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Friends, Romans, countrymen lend me your ears. I'd like to propose today a restructuring of the houses Under and Over.

Under my proposal the lower regional legislature (Underhusen) will be turned into an Open Assembly accessible to all members new and old ingested in regional government.

The Upper Legislature (Overhusen) will be rehauled into a combination of the current UH/OH system featuring a number of democratically elected members as well as a number of Monarch appointed members.

New regional laws would now be introduced and voted upon in the Open Assembly before being presented to the new Upper Legislature for approval.

This legislative reform would allow access and participation from any new members without the fear or possible loss of intrest from losing an election to the established hands of the region. It would allow for the region to properly reflect the ideals of her members and not just the few elected. It would provide adequate checks and balances to prevent any hostile takeover and joke legislation because of the monarch appointees in the new Upper legislature.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

I realize this may casus hated debate let's all agree to be civil and to save the threats for another time and place we are debating law here let's be adult inn this discussion please.

I saw you were destroying the Underhusen and agreed.
Then I saw you were effectively just merging the Underhusen with the Overhusen and recoiled.
In an open assembly system there's no need for any representatives, democratically-elected or not; the people can assert themselves as they see fit without the need to have them filtered through representatives. The only reason to elect representatives to go into the Overhusen would be to dilute the powers of the Monarchy. Which would just get a no from me, dog. Up the Monarchy, y'know.

also i resent the desire to prevent joke legislation

I saw you were destroying the Underhusen and agreed.
Then I saw you were effectively just merging the Underhusen with the Overhusen and recoiled.
In an open assembly system there's no need for any representatives, democratically-elected or not; the people can assert themselves as they see fit without the need to have them filtered through representatives. The only reason to elect representatives to go into the Overhusen would be to dilute the powers of the Monarchy. Which would just get a no from me, dog. Up the Monarchy, y'know.

also i resent the desire to prevent joke legislation

Admittedly I'm attempting to keep multiple groups happy with this legislation in an attempt to actually get it passed into law.

This has been tried. You're not going to keep everyone happy.

Someone has to try though. I'm new and fresh and haven't had the will to get this done beat out of me yet 

And it largely fits my agenda.

I don't think the legislature as currently constructed can succeed. Our options are burn it all down or reform in my honest opinion.

I mean, I am a burner at heart (the motherfuckin' OG burner, since it was my dissatisfaction that led to the second constitutional convention to begin with), but even I must admit the current system has its benefits. It has had incredibly good terms, and when push comes to shove, it gets shit done.

I just think it would get shit done sooner and more effectively with more eyes on it. The current system relies on 5 people to drive everything, which kinda fails when those 5 people fail. With an OA, someone would always be there to pick up the slack.

But yeah, honestly, I don't see any reason we couldn't just keep the UH around through its officers, meaning we'd have a Speaker and Speaker PT still, and we're definitely keeping the librarian, but the rest would become unnecessary.

And more to the point, trying to keep everyone happy is likely just to piss everyone off, instead.

I mean, I am a burner at heart (the motherfuckin' OG burner, since it was my dissatisfaction that led to the second constitutional convention to begin with), but even I must admit the current system has its benefits. It has had incredibly good terms, and when push comes to shove, it gets shit done.

I just think it would get shit done sooner and more effectively with more eyes on it. The current system relies on 5 people to drive everything, which kinda fails when those 5 people fail. With an OA, someone would always be there to pick up the slack.

But yeah, honestly, I don't see any reason we couldn't just keep the UH around through its officers, meaning we'd have a Speaker and Speaker PT still, and we're definitely keeping the librarian, but the rest would become unnecessary.

And more to the point, trying to keep everyone happy is likely just to piss everyone off, instead.

Agreed.  I'm all for an OA, but I liked the original idea we had where there was an OA made up of all members, but also a council that was basically like what the OH is now with its appointed members, but more of what Laurentus was suggesting with using the UH officer roles.

On one side, having 5 or even 7 people working all of the legislation (since the OH has simply just checked finished laws except for what Moot may occasionally proposed, and voted on it) has always shown to be hit or miss.  You have sessions like my first where the team got a shit ton of stuff done, you have sessions like we have in the past where nobody did a thing (and nobody had campaigned on one of those terms, which was basically foreshadowing the term itself), and you have sessions like this where it's been lukewarm because we got caught up in a game and then life.

On the flipside, opening up the general legislative body to all citizens gives a much broader perspective outside of the occasional posts we'll see in the Citizens Platform channel/topic.  Now members will have an even bigger say because now their vote matters outside of just who to vote for.

And hell, if we wanted to keep the election process...why not use that for the offices of that council-like alternative OH type of thing we want to put in?  We can mix it up having some offices such as the Librarian and even OA Speaker be elected offices, and have some of the other positions be appointed by Moot.  That way everyone has a chance to be in government, and for anyone that wants to still run for office and go up the ladder, they still have that chance.

But yeah, you're never going to make everyone happy because some people aren't going to want an OA in any form, period.  Likewise, some people don't want our current system, so it's really more of figuring out what the majority of people are wanting and go from there.

I mean, I am a burner at heart (the motherfuckin' OG burner, since it was my dissatisfaction that led to the second constitutional convention to begin with), but even I must admit the current system has its benefits. It has had incredibly good terms, and when push comes to shove, it gets shit done.

I just think it would get shit done sooner and more effectively with more eyes on it. The current system relies on 5 people to drive everything, which kinda fails when those 5 people fail. With an OA, someone would always be there to pick up the slack.

But yeah, honestly, I don't see any reason we couldn't just keep the UH around through its officers, meaning we'd have a Speaker and Speaker PT still, and we're definitely keeping the librarian, but the rest would become unnecessary.

And more to the point, trying to keep everyone happy is likely just to piss everyone off, instead.

In large part I like the majority of this. I don't think keeping everyone happy necessarily means everyone will be pissed off but hey the idea behind this discussion is to figure out what will actually work and what will not.

Maybe I'm naive but I think this group of people has the capacity to work together on an alternative form of government that allows both for open access and elected campaigns that please both sides of the debate. Maybe not fully but enough that nobody has to see this as a reason to become super upset.

You're not going to make Chanku happy unless you keep everything exactly the way it is, for example. To the point that she's threatened to leave if this ever goes through.

You're not going to make Chanku happy unless you keep everything exactly the way it is, for example. To the point that she's threatened to leave if this ever goes through.

I largely believe reasonable adults won't let a change intended to improve the region devolve into that action. Maybe, again, I'm naive but I think everyone can act in good faith here.

and you have sessions like this where it's been lukewarm because we got caught up in a game and then life.

hey now i've been super on point okay

Other than that bit of silliness, yeah, broad agreement with Pengu and Lau.

I largely believe reasonable adults won't let a change intended to improve the region devolve into that action. Maybe, again, I'm naive but I think everyone can act in good faith here.

I think the key thing to keep note of here is that Chanku sees the UH in particular and the Storting in general as her legacy; she's been intimately involved with it since, like, 2013, has run in every session, and is, in general, very much into the 'bureaucratic legalist roleplay' I generally prefer to characterize the UH as.
Eliminating the UH would be an enormous blow to her legacy in the region. I think that what Pengu suggested about having elected officials to help administer the OA could well be a reasonable common ground that could be agreed upon.

Although if 'reasonable common ground' is the goal...maybe the solution isn't to 'change the system' to create an OA, but use a brilliant legal hack to not have to bother with a Constitutional Convention at all.
The legal hack I literally just thought of is this: amend the Default Seats of the Underhusen act such that instead of 5 seats being the default, the default is, oh, 35 (a number roughly equal to the number of total voters we had in the last election), or even, like, 1001 (a number grossly over the present population of the forums).
That then effectively means that everyone eligible 'wins' a UH election by walkover and gives us a de facto OA without actually having to change anything about the operation of the UH (and thus needing to reimagine how the UH Officers would operate in an OA context).