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This isn't a discussion with a purpose per say, it's just intended to be an ongoing topic about my studies and thoughts on consensus-based governance and possible applications for Wintreath, for anyone that's interested and would like to bring their own thoughts in. I will continue to make dedicated topics for any specific proposals.

For now, this is based on my ongoing reading of Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life, which I talk about here. It will likely branch off into tangents.


The other day I took a look at Loomio, which is open-source software (with a paid cloud-hosted solution for those who don't want to host it themselves) that is centered around decision-making. My understanding is that questions are asked, and then for each question there's discussion, proposals, and votes all organized on the same page. When people vote, they can briefly summarize why they voted the way they did, which is an easy reference for others. It actually developed as a result of the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose organizers were looking for more inclusive tools for decision-making than the physical meetings they were having (which were open to anyone but required people to be at the right place at the right time).

I'm surprised that I haven't heard of Loomio before, since it seems like it'd be perfect for regions with open assemblies, but few regions use that setup I suppose.

I also don't believe it's right for Wintreath...I think one key aspect of Wintreath's emerging consensus-based government is its informality. It's essentially someone asking a question or proposing something and if nobody objects we run with it. By adopting a formal solution like Loomio, we would also be returning to more formal processes like we had prior to the split. If Wintreath were to grow significantly, we would probably have to do that to ensure inclusivity and fairness, but as it is the more informal system seems to be working out fine.

It did make me realize that there needs to be mention of ongoing discussions on-site though. We now have a number of Citizens who aren't on Discord, and if most of our discussions are on there then they're not able to know what's going on and weigh in. Therefore, I will make more of an effort to include discussions here on the forums and to communicate what's going on over on the NationStates RMB as well.

Any thoughts on this? Any disagreement on my assumptions here?

What seems to have evolved as the method of governance is person A proposes something, then if the consensus of citizen input is in support (or just a lack of objections) it passes, and if the citizen consensus is against it fails. This method is probably the one we're going to end up enshrining as our governance (at least based on what I see), but I think it's probably important that we discuss what the result should be if the discussion fails to reach unanimity, and how much importance we place on a unanimous decision.

My general idea of how disagreements on a proposal should be approached is if after the objection there is still a majority of supports for the proposal (normal majority, super majority, idk could be any percentage) it should probably pass. I think that in determining whether something is passed if it receives any objections, supports that occur before the first objection should be ignored, requiring people who have voiced their support to voice it again after the objection. This encourages people to participate in the entirety of the discussion, as well as ensures there's more consideration of all sides.

I'd say your analysis of what's evolved is correct.

Consensus doesn't necessarily require unanimity though...for example, there was a proposal from somebody to sever relations with all NS regions, but nobody else seems to have felt the same way so we've moved on. It may require someone to subjectively determine what the consensus is (in that case, me), but I think anyone would make that determination since it was just one person.

The question is what do you do if there's an actual contentious proposal where a significant amount of people are on either side? I imagine there should be an attempt at compromise to bring more people one way or another...a discussion at least. I'll admit, this is an area I'd like to do more research on...see how other consensus-based groups are handling that. If push came to shove, I imagine it'd be best to maintain the status quo in the absence of something that most people can get behind.

This isn't a discussion with a purpose per say, it's just intended to be an ongoing topic about my studies and thoughts on consensus-based governance and possible applications for Wintreath, for anyone that's interested and would like to bring their own thoughts in. I will continue to make dedicated topics for any specific proposals.

For now, this is based on my ongoing reading of Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life, which I talk about here. It will likely branch off into tangents.


The other day I took a look at Loomio, which is open-source software (with a paid cloud-hosted solution for those who don't want to host it themselves) that is centered around decision-making. My understanding is that questions are asked, and then for each question there's discussion, proposals, and votes all organized on the same page. When people vote, they can briefly summarize why they voted the way they did, which is an easy reference for others. It actually developed as a result of the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose organizers were looking for more inclusive tools for decision-making than the physical meetings they were having (which were open to anyone but required people to be at the right place at the right time).

I'm surprised that I haven't heard of Loomio before, since it seems like it'd be perfect for regions with open assemblies, but few regions use that setup I suppose.

I also don't believe it's right for Wintreath...I think one key aspect of Wintreath's emerging consensus-based government is its informality. It's essentially someone asking a question or proposing something and if nobody objects we run with it. By adopting a formal solution like Loomio, we would also be returning to more formal processes like we had prior to the split. If Wintreath were to grow significantly, we would probably have to do that to ensure inclusivity and fairness, but as it is the more informal system seems to be working out fine.

It did make me realize that there needs to be mention of ongoing discussions on-site though. We now have a number of Citizens who aren't on Discord, and if most of our discussions are on there then they're not able to know what's going on and weigh in. Therefore, I will make more of an effort to include discussions here on the forums and to communicate what's going on over on the NationStates RMB as well.

Any thoughts on this? Any disagreement on my assumptions here?
I think we should keep the informal system but record the results 

I agree, it should be informal, as I'd rather not have to spend 5 hours attempting to wade through rules and regulations. Now, for consensus, it shouldn't be required for it to be universal. As that's just nearly impossible. It should require a 60% majority, and if the opposition is around 30%, compromises should be made without compromising the entire thing that was proposed. But,  we have like 30 citizens? And 250 nations. So we're the 12% who can decide the fate of the 88% via laws and rules. We should always allow some of our non-citizens to weigh in what they think we need.

I'm going to reply later, but I'm copying a post @Chanku made from the Discord. It has extensive thoughts and links into consensus-based governance so is very relevant to this discussion:

This is a partial response to the latest post on the forums, mostly because I'm lazy and I just don't care to log in atm.

However I do have a good amount of information on Consensus-Based models.

You can't really do percentage support or non-support in an informal consensus based system, to do so would require the establishment of an override mechanism which goes outside of the normal consensus-based system.

There are, however, some ways to dealing with disagreements under Consensus-based systems. For more formal systems there tends to be a few options:

Allowing the lodging of reservations - this allows a group of people to say that they won't stop a proposal from being implemented, but they have issues with it and want those issues to be recorded. This can also lead to the proposal from being reworded or reworked if desired.

"Stand Aside" - this allows a person to say that they may not like a proposal, but do not object or wish to otherwise keep it from being implemented.

"Object/Block" - this is a person saying no, and if you require unanimity it proposal is stopped and does not pass.

Under more informal systems, I tend to see Unanimity (or near unanimity) coming up, as it's easy to explain and tends to happen a bit 'naturally'. Where-as non-unanimity requires more codification and rules. Regardless, there are a few long-standing places we can look at for consensus-based models both with and without Unanimity requirements, such as the IETF and Quakers.

For non-Unanimity based-Consensus we can look at the IETF -- Internet Engineering Task Force --, which uses consensus-based decision making in its Working Groups, which helps create and establish Internet Standards tends to actually operate under Rough Consensus, and can be rather informal. You can read more about it from the IETF here:

For those who want a TL;DR of Rough Consensus, the main idea is not to get exact agreement or unanimity. However it is to discuss and at least acknowledge and address concerns held by individuals who disagree. If an individual, or group of people, still disagree despite discussion and attempts to resolve the issue, then the matter can still progress.

Quakers actually tend to use a pretty interesting structure, and have used it for decades. Although it is a rather formal system that is designed for in-person meetings, it may be adaptable (or at least it can be used as inspiration). Under the Quaker System, there is at least one Clerk, which is selected and prepares the agenda of the meeting, guides the meeting, and modates the meeting if necessary. The Clerk, is also entrusted to be a "servant of the meeting" and is not supposed to abuse their influence over the meeting. Typically a Clerk is elected, but I'm not sure formal elections would be necessary if Wintreath adopted this method. Clerks are also responsible for granting non-members (for Quakers, these are people who are not members of that church) permission to participate (which is typically granted).

With the Quaker Model, there is typically a period which begins with silence, to reflect on the proposal, then members get to speak on the proposal. When doing so the members are more-so speaking personally, and based on their experience. However individuals must make their statements individually and can't refer to or respond to anyone else's statement. It may also be limited to only speaking once per item. Afterwards, once the Clerk believes the matter to be fully examined the Clerk creates a written statement which discerns the 'spirit of the meeting', which is then read to the meeting. Participants may then speak on the statement, like they did with the proposal as initially presented, but may not introduce anything new. This period is more-so used to edit the statement and to make sure it's accurate and correct. After that, the Clerk then asks whether the statement is acceptable or not, where the meeting must either unite or postpone the matter. Quakers aim for "Unity in disagreement" over uanimous agreement.

There's also numerous examples of this in anarchist groups, and the like, which tend to adopt various models -- most of which are typically based on Unanimity.

If you want to go outside of Consensus Decision Making in general, you can look at the Haudenosaunee form of Governance, which does tend towards Consensus and agreement as well.

For my experience of using it in both my former FF14 guild, and in my House I typically found it works well with people that both are willing to work with it, and are willing to discuss and are working towards a common goal. The less codified it is, the harder it is for new people to actually learn and navigate especially as it's not as 'common' as other methods. So some form of guide or official codification will be required the less people you have unified they are.

My NS House had almost no codification, but it was a small group of people that knew each other, and most decisions were things like inviting or adding someone to the family, and the occasional codification of rules and decisions that had been made.

For my FF14 Guild, it was only partially codified, and lead to issues where when me and the other founder weren't able to be as active and others ended up leading, they had a hard time understanding how things worked and ended up leaving to make their own group. We also required explicit unanimity, albeit that was more-so an accident than anything

Sources and Additional Reading:

IETF
Wikipedia - Rough Consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_consensus
IETF - RFC 7282, On Consensus and Humming in the IETF : https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7282

Quakers
Wikipedia - Quaker Business Method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaker_business_method
c. wess daniels Medium - Prinicipal vs Preference: The Speed of Quaker Decision Making: https://medium.com/nursery-of-truth/principle-vs-preference-the-speed-of-quaker-decision-making-58286864b08d
Quaker.org - What is Communal Discernment in Decision Making? - The Quaker Decision Making Process: https://quaker.org/decision-making/
Morestown Friends School - The Quaker Decision Making Process: https://www.mfriends.org/quaker-process/
Wikipedia - Consensus decision-making (On the Quaker Process): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making#Quaker-based_model

Haudenosaunee
Wikipedia - Iroqouis Government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois#Government
National Mueseum Of the American Indian, Education Office - Haudenosaunee Guide for Educators: https://americanindian.si.edu/sites/1/files/pdf/education/HaudenosauneeGuide.pdf
Haudenosaunee Confederacy - Government: https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/government/

General
Consensus Decision Making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making#Quaker-based_model

I agree, it should be informal, as I'd rather not have to spend 5 hours attempting to wade through rules and regulations. Now, for consensus, it shouldn't be required for it to be universal. As that's just nearly impossible. It should require a 60% majority, and if the opposition is around 30%, compromises should be made without compromising the entire thing that was proposed. But,  we have like 30 citizens? And 250 nations. So we're the 12% who can decide the fate of the 88% via laws and rules. We should always allow some of our non-citizens to weigh in what they think we need.

Rules and regulations on what people can do aren't really what IC governments do.



I've been thinking it would be helpful to bring up and discuss the major jobs/areas of IC governance. The list is below and serves to be a list of the major areas I've seen in governments of regions, not as a list of things we need to do as a region. Some of these things I do not believe we need to do, and some of these things are things we should not do. Some of this stuff is stuff that is already being done and does not need to be managed by the citizenry. This list I've assembled is as follows:

Foreign Affairs
- Accepting/Rejecting Embassy Requests
- Making Embassy Requests
- Closing Embassies
- Ambassadors
- Press Releases/Announcements to Foreign Regions
- Treaties

Culture/Events/Media
- Scheduled Events (if interregional then is involved with FA)
- Newspapers (Also something that can fall under FA)
- Fun Regional Polls

Roleplay
- Management of Roleplay
- Management of Maps

Immigration/Education/Integration
- Recruitment TGs
- Getting New Members Involved
- Getting New Members to Endo the Del

Military/Defense/War
- r/d
- Heavily involved with FA

WA Affairs
- WA delegate vote and approval of proposals
- Involved with FA

Elections/Recalls of Executive Members
- pretty self explanatory

In regards to FA, we just had a discussion on this, and is largely handled by our idea of consensus-based governance. Making and closing embassy requests fit within the system of if a citizen has an opinion or would like to do something they propose it and then we see what the consensus is. Accepting/Rejecting embassy requests also fit within the consensus system, but is a bit different since the topic is inherently brought up by the request itself rather than a citizen. I think that embassy requests should automatically be rejected if nobody voices any opinions on it at all, although Wintermoot should have the ability to choose to accept it if he feels so, with his acceptance of it being an opinion on it without there having been any opposition if nobody else voiced their opinion on it. The final bit of FA to address are treaties and ambassadors. Ambassadors we also came to a consensus I think in our FA discussion, where if somebody wants to serve as an ambassador and make press releases purely because they think it would be fun then they can become one through the proposal-consensus system. Treaties and FA agreements are a more interesting area for our government. In terms of finalizing them, running them through the proposal-consensus system should be a necessity, but the area of importance to determine is who serves as the point of contact for making the agreement? Is it Moot, is it whoever's delegate at the time, or should it be anyone who's interested (and if so what if there are a lot of people who want to do so)?

I'm going to lump RP and Culture/Events/Media together in this paragraph. In regards to Culture/Events/Media there should not be an official regional newspaper that anyone is required to maintain. Nobody should be required to do anything they don't want to do. If somebody wants to write a newspaper (because they find it fun) and does so, the region should support their newspaper. It falls into the category of passion project. Most of the stuff in RP and Culture/Events/Media falls into the category of passion project. Inner Solsticia's map also fits into this category of passion project, which brings up an interesting thing. They're not a citizen. Obviously to try and ban passion projects from non-citizens is shitty, stupid, and an asshole move, they clearly should be allowed to do these things and be supported by the region in it. This brings up the topic of how do passion projects fit within the consensus-based government we seek. Do these projects get brought up automatically to citizens when a non-citizen brings up their project? Do non-citizens have the power to propose things for consensus among citizens? Should projects like these even be run through the system of consensus-based governance to get regional support? Should Wintermoot just give support to these things on his own? 

In terms of Immigration/Education/Integration, this doesn't really need to be handled by our government system. Recruitment TGs are sent out via API by Wintermoot, and due to the mechanics of the site and API keys nobody else can/should really touch API recruitment. Manual recruitment can just be run through Wintermoot's authority, someone who wants to manually recruit can ask for the raw recruitment TG to send and Moot can grant required permissions. As for getting people to endorse the delegate, this is largely just the job of Moot and the delegate. When I was first chosen as delegate, Wintermoot's efforts to increase my endos were promotional, in regional TGs and in the WFE and RMB. My work to increase my endos are to endotart, as well as my promotional dispatches, most of which have pings to the target audience in them, and were shared and pinned by Moot. The responsibility of increasing the delegate's endos falls primarily on the delegate, and supporting the delegate's efforts in that also falls on Wintermoot. This isn't really something that needs to be handled by the citizenry. In terms of getting people involved, Wintermoot always welcomes new people on the RMB, and you all recently got a TG from me encouraging participation in governance among the citizenry.

r/d isn't something we do, so can be ignored here. As for WA policy, the precedent that has been set is the delegate chooses the method for determining how they cast their WA vote and approve WA proposals in their campaign promises. WA isn't a big topic here, but if discussions ever emerge about a resolution (including among non-citizens) I'd definitely want to support the consensus of that discussion rather than the majority of WA nations. Most people just follow the leader, they vote in accordance with whoever's already winning or with the delegate vote.

Finally in regards to appointments of the delegacy and emergency recalls of the position, this is something that easily fits within the system of proposal and consensus and doesn't need much clarification.

This is a partial response to the latest post on the forums, mostly because I'm lazy and I just don't care to log in atm.

However I do have a good amount of information on Consensus-Based models.

You can't really do percentage support or non-support in an informal consensus based system, to do so would require the establishment of an override mechanism which goes outside of the normal consensus-based system.

There are, however, some ways to dealing with disagreements under Consensus-based systems. For more formal systems there tends to be a few options:

Allowing the lodging of reservations - this allows a group of people to say that they won't stop a proposal from being implemented, but they have issues with it and want those issues to be recorded. This can also lead to the proposal from being reworded or reworked if desired.

"Stand Aside" - this allows a person to say that they may not like a proposal, but do not object or wish to otherwise keep it from being implemented.

"Object/Block" - this is a person saying no, and if you require unanimity it proposal is stopped and does not pass.

Under more informal systems, I tend to see Unanimity (or near unanimity) coming up, as it's easy to explain and tends to happen a bit 'naturally'. Where-as non-unanimity requires more codification and rules. Regardless, there are a few long-standing places we can look at for consensus-based models both with and without Unanimity requirements, such as the IETF and Quakers.

For non-Unanimity based-Consensus we can look at the IETF -- Internet Engineering Task Force --, which uses consensus-based decision making in its Working Groups, which helps create and establish Internet Standards tends to actually operate under Rough Consensus, and can be rather informal. You can read more about it from the IETF here:

For those who want a TL;DR of Rough Consensus, the main idea is not to get exact agreement or unanimity. However it is to discuss and at least acknowledge and address concerns held by individuals who disagree. If an individual, or group of people, still disagree despite discussion and attempts to resolve the issue, then the matter can still progress.

Quakers actually tend to use a pretty interesting structure, and have used it for decades. Although it is a rather formal system that is designed for in-person meetings, it may be adaptable (or at least it can be used as inspiration). Under the Quaker System, there is at least one Clerk, which is selected and prepares the agenda of the meeting, guides the meeting, and modates the meeting if necessary. The Clerk, is also entrusted to be a "servant of the meeting" and is not supposed to abuse their influence over the meeting. Typically a Clerk is elected, but I'm not sure formal elections would be necessary if Wintreath adopted this method. Clerks are also responsible for granting non-members (for Quakers, these are people who are not members of that church) permission to participate (which is typically granted).

With the Quaker Model, there is typically a period which begins with silence, to reflect on the proposal, then members get to speak on the proposal. When doing so the members are more-so speaking personally, and based on their experience. However individuals must make their statements individually and can't refer to or respond to anyone else's statement. It may also be limited to only speaking once per item. Afterwards, once the Clerk believes the matter to be fully examined the Clerk creates a written statement which discerns the 'spirit of the meeting', which is then read to the meeting. Participants may then speak on the statement, like they did with the proposal as initially presented, but may not introduce anything new. This period is more-so used to edit the statement and to make sure it's accurate and correct. After that, the Clerk then asks whether the statement is acceptable or not, where the meeting must either unite or postpone the matter. Quakers aim for "Unity in disagreement" over uanimous agreement.

There's also numerous examples of this in anarchist groups, and the like, which tend to adopt various models -- most of which are typically based on Unanimity.

If you want to go outside of Consensus Decision Making in general, you can look at the Haudenosaunee form of Governance, which does tend towards Consensus and agreement as well.

For my experience of using it in both my former FF14 guild, and in my House I typically found it works well with people that both are willing to work with it, and are willing to discuss and are working towards a common goal. The less codified it is, the harder it is for new people to actually learn and navigate especially as it's not as 'common' as other methods. So some form of guide or official codification will be required the less people you have unified they are.

My NS House had almost no codification, but it was a small group of people that knew each other, and most decisions were things like inviting or adding someone to the family, and the occasional codification of rules and decisions that had been made.

For my FF14 Guild, it was only partially codified, and lead to issues where when me and the other founder weren't able to be as active and others ended up leading, they had a hard time understanding how things worked and ended up leaving to make their own group. We also required explicit unanimity, albeit that was more-so an accident than anything

I prefer the system of rough consensus over unanimity. I don't like the ability of unanimity to let someone singlehandedly lock the government out of action.

Also I wholly support having a differentiation between "objecting/blocking" and "standing aside". I think it's a really useful tool to have to express opinions.

@Chanku: Thanks for all the great information about consensus decision-making in general! I have to admit I've only got through the first half of links at this point...it's a lot to take in, and it's not necessarily intuitive stuff for someone like me who is only deeply familiar with democracy and autocracy. I guess I'm still getting exposed to the finer points of this stuff...which is the whole point of this, I know.

But I do have some thoughts so far:

I think if there's a word for it we're probably going for a rough consensus...unanimity, while preferred, isn't always going to be possible. We can only hope that everyone will work together toward something they can live with, but at the end of the day it wouldn't be productive to allow one or a handful of people to stop something that's backed by the vast majority of people.

I thought the "On Consensus and Humming in the IETF" link you posted was informative to how policy proposals such as the Citizenship and FA discussions we're having now could work. In those cases the goal should be on addressing objections and concerns to get to the best solution, and I like the idea of not closing discussion on something until all open issues have been addressed. Obviously it may not be addressed to everyone's satisfaction, and that's where the rough consensus comes in. But I don't think we want a system that looks like a vote, and we certainly don't want to ignore minority viewpoints just because a majority is fine with something as it is to begin with.

I also like that it focuses on participants rather than members...in our new system, Citizens are given the right to participate in governance, not the obligation to. I think we recognize that trying to force uninterested people to weigh in on something or even just cast a vote leads to things like popularity contests, lemming effects, etc. It also neatly aligns with our goal of people getting involved in things they find interesting and fun rather than taking on job-like duties.

The Quaker model is interesting, and I have to admit I wish there were more systems like this offline...I wish our processes for making decisions, especially emotionally-charged political ones, had more opportunities for thought and reflection and were less reactionary. The need for ego-checking is something I wish we saw more of...it's interesting, in both this and the IETE process people are essentially asked when objecting to consider whether they're objecting based on preference/something you can live with regardless or because there's a real issue or principle at stake. It seems a little formal for what we're going for, but I am curious to know what parts of the model you feel could or should be adapted to Wintreath.

Speaking of formal, I believe a lot of the options you mentioned such as the ability to object or stand aside are in Loomio, which is something we could adopt in the future if Wintreath grew to the point where informal systems weren't working anymore. As it is, I don't see an issue with someone having their objections/reservations noted, especially if they feel it wasn't addressed to their satisfaction and they're 'in the rough' so to speak. Of course, we haven't had a discussion on how things will be recorded...shirikisho la mipapai's post suggest we might not be doing the best job of recording things, especially for people who aren't on Discord.

Also agree that once we've got the details in place there should be a guide for how to get involved in governance for those who want to.

Will read through the rest of the links as soon as I can.

@The Age of Dystopia

Foreign Affairs
For the most part, I agree that we've already handled this.

Not sure if by embassy requests you mean establishing relations or simply creating NationStates in-game embassies. For establishing relations, I think given that we've dispensed with the idea of requiring someone step up as ambassador to approve relations, relations should be approved by default if there are no objections made to it. At the very least if a region has made an effort to come to Wintreath and fill out the request form, I think they deserve to at least have a reason why their request was denied.

For in-game embassies, if we otherwise have relations with them I think we can automatically accept them. For cases where we don't have relations, I'm fine with automatically rejecting them. We've rarely accepted those anyways, and in almost all cases nothing ever came of them. A possible exception may be small/personal regions started by Wintreans, like OrangeJuice and Snakeia. These are small regions that aren't competing with Wintreath in any way, and imo it's to our benefit to recognize them (and support our members in the process) with an embassy. If they grew to the point that they did start becoming large, established regions we could also request that they apply for more formal relations.

I don't think we need a community decision on individual ambassador appointments...that seems like it could be tedious. It's unlikely we'll ever have more than one person interested in a specific region, and if there's broader concerns about who we make ambassadors in general we can come to a consensus on a policy for that.

On a personal level, I think most NS treaties are useless and performative at best, especially recognition and cultural treaties. Regions recognize each other when they establish relations, and can do cultural things without a treaty. There may be more use in NSGP and R/D treaties, such as the sanctions agreed to in the Modern Gameplay Compact. However, I have a hard time imagining Wintreath giving its independence to decide those things for ourselves for the purpose of joining a group of other regions. Even our vassalization treaty with New Hyperion, as impressive as it sounds, is essentially a formal recognition of the fact that our communities had become intertwined to the point that this sort of arrangement made sense.

I agree that treaties should be a community decision, but I may also retain a veto power as founder given our...complicated relations with other NS regions in the past. I'll admit, deep entanglements with other NS regions, especially those involved with NSGP, makes me weary.

Culture/Events/Media
I completely agree with you, and for the record I would love to be part of a newsletter team. I've even suggested a premise for one. I just don't want to carry one on my back the way I did with The Frosty Bugle. Even after reducing the workload to ~3 hours an issue, it's still a lot of work for one person, especially since The Frosty Bugle was a weekly publication.

I personally don't see the need for community approval for non-Citizen contributions...it's unusual, given that people who want to contribute to Wintreath on a deeper level usually become Citizens. I would be happy for Inner Solsticia to become a Citizen, but as it is her map has received a lot of interest and is doing good for Wintreath. Where there may need to be decisions made when there are conflicting contributions. For example, if somebody else creates a regional map, I would say they have the right to...but then which one should receive 'official' recognition on the region page?

There are also some contributions that a larger than mere cultural contributions...usually those that create new official Wintreath platforms (on the level of NS, the Discord, forums, and Minecraft server), and in those cases I'll make those decisions in consultation with the RSS and the community. I think on that level I have an obligation to do that.

Immigration/Education/Integration
Also agree here. I've never denied a request for somebody to have access to manually recruit, and the only consideration is that we can be held responsible as a region if an authorized recruiter misuses the system such as not marking their telegrams as recruitment or otherwise trying to get around those telegram category blocks.

WA/R/D
Also agreed. There's been very few real contentious WA proposals in Wintreath...if someone has a strong desire that we vote a particular way on a current or upcoming proposal, they can always bring it up themselves too.

I have finished going through all the links that Chanku provided

Not necessarily related to governance per say, but one thing that caught my attention in the Haudenosaunee Guide for Educators is how they considered what we now call lacrosse a "medicine game", something that was played to bring people together, heal them, and strengthen them. In the "Principle vs. Preference" link on Quaker Decision Making, there's a section that mentions "Low Threshold Acts of Community" to bring people together outside of governing. Its example was a "God Pub", where Quakers and Episcopals could come together in a more casual setting and have conversations with each other that people wouldn't be comfortable having at church.

I think they make the best case for what we call "culture" that I've ever heard...not as fun and games or things to boost regional activity, but as things that bring people together and bond them. Perhaps that's the true importance of culture.

This this pdf link has a lot of great resources on if we ever need to establish a more formal system, including a suggested structure and bylaws template. But as it is, section 3.1 has some great thoughts on elements that make up a successful foundation for consensus decision making, and I think we should probably incorporate that into any guide we make. The two last ones, Commitment to the Group and Active Participation, are also related to what we're discussing with Citizenship changes...filling out the application is kinda how people tell us that want to more deeply commit to Wintreath and Active Participation (not necessarily in governance, but in anything) is what we're looking for to maintain it.

In any case, I've taken a stab at a very rough draft of a system, which I've created a sub-discussion for here.