Not being a member of the Scientific Council I was unable to reply to Soro's latest posting under the Declaration for Candidacy thread in that section so I post it here.
Soro,
With all due respect for your position as Dean of the Scientific Council, where have you been since November 4th and do you check your email? Allow me to update you on the situation as of the evening of November 10, 2011.
The SC has not been asked to call a meeting for resolution of some issues regarding constitutional waivers for the election. An email thread was started by Sudane on November 4th bringing attention to the possibility of the CDS having issues about who is eligible to vote and run for office. This email was addressed to myself, Tor, Arria, you, Delia, and Aliasi. This email thread started on the 4th and finished on the 8th with a total of 28 emails sent back and forth. You didn’t contribute to any of those 28 emails even though you were asked questions directly and questions were asked to the SC in general.
On November 8, 2011 at 5:15 PM Arria Perreault, the current LRA of the Representative Assembly addressed the 28th email to you. In this email she explains to you that the RA held a vote on three proposals:
“The RA votes a waiver to allow all declared candidates to run, including the candidates who are not in compliance with Article IV, Section 3. This waiver is valid for this election only.
The RA votes a waiver to move the election dates. The voting will start on November 19 and will conclude on November 26.
The RA sets a committee of three members who will be in charge to organize the campaigning posters and events, as the current Chancellor and the current PIO are running for a RA seat.The members of this committee are Pip Torok, Fern Leissa and Sonja Strom.”
She further states in this email addressed to you:
“The RA has accepted the three proposals (4 times aye for each on 4 votes).
Pip has said that he would like to get the relevant permission to help with the signs.
Now the SC should make a communication about the elections. Fern and Pip are ready to help with the campaign. They should be informed about their tasks.”
So as you can see no meeting of the SC has been asked for. The issue has been resolved and the citizens of the CDS need to be made aware that elections will not begin on Saturday November 12th but will actually begin on the 19th of November.
Also I don’t understand why you have difficulty accessing a website that is open to the public. Here are the links for the web portal and the page that houses our Constitution and the page that also houses our Code of Laws.
http://portal.slcds.info/index.php/cds- ... stitution/
http://portal.slcds.info/index.php/cds- ... e-of-laws/
We have taken an awesome opportunity to highlight what the CDS is all about, its democracy, and flushed it down the toilet with this fiasco. Personally I hold the Scientific Council responsible for the mess and I hope they will step up immediately and make the best of a bad situation. I bring to your attention the Constitution of the CDS and more specifically the role of the Scientific Council.
Section 1 – The Scientific Council
The Scientific Council (SC) is a self-selected meritocracy. Its governmental role is to interpret and enforce the constitution. Its service roll (ed. note: sic) is to resolve citizen disputes and moderate user forums and events.
Soro, you allowed a citizen, granted a well intentioned citizen, to post an official government announcement on the forums. To make matters worse this posting contained incorrect information and it clearly states in the Constitution the SC is responsible for moderating the forums. The only instance I am aware of that the “28 days of citizenship” was brought to anyone’s attention was at the final RA meeting by our current Chancellor, Tor Karlsvalt. This should have never happened Soro.
The SC is also tasked with moderating CDS events and I have to ask you what event is more important to the CDS than its twice a year elections. When the deadline for declaring candidacy was met at 11:59 PM SLT on November 5th 2011 we had 12 citizens standing for 7 RA seats and 2 citizens running for Chancellor. Leaving the eligibility fiasco out of this discussion nothing had been planned or set in place by the SC in reference to the elections and campaigning. 14 people volunteering to fill 9 positions and no debates scheduled, no meet the candidate sessions scheduled, no notices in regards to signage, absolutely nothing done to make this election as significant as it could be. What an opportunity to post notices via Second Life Events Calendar.
“Come watch democracy in action in Second Life. The Confederation of Democratic Simulators, one of the oldest democratically ran communities in SL is beginning their campaign season.”
Obviously an ad a little more exciting than this could be done up but you get my point. For your benefit and the benefit of all our citizens I’m going to post here my suggestion that I wrote in the emails concerning the fiasco.
Here are the applicable paragraphs from my original email:
In regards to the dates for campaigning and elections I offer the following suggestion. Currently we are almost 24 hours into campaigning on our current schedule and absolutely nothing has been accomplished. There has been no announcement to the candidates to submit their campaign statement and picture to the PIO to be placed in the campaign kiosks we have used for at least the last two elections that I can remember. There has been absolutely no discussion about hosting either “Meet the Candidate” get-togethers or debates. We have 12 candidates running for 7 RA seats and 2 candidates for Chancellor. Of these 14 candidates I believe 5 of them have no prior experience in the CDS. What does it say to them and all these other new citizens who have joined our community when our main claim to fame, our democracy and the holding of elections, has turned into a total unorganized fiasco? We as a community need to do some serious scrambling to get all these issues addressed as soon as possible.
With this amount of people running for office allowing only one week to campaign, especially considering we’ve already wasted an entire day and nothing is planned for Monday either, is not fair to the candidates or the citizens. I suggest we push the opening of the polls to Saturday, November 19th. We allow campaigning to continue from here on in. This will give the candidates 10 weekdays and a complete Saturday and Sunday in order to give their campaigns the time needed. I understand the polls would be open the same week as the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. but let’s be honest it doesn’t take that long for an individual to log in-world and cast their votes.
With 14 candidates I think it is going to be nearly impossible with everyone’s varied schedules to attend an in-world event at the same time let alone all the citizens who also want to attend. We need a few of our long-term citizens to take the ball on this situation and help us out. Calli, Sonja, Fern, Lillith, Rose, and Pip are a few people who immediately pop into my head.
In order to schedule debates we need to know what days and times each candidate would be available. I think best case scenario we host 3 debates. 6 RA candidates at one debate, 6 RA candidates at the second debate, and a third debate for the Chancellor candidates. Work up one set of general questions; say 3 to 5, which will be given to the candidates in advance of their debate. The questions would be the same for everyone. Next you allow all citizens, whether they’re running for office or not, the opportunity to submit, say two questions to each candidate. The questions are anonymous; the identity of the citizen submitting the question is not disclosed. Also citizen questions are not provided to the candidates before the debate. These are the questions they have to think on their toes about and we limit the response to either 3 or 5 minutes. All debates are recorded and transcribed to the forums that way those unable to attend can study up on the candidates and ask additional questions through the forum if they feel so inclined.
This would also be an ideal time to advertise these events on the Second Life events calendar. Even though non-citizens aren’t able to vote, what better way to showcase our democracy than allowing them to observe. I also would like to see if we could host some type of “Meet the Candidate” gatherings. I’d encourage these are held at a public venue such as the biergarten and they not be hosted by the candidates. These could be scheduled throughout the campaign session on an individual basis.
I am running for Chancellor therefore I am unable to take the ball and run with these ideas. I encourage those who feel so dearly for our community and who aren’t running for office to take care of this. This is a great opportunity to turn a bad set of circumstances into a spectacular turn-around.
In closing it would probably be a good idea to make a posting in this forum explaining to all the citizens what has actually transpired and the issue that needed to be addressed. For those unaware the waiver passed by the RA allowed Shep Titian, Cacilia McMasters, Vespasian Cortes, and Kim Rongu to stand for office even though they didn’t meet the 28 day citizenship requirement. The waiver also allows any individual who was a citizen as of November 3rd the ability to vote when in reality the cut-off point should have been the 28 day citizenship requirement mentioned earlier.
unless you want something to "fix" something