Well, we have arrows to give more priority to a Proposal; what about having another system to give it less priority?
For instance, what about:
“If the flavour text of a Proposal includes the text “WAIT X”, where X is a positive integer, then the Proposal cannot be enacted until it has been amended by at least X other Proposals.”

I don’t see how that addresses the question, but still an interesting idea.  Proposals are still static, then.  The goal would be to allow them to change while ‘active’, maybe even to allow other players to tack on stuff.  To be honest, I’m not sure how accurate this represents Parliament, but it would definitely be interesting.

Well I’m not sure what you mean, but the idea is that Proposals are gamestate, so we might as well use that. For instance you can make a Proposal reading
“All sheep are white”
and then before it has been enacted you can pass another proposal reading
“if there is a pending proposal that mentions sheep, replace in that proposal every occurrence of the word ‘white’ with ‘black’.”

For the record, in France we are currently in the process of passing a law allowing for gay marriage, and the opposition proposed over five thousand amendments in order to slow things down. Such amendments include stuff like “When a homosexual couple adopts a child, the child should be named after the registrar”.

I understand that - but I was looking for a mechanism that allowed for the Proposal itself to change.  Posting conditionals may emulate it, but it’s not quite the same, as the weight is transferred to a separate vote.  I can see how WAIT would help, a bit.

As for the gay marriage bit, that’s really fascinating.

I was just thinking of that kind of thing. Modifying pending proposals, that is.

I think the first answer is, “I wouldn’t” - a Nomic in something like Google Wave would be ripe for playing with that but the blog format seems unsuited. So while I won’t issue a blanket objection to the concept, I’d like to see it work in context before being enthusiastic.