[Tau]

Yeah, I'm not more important than other members and Tom is no more important than me. We all carry a single vote.

Yeah, we should definitely all get the same amount of votes. Anything else would end up like the Defense Council at the UN. But what about term in office?

Maybe if all 4 of the other members decide someone is not pulling their weight or is largely unhelpful or there are just better candidates to call upon, 4 votes would be enough to dispatch them from the council?

That seems good. Except, I have a problem the the 4 votes part. What if there are two members absent at the same time?

[Thork]

Mmmm. yeah, its a tricky one. Lets come back to it. Maybe Tom or Secret User will have an awesome idea or you will wake in the night having had communications with the shrimp who advised you on the issue.

[Tau]

Why not just have a set term limit when everyone is up for relection? That way the people can vote back who they want in and some new faces can emerge.

I can see doing things the way we did the first election getting out of hand quickly in a larger forum. I think it would be better to have us run individually. So, when my term runs out it gets announced and anyone who wants to run against me announces that they do, and everyone votes for who they prefer. Otherwise it'll be chaotic when there are 20 nominations and everyone is trying to explain why they think they should get elected.

This is also why I started thinking about having official members. When the forum is 75% angry noobs, they could vote themselves into the council through sheer force of democracy and before we know it the council would be five RE'ers with less than 1000 posts between them.

[Roundy]

If anything, I think there should be a president (who's more a figurehead than anything else) whose term is a year, then the four regular members whose term is six months.  It may be better if we devise a better system for voting than was previously done but I see no reason not to just have two election seasons a year.  Hell, it would be fun.

Also, I would suggest that future challengers need to be nominated before they're declared candidates.  It would streamline the choices.

[Tau]

And how would we prevent angry noobs from hijacking the vote? I'm all for being inclusive, but it would defeat the purpose if the Flat Earth Society was being run by people who didn't want it to exist.

[Roundy]

And how would we prevent angry noobs from hijacking the vote? I'm all for being inclusive, but it would defeat the purpose if the Flat Earth Society was being run by people who didn't want it to exist.

Perhaps we need rules in place to prevent this from happening, like approval of a nominee (either by vote or by the Council itself) before a prospective candidate is declared an official candidate.  As I said, we may need a better system of voting.  I'm not suggesting we put it off, per se, and in fact we should probably make it a high priority, but we do still have several months to figure it out.

[Thork]

Ok, president is something else. We should run a separate thread on that proposal.

I know we are doing lots of things with lots of ideas but this seems normal when you are putting things in place. So if we are going to do that, lets make that a completely new thread with a vote and discussion.

And how would we prevent angry noobs from hijacking the vote? I'm all for being inclusive, but it would defeat the purpose if the Flat Earth Society was being run by people who didn't want it to exist.

I don't have an answer for this.

My gut instinct is that the council dismisses and nominates new members, but I fear the council may then become a clique.
If everyone gets a vote, its likely to be 4chaned so we end up with muppets on the council.
If we make it members only, we'd have to be selective about members and I don't think that's a good idea as mentioned before.
If we ask the forum admins for help, they get too much power, the very thing the council was set up to prevent.

I think the council selecting new members is the best answer however, maybe the forum could select 3 candidates, they get put forward and the council then votes on which of those to select? Still gives the council an opportunity to be a bit cliquish but if the society isn't happy with the council at large, they will put forward people who aren't part of that social clique.

Again, more ideas needed. This is such a hard problem I'd like to push on and come back to it. Maybe a new thread just for this issue so we can concentrate on fleshing out more of the constitution?

[Tom Bishop]

I admit that I don't have any good answers for the constitution.

I think a main sticking point for me was figuring out a way the selection of new candidates can be fair to the public, for the council, and for the integrity of the forum.

I came up with an idea that we could institute a form of checks and balances on this matter. We allow the public forum to vote and elect people they want to see to run along side the council members. The council can reserve veto power over suspicious names on the public selection. Finally, admins can act as watch dogs and reserve veto power over the council if they see impropriety in disqualifying applicants.

In this way things can be fair to all, and no party has too much power over the election process.

[Tom Bishop]

I noticed a flaw in my suggestion. Under what I suggested above the council could not readily tell which names are suspicious or not. Obviously "AxeMan" with a one week old account and few serious posts in the upper forums could be disqualified as an obvious sham, but what about a more serious contributor who has been around for a while and has seen to get himself elected with phony voting accounts.

[Tau]

I noticed a flaw in my suggestion. Under what I suggested above the council could not readily tell which names are suspicious or not. Obviously "AxeMan" with a one week old account and few serious posts in the upper forums could be disqualified as an obvious sham, but what about a more serious contributor who has been around for a while and has seen to get himself elected with phony voting accounts.

We could have a post minimum for the election board, the way we used to for RM. Say 150 posts to access. It's not particularly exclusive and anyone with that much spam is bound to be noticed.

[Tau]

Alright, let's work on this. It shouldn't take months to write a constitution.

So, power structure. I suppose giving specific powers and responsibilities to all parts of the society should be in here. The moderators are pretty much the executive branch. Maybe we can even call them that in the constitution. They are given the power and responsibility to enforce the rules.

And if we're talking about execution, we need to talk about legislation as well. From the tone of conversations in the upper fora, it seems like people want the legislative authority to be in the hands of the people, which seems fine to me. Maybe we can give the admins the power to make the final decision about whether a rule should happen? The zetetic council should have no role in creating rules for the forum. In discussions about such things council members hold no more weight than anyone else.

So then, admins. The Administrators have the responsibility to keep the forum running. They can choose moderators, make final decisions in disputes in S&C, decide on rules, and make changes to the site itself as they see fit. If for some reason we need to choose new admins (Pizza decides he just doesn't want to do it anymore or whatever), there can be a poll for it in the election board.

The Zetetic Council is in charge of publicizing the society and FET. We are, by default, in charge of anything Flat Earth that isn't part of the forum. We have the power to hand off authority to other groups at our discretion. We're also in charge of creating and editing this constitution. We will be in charge of creating official members when we decide what those actually are. Any authority, within reason, which isn't given to another group is given to the council (so for example things like name changes).

____

If there are no problems with any of that I'll rewrite it in more official language.

[Tau]

Elections

Zetetic Council elections will be once every 6 months. They may also be held in the interim in the case that a council member abdicates or is otherwise removed from their position, should the council decide to replace them. All forum members with more than X posts will be allowed to vote in the elections, which will be held in a specially created subforum¹. Nominees may be selected by any member, although the Council holds the right to veto nominations for any reason. The council also has the right to revoke voting privileges from a member².

¹ I figure this can work like Complete Nonsense used to. It's just to stop people from making alts or whatever to abuse the system. We can probably set X to something fairly low, maybe 50.

² Seems reasonable to me. Should we give someone veto power over us for this or just trust that we won't become tyrannical?

[Tau]

Impeachment

Members of the council may be removed at any time by the council or the general membership. Two council members may be removed at a time. The majority of the remaining council members, or an 80% affirmative vote by the general membership, is required for this to occur. The council hold the right to decide whether or not to immediately replace the removed members.

[Tom Bishop]

I endorse Tsunami's ideas.

[Thork]

I agree too. Nice. Maybe post count should be set at 200. Anyone who uses the forum regularly will easily get up to that number and 50 is low enough for sad noobs to make alts spamming complete nonsense to get to 50. If they get to 200, they deserve a vote for being so bloody minded.

[Thork]

You're never here!

[Tau]

I'm down with 150. That said, what exactly is our goal with the post minimum? If it's purely to avoid alts, then I think it should be lower, maybe 100. Nobody is gonna make 100 spam posts without getting banned on multiple alts. I just can't imagine anyone caring enough to put that much effort in. If we're also trying to keep the average angry noob out of the runnings, which I can see pros and cons about, then I don't think 200 is unreasonable.

[Tau]

Given the sudden influx of activity on this board, I figure I'll try to continue this. We'll see what happens.

So far we have basic power structure and election/impeachment of the council. We also discussed amendments to this constitution. What should be next on the list? Here are some that I've thought of.

-Aims of the organization (advancing Flat Earth Theory. We could optionally add something about reunification here if we want)
-Membership (and the levels, or lack thereof, thereof)
-A more detailed description of the powers of each group

Can anyone think of anything else important?

[Tom Bishop]

This is my opinion on the above.

Aims

Flat Earth Society is a society of free thinkers dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of the universe and demonstrating that Round Earth Theory is little more than an elaborate hoax.

Member Roles

Admins - Admins are the forum and site administrators who are tasked with running the site.

Mods - Moderators are selected by the administrators and are tasked with managing discussions.

Zetetic Council - Elected members who cast votes on the overall direction of the society. Council members have access to the Zetetic Council forum and are designated with a special badge and title.

Official Members - Official Flat Earth Society Members are those who have signed up with the main site ledger and have received a certificate of membership. Members are granted access to the Zetetic Council forum and will have a special badge and title. Members will have a standing voice in Council matters, are invited to online Society meetings, and are generally looked at to help with projects and events

Pubbie - Default user group for members from the public who have signed up to the forum to join discussions in the debate or off-topic forums.

[Tau]

Sounds good to me. I hesitate to call RET a 'hoax', though. Not all theories give equal weight to the Conspiracy. I'll make a separate thread where we can type up something more official.