a suggestion for future rounds of council: when we the players vote, the player with the highest percentage of votes is the inner council member
then no bickering about the first power play
also, as this is the first time this has been done, i understand some delays, and it is not all on the part of the players, or the players of this server specifically
my guess is that Inno had some vision of how this would happen and it's not fallen into place exactly
go figure, a human factor
yes we all want some progress but think everyone needs to chill just a bit
Unfortunately there are some issues with this - namely one, the order that the candidates appeared in.
Candidates who appeared at the top of the voting list had a significantly better chance of being elected than those at the bottom.
(Given, this could be a very easy fix on Inno's part by just randomizing the list for individual voters, so that the votes are more balanced. Unfortunately, there is likely a decent amount of players who did not read the introductions and just clicked the first five people they saw - or perhaps clicked the one or two names they did recognize, and randomly filled the rest with the names at the top of the list.) At least, that is the conclusion that a lot of people are making based on the results of the election - where the results of the election almost exactly reflected the order they appeared in during voting. But again, if Inno changes the voting system up just slightly - this could be fixed.
I think it would be better for future rounds of council to
begin (note: BEGIN, not actually make the vote) the spokesperson discussions after a month of already working together or so. For a vague example, if the vote started at the beginning of the 5th month of the current council's term, they could have results in by the beginning of the 6th and final month of the current council's term. Then, this new council could begin working together to slowly start to replace the old council throughout the 6th month. After a months time of working together (around the end of the 6th month/current council's end of term), it's likely that a leader would sort of naturally appear. Then the inner council vote would begin, it would likely take less time to talk it through since they already know each other, and a transition from the old council into the new council would happen more seamlessly.
When we were first elected we did make efforts to start working on the local council - for instance, we had a draft set to create a thread pretty much exactly like this one since the first week, and we were just waiting on a few emails to be included before posting it.
But ultimately, our only instruction was to elect an inner council spokesperson, so instead of focusing on what we should have been focusing on - setting up the local council - we spent all of our time arguing over who would be best for spokesperson.
Which ends up being very silly - because Inner Council can't necessarily do anything until they have players giving proposals to the local councils anyways
It was definitely a huge mistake we made that came from many different angles. I think a part of it is - like you said - Inno had a vision for this that didn't quite come to fruition, and I think it resulted in the council not being given much instruction on what they were supposed to be doing. A larger part was the arguments we were having about the spokesperson position were getting in the way of us doing more important tasks.
As for the 'it took a month to get them to talk to each other' thing - we've been talking since the day we were told we would be in this council. In fact - we were talking way too much, and we had two players of council who were very set on one thing and two players that were very set on another thing, and one player that was sick and missing. It resulted in a stagnate with, yes, lots of shouting. But after said 5th player returned, it took less than 3 hours
(likely a shorter period of time) for the final decision of inner council to be made. That, along with being given no direction to do something other than inner council elections, ended up being the problem.
Since then we have begun to start to work out how local council is going to work. As Wilsh said, we have created a database that has all of the ideas and suggestions that people have made on this thread, as well as other players' private suggestions. For now this is remaining between the 5 of us, although we have talked about sharing it publicly so that everyone can get an up to date idea of what council is doing, which items are actively being discussed, which ideas have already been suggested, and which topics we sent to inner council.
We've also been in many talks about how communication is going to work. Since we've already got a player in inner council, we're going to take that to our advantage and see what the inner council communication is going to look like before we try to officially implement something. If he ends up having a meeting once a week where he needs to bring a suggestion, we're likely to take a very different approach to this entire thing than if it's a constantly flowing discussion with ideas. I would love to have at least an initial 'system' in place by the end of this weekend if possible. But, this is still very very new to all of us, and it's very likely that we'll have to play around with that initial system a ton to get it to a place where all of us are happy with it.
For now keep bringing in them ideas so that when we do start this discussions, we have lots of topics to pick from
