Friday, August 13, 2021

Proposal: [Core] A minimal consensus shouldn’t have lasting effects

Timed out 3-1. Enacted with irony by Kevan.

Adminned at 15 Aug 2021 18:12:25 UTC

In “Votes”, after

It has been open for voting for at least 48 hours, it has more than 1 valid Vote cast on it, and more valid Votes cast on it are FOR than are AGAINST.

append, as a new sentence in the same bullet point,

Exception: Proposals which would change the text of a Core, Special Case or Appendix rule if enacted cannot be Popular on this basis.

“Wolfsbane” just timed out 6 votes to 4, making a fairly major change to the trans-dynastic ruleset. I get worried when potentially far-reaching changes are made by less than half the playerlist, especially when almost as many players are opposed. (This is despite the fact that I was in favour of the change!)

The systemic problem here seems to be that proposals to change the core rules can, and often do, time out without sufficiently many people paying attention to them. This proposal makes it so that a proposal to change the core rules needs a quorum in order to pass – if it times out without a quorum, it can be failed even if it hasn’t attracted that many AGAINST votes. (It can still pass if it’s more than 48 hours old, but has a quorum.)

This will make core rules changes harder to get through, but I think that’s a good thing in general. It also encourages advertising core rules changes and trying to build a bigger consensus around them, and I think that’s definitely a good thing.

(Note: for safety, this restriction only applies to Proposals; CFJs to change the core rules can still pass by timeout.)

posted by ais523 at 13 Aug 2021 17:30:00 UTC Comments (7)

Comments

Bucky:

13-08-2021 18:50:51 UTC

This looks like it applies to merely activating or deactivating a Special Case rule, which are intradynastic concerns. I don’t know whether that was intended.

ais523:

13-08-2021 20:18:40 UTC

It wasn’t; I’ve fixed it.

Clucky: he/him

13-08-2021 20:31:24 UTC

against

having two different proposals with the exact same vote counts, but different resolutions because it turns out more people were idle when the first count was made seems very silly to me

Kevan: he/him

14-08-2021 10:13:08 UTC

Looking back over the past couple of months, the following enacted proposals would all have failed instead, under this proposed rule:

* Wolfsbane timed out 6-4: repeated the Traitor rule, was disputed
* Smoke Bomb timed out 6-3: made the Traitor rule Rare, was strongly disputed
* A Flavour Kind of a Flavour timed out 6-0: extended the definition of flavour text to also cover ruletext, important fix, no strong objections
* Every Enaction Has An Equal And Opposite Reenaction timed out 6-0: enshrined proposal state and added a new one of Illegal; was questioned but not objected to
* Favour Tweaking timed out 4-0: clarified Sigil Favours, no objections
* Too Late to Edit? timed out 6-4: changed the edit window to eight hours, was strongly disputed
* Eyes Only timed out 4-1: clarified sharing of private Imperial information, was disputed

The uncontested proposals failing at one or two shy of quorum would have been frustrating - although had the proposed rule been in place, players would have been under more pressure to actually cast votes, and it’s likely that we’d have done some “come on, this is going to fail in three hours” vote-shopping to get them over the line. It may make some sense to say that a Core proposal with a single AGAINST vote can’t be timed out Popular, but it can with zero AGAINST.

Reading through the comments on the four disputed ones, they could certainly have used more discussion and reflection, and I don’t think we’d have lost anything by taking each of them to a second (possibly slightly iterated) proposal.

for

Some mild reservation that less active players might feel under pressure to vote FOR a Core change if it’s being sold as an important fix, so as not to block it, which could be counterproductive.

Janet: she/her

15-08-2021 04:18:03 UTC

for

Vovix: he/him

15-08-2021 07:12:41 UTC

Would be really ironic if this passes 3-1 by timeout…

Vovix: he/him

15-08-2021 16:24:56 UTC

Ironic, isn’t it? It could save others from passing by timeout, but not itself…