[b:1kfgdxek][u:1kfgdxek]Encouraging immigrants[/b:1kfgdxek][/u:1kfgdxek]
There has been a great deal of discussion of late about the question of requiring people to have been in the CDS for a fixed period of time, say 28 days, before holding any public office here. The thread on which it was most discussed concerned only judges, and has now descended into a debate between Beathan and Michel on the interpretation of US contract law, but the point is of more general importance than in relation to the judiciary.
Our current Public Information Officer came to the CDS just to be a PIO here. A number of people have come to the CDS to be lawyers under our legal system. We have had an unfilled position on the Scientific Council since before I came to what was then simply Neufreistadt in August, the consequence of which is that the constitution and Terms of Service on the main website is months out of date.
If we impose a residency requirement for public office, there are two distinct ways in which that can be harmful to us: (1) it may mean that important offices go unfilled; and (2) it may discourage people from joining.
Taking the second first, it might be quaint to think that everybody joins the CDS because they like the idea of democracy in the abstract, or just want to be a citizen in general, but the reality is that people who may well turn into highly valued citizens do not always think that way. People are more likely to come to SecondLife thiking, "what can I do?", rather than "where can I live?". If we can provide answers to that question, whether it be "be a judge" or "be the Scientific Council archivist", or "be the Public Informaiton Officer", or be any other sort of civil servant that we have yet to invent, then we are likely to encourage more citizens who have a specific interest in doing that sort of thing. It is very unfair to think of people who come here for this reason lesser sort of people (as, disturbingly, Beathan seems to think in one of his multiplicity of posts), who will never become fully involved citizens: SecondLife in general has a way of attracting people to do one thing, and then gently persuading them to do a whole range of other, more social things when they are here. Nobody is going to come and live in the CDS just to decorate our Christmas tree or talk in the thermae, but, nine times out of ten, people who come for something else will, if they end up getting a house here, at least, become part of our social circle. Indeed, as I have posted before, it is no exaggeration to say that about 10% of our current population are here because of our new judicial system: that tells us something about the power of institutions to attract people.
Secondly, as our government grows ever more sophisticated, and acquires more land and other assets to administer, more and more government jobs will need to be filled. We are already seeing that with the Chancellor's office, the judiciary, Gwyneth's Scientific Council reform proposal, and ideas about improving our co-ordination of events handling and management, as well as the multiple estate-owner idea put forward by Pelanor. We already have jobs, most notably, that of Scientific Council archivist, that have remained unfilled for months. One important job, that of Public Information Officer, was not filled except when our present Chancellor managed to draft in somebody whom she knew elsewhere. If she had not been able to do so, we would still probably be without a PIO, with all of the disasterous consequences for Colonia Nova that that would have had. One of our citizens, Zeus Zetkin, is keen on setting up a branch of his SLJobFinder service in the CDS to deal with government jobs. That itself could be a way of encouraging citizens to join us, and of filling important posts at the same time. It is not enough to say that people may do so if they wait 28 days, as, faced with only the possibilities of having to wait 28 days, or not doing it at all, many who would do it without the wait would not bother (and understandably so) if they had to be delayed by a month.
It is hard to see that anything special is achieved by making citizens wait 28 days before they can provide good service to us. There is nothing magic about that number: why should a citizen who has been here 21 days or 14 days be any less qualified to hold public office than one here for 28? In a community as small as ours, and one in which, esepcially given our recent acquisition of Colonia Nova, a significant and increasing proportion of our population themselves have not been here for 28 days, and an even more significant proportion, not much longer than that, the requirement seems arbitrary. Is there any real evidence that people learn in 28 days of just being a citizen what they can't learn in an application process for whatever office it is that they want to fill?
Finally, I realise that we have a 28 day requirement on voting, but that is different: that is to prevent electoral fraud. Because we cannot verify the RL identities of voters, we have the 28 day requirement to prevent a flood of new people (perhaps from franchulates), many of whom might be alts, from innundating our government with votes in order to pull off some sort of coup, as Desmond Shang vividly imagined on one of his many posts in the SLHomepage forums. If we were able to verify who was an alt of whom (as we might be able to do sooner than some may think), we would probably not need even this.
Incidentally, on franchulates, a 28 day requirement for holding public office would be absurd, since that would mean that new people in franchualates would not be able to be part of their own local government for 28 days.
