Welcome to the race, Pengu, and thanks for the detailed opener and your well thought out response to Hapi's question. I'm looking forward to seeing your campaign develop in the coming weeks and remain excited to watch how you push for continued discussions about the future of our regional legislature.
With Lau arguably having been one of the more effective Speaker's I've personally had the pleasure of observing in this term, how would you build on his work and continue to bring good repute to the office if you successfully ran?
What role do you see yourself playing in discussions about reforming the legislature and what ideas do you have to encourage discussions to continue productively?
Finally, do you see any opportunities to bring NS RMB-only members over to the forums and encourage their participation in the forums?
Well, Lau is a pretty exceptional Speaker that I wouldn't necessarily say that I could hit at his level, but I'd try to continue things at the level that he's set up as well as find more ways to get people engaged. Ways such as continuing tagging whenever a law comes up for a vote, doing a ping and a post in the Citizen's Platform channel on Discord whenever a law is up for discussion in the UH so people can discuss (or even do a citizen announcement for Discord), and make an announcement on the RMB to possibly even get RMB people to check it out.
Likewise as I mentioned, I want to also get back to doing polls for legislation outside of the UH-centric seating act to get input on things outside of the few outspoken people we get discussing in topics. It's always great hearing what people do have to say in that topic, but I usually find you get the most interesting input from polls that can sometimes differ from what's said in the thread vocally. Using the polls, I'd want to engage those people to see why they feel like that and give them a chance to speak up, or even do PMs to people that normally don't speak up to get their input on things, sort of get a bigger feel since we're definitely making steps to get people to be more involved, but we could also go further.
In the next session, I'd actually want to start out of the gate running with discussions about reform, posting some examples of what people wanted to go for, and put it to a poll on what people are actually wanting. Really, we're always going to be at a stalemate until we figure out what people are actually wanting and why, and I'd want to start off the term getting to the bottom of that and going more into the heart of the matter rather than continuing debating why one is more promising than the other. So I want to start getting people to talk about what they know about the UH and what it does, why they feel it does or doesn't work, and what they think would be the most ideal approach because even if I fully support a type of OA...it's obvious not everyone does and I don't want another legislation reform discussion to lead in the same place as the 2015/2016 Constitutional Convention to where we made prominent strides toward an OA only to have a last minute turn from a majority of people who didn't like the details or overall didn't like the OA ideas.
So basically, I want to go in guns blazing and get some discussion brewing, continuing off of the current discussion while also getting more into, as I said, the heart of it and see where people stand in the long run since even this time, we've had some uncertainty towards an OA from citizens such as Crushita who haven't seen it work in other regions.
And to answer your question, I actually do see opportunities to bring RMB members into the forums to take part. As I mentioned earlier, I'd want to start posting when we have new legislation in the RMB for people to check out and possibly pull some RMB people to want to look at it, sign up, and place their thoughts on it. Ideally, I'd also love to see our polls start to reflect the topic at hand as well, possibly asking their input on a bill being discussed with a link to said bill, and they could check it out to get a better idea of what it is they'd be voting for.
There's always ways to get RMB players involved whether it be RMB posts, the regional poll, and possibly other methods we haven't thought of. Hell, we could even do regional telegrams for big legislative discussions such as the current one about legislative reform so long as we're not doing it constantly with every bill to where it becomes invasive and a nuisance.
But a big part of this term for me ideally would be finding those ways to get more people involved and fixing that big issue that Charax and others have touched on: the Integration part. Get more people to know what the UH is (which I'll touch on more in this next question) and what they can do to be a part of it, and give them more of an idea of how everything works so they can feel more comfortable getting involved.
If ot became abundantly clear that legislature restructuring is impossible how would you attempt to increase participation and intrest in the current format?
It was touched on by other members and I highly support it, but guides would be a monumental aspect. Guides to how the Underhusen works, guides to how the Citizen's Platform works (and revamping
this thread), and overall just drawing up some helpful tips and whatnot so that if the UH decidedly stays as is, it still has more value and purpose and it's much more clear on how it and the legislative process in general works.
Because I think others touched on it really well that part of the reason there's lack of interest is that people don't know what it is...even people who have been here a while as Wintermoot even pointed out. So the first step would be clarifying what the UH is, how it works, and how even non-elected citizens can be a part of the process.
