Zedling Council Meeting 2017-07-29

Host: Hominix

Scribe: Memery

Topics

Council Warp X Elections - Everyone

Amir hosting the Council meeting was apparently such a bad choice the servers thought it was a better idea to just shut down completely. This was a pretty good plan in theory but unfortunately didn’t work. The lobby server was still alive and kicking (obviously, it missed the memo about shutting down or something) and Amir and Zed set up a little temporary meeting hall in the middle of the main island. How sweet. The first and only topic was about the upcoming mayoral election. Woo. The two main arguments are for the use of a public voting system or private. In more recent years the Council has opted for a more private method of voting to avoid the mob mentality that came with public voting. Hominix also wanted this to be used for mayoral votes. On the other side of the debate, Sway and Sneaky stated they would prefer to keep it simple by doing it the good old fashioned way, using a forum poll. Looking back, I thought this debate would take a whole bunch of time, and it did, but it was nothing compared to what followed… This debate was put on hold to discuss a more pressing issue with the current voting system in place.

Prior to this meeting (Note that I said ‘prior’ meaning we did actually get something achieved in the end, woo) a mayor could only be elected after receiving at least three votes from members of the Council. The Council agreed it would be a better idea to include the rest of the server within the vote. Although this seemed like a simple idea, just including other member’s votes, I noticed a small problem: If we allowed public voting to occur, the potential mayors would still need 3 Council votes to become elected. This would create massive issues if a candidate won the popular vote, but lost due to only receiving two votes from Council members. I decided a new and much more better way of electing a mayor needed to be introduced. After several hours of conveying my problem with the current system to the Council and how I intended to solve it, I came up with this three-step process as an amendment to regulation 13 of the Council regulations:

Council warp Mayoral election process:

1. A forum post is made allowing people to express their interest in running for mayor of a Council warp town.

2. The following meeting, the Council will vote to endorse candidates to run for mayor from the list of interested parties. A candidate must receive two endorsements from Council members to be allowed to stand in the public vote. If the candidate is on the Council, they cannot endorse themselves. Council members are not required to endorse any interested party. If a candidate has received two endorsements from Council members, they cannot be endorsed further. The meeting host must ask each Council member in-turn to message them privately with their endorsement, Council members are reminded they do not have to endorse anyone. This is to prevent spam voting and confusion over endorsements. If the meeting host is a potential candidate, another impartial party must instead collect the endorsement votes.

3. Once the candidates have been endorsed, the mayoral election will begin. A forum poll will be set up that allows forum users to vote for the mayor they want to elect. Any Zedling, Zesty or Zriend can vote. At the following Council meeting, the new mayor will be announced.

I know right, look how cool and official that is. Because there were not many Council members present (due to the server not really working) the endorsement stage was moved until next meeting. At least progress was made even if this will take an extra month as a result… After the amendment was agreed and voted on, it was decided the public vote (after Council endorsements) will take place on the forum. It was agreed that this was the most convenient, safe and accurate way of measuring votes. Although the polling is not private, it was concluded this was the only real way to do this. Keep an eye out for the poll that will go up after next week’s meeting
After the meeting was finally called to an end, almost two and a half hours after it started, Zedwick decided to show off a fun new Mariokart mini game he found, that will most likely never see the light of day on Zesty games. But never mind it was super fun being killed by the lightning rod item repeatedly while Amir and Sneaky won the races…

Next Meeting

Next meeting will be on 12th August at 8 pm BST, and will be hosted by AmirTheTurtle.

That’s it for these Council notes. I know a lot of normal council stuff didn’t take place at this meeting but we had to improvise due to the lack of proper meeting place. Attendance was also not taken this meeting.
~Memery, over and out.