notes-hypotheticalConstitution-hypotheticalConstitutionOldNotes

old notes for things that have already been incorporated either into the bylaws or the todos, or that already have been decided against. just so that i can see my thought process later.


juries ideas:

a council + a judge is a court. in this case the council is acting as a jury.

both the judge and the council must agree on 'guilty' for a given charge for a person to be guilty of that charge.

in a given constituency, the only eligible candidates for delegate are those whose council score is positive, and also greater than the median of their constituency

notes: the >median requirement ensures that each higher layer of the delegate pyramid will tend to have delegates with higher council scores

anyone who is a delegate is not anonymous while they sit in council

in order to bring a court case, you must put at risk/temporarily spend 6 points of your council score. if the case looks like it will take a long time (time = the average amount of time a juror must serve per score point gained (note: this time includes time in unsuccessful councils) * 6 jurors), the council can ask another council an appeal council) to review and assign/demand more points for this case. each council member has a preset limit on how large a case they are willing to accept (or mb do this according to next scheduled vacation), and if the point score for this case is too high for any member, the case will not be assigned to this council. the system tries to keep together council members with high limits (e.g. willing to hear long cases). the council must come to consensus within the time limit set for the case (otherwise the issue is undecided and automatically goes to another council).

if you win the case, you get your 6+ points back, and the defendant is charged them instead. you cannot bring a case with points you do not have, but defendants just go negative in the end if they lose.

you can have just a trial by a single judge if you only want to risk 1 point. the defendant, however, can always insist that it be a jury trial, in which case the prosecution is forced to risk more too.

other things that cost points (generally 6 points):

each person's score goes up 1 whenever the council they are sitting on decides a case (which is always by consensus) (regardless of if the decision is 'accept' or 'reject'). the score goes down 1 whenever a council they are sitting on cannot come to consensus within the time limit set for the case, or down by 4 when they resign from a council (even if no case is pending). if a member resigns, the issue is undecided and gets reassigned as if the council could not come to consensus, but the other members are not penalized.

there is no 'findings of fact/findings of law' distinction, although the judge (who is not anonymous) is bound to only speak about the law.

issues can be appealed. an appeal costs points as if the issue were re-brought, minus one (e.g. there is little reason you would re-submit, rather than appeal, if your main motion were rejected). when an issue is appealed, it it sent to a council where the minimum score over all members is greater than or equal to the median score in the old council.

appeal court levels are created by taking the median score over all councils in the next lower level

the system tries to place members who get a high score with members who have a low score (rounding up negative scores to 0, though; we dont wanna distribute those guys all over the place!). but, if the person's score is high enough to allow them to serve on an appeals court, they can opt to serve there, too. that is, they'll be serving on two (or more) courts at once (one per level they merit). so, people who have a high score have the option of increasing their score faster than others.

or -- maybe we should place people on councils with similar scores to their own. so the more experienced councilmembers dont have to deal with educating noobs. then no one serves on more than one at a time. i guess this is simpler, and makes the system less miserable for the most dedicated council volunteers.

when a court is reviewing a proposed main motion, they can ask for amendments and the proposer can make them, or not. the court may refuse to accept the motion if their demands are not heeded, or they can make suggestions that are not demands if they choose to. The suggested criterion for approving main motion and amendment texts is:

You may also reject motions if the submitter rejects amendments to it that the council has demanded. The council should only demand amendments accomplishing what seems to be the main aim, while that greatly improving it, or while making it much more pallatable to its opposition.

Any elected official has their past council participation de-anonymized when they decide to run. This incentivizes them against taking the easy way out by simply agreeing to everything in every council session. If someone is embarrassed about things they said when they were much younger, for example, then they can choose to wipe the records of their past council participation, which makes it impossible for the system to de-anonymize their past participation, but it also causes their council score to be reset to zero (making them inelgible for election until it is positive again).

It suffices to meet the council score condition at the beginning of a run for elected office; after that point, if one's score drops, it does not disqualify. a candidate remains a candidate in their own recall election regardless of their council score. however, to be re-elected, one's council score must satisfy the condition.

having the councils as 'courts' allows us to use the 'positive votes only' variant of reweighted score voting, which gives little incentive for negative campaigning. to take care of the equivalent of 'flagged comments', the courts adjudicate the flag (which they might actually do when the system is being used on an online forum; or, there might be a 'decorum' category of court for this; actually i guess we should call them 'censors'. note: no PRIOR restraint; also, all banned comments can still be viewed by browsing at -1).

what about the actual situation of crazy or evil candidates, those for whom negative campaigning might be appropriate? We could allow them to be 'flagged/censored' on the ballot if a court determines that they should be. This doesnt mean they're hidden, it just means that they're listed is a special section of 'censored candidates', along with a short statement of why the council censored them, and a rebuttal by the candidate.

'refer to committee' refers to courts. a court that takes a motion referred to them cannot 'reject', they can only approve, by consensus, a rewritten version. BOTH the original version and the rewritten version become alternatives in the final vote (which i guess is decided by approval voting?, with a runoff between status-quo and the winning motion).

court category ideas:

or should censorship and trials be mixed in with legislation, to give legislative committees more 'hands on experience' with the effects of legislation? maybe trials should all be mixed in with 'justice'. and maybe censorship legislation should be mixed in with the activity of censorship. so:

court category ideas:

note: motions by the reps (the delegates and the electors) ARE NOT reviewed by councils.

perhaps only the highest-level (e.g. appeal) councils get referred to by refer to committee. e.g. you work your way up reviewing member motions? this suggests that motion reviews should be subcategorized by topical area, so that committeemembers can become experts by the time they are elgible to be referred to.

"parliamentary categorization" refers to determinations like which voting threshold category a given motion falls within

now, can courts still influence legislation? i propose yes, and i propose a different mechanism than the one i envisioned before: when there is a tie among the 3 houses of the legislature (that is, 1 passes a resolution, one rejects that resolution), then councils can break the tie; each council can, if it reaches consensus, cast a vote one way or the other, and the sum of the votes, times the council scores of the councils casting them, determines the vote of a fourth, tie-breaker house. If the third house accepts or rejects, however, then the council votes have no effect.

councils decide via majority vote whether to begin discussing tiebreaking legislation. there is no score penalty if they fail to come to consensus on this, although they still get +1 if they do come to consensus.

council scores are just the sum of the council scores of everyone on the council, with the exception that councilmembers with negative council scores only contribute a 0 to the sum.

councils could also produce a 'council summary' of a legislative debate, to be shown alongside the for- and against- summaries created by voting up.

the system randomly assigns incoming requests to juries (must be random to avoid stacked jury attack, where one political party tells a small proportion of its members to vote for other parties, just to have a few juries whose members are all really from one party -- with stacked attack, this only helps in proportion to the votes that the large party is giving up)

appeals courts are always filled first -- if there are not enough incoming requests+appeals to saturate them, then the lower courts get no action (because we are guessing that the experienced appeals courts produce the quickest and best results)

should we let councilmembers stay with one council, and try and form bonds with them and bargain and such (i'll agree on this case if you agree with me on that legislative tie-breaker)? i'd like that, but i think it makes the logistics too complicated when people go on vacation -- when they're on vacation, the rest of their council would have to wait for them (or accept a temporary replacement member, leading to more complex logistics). also, then you have to have rules about how many vacations you can take. it's logistically simpler to just ask each person how long they have to continuously serve, then place them randomly on juries with people with a similar length of time currently available.

should we let juries refuse cases assigned to them? i'd like to say no, but if we said that, people cant recuse themselves. on the other hand, since identities are anonymous, we cant easily enforce recusation, so maybe we should not have it because it would be uneven. on the third hand, we could disclose identities to the judge, and they could ask ppl questions relating to recusement.

written jury deliberations are public but identity of members is anonymous, even to the other members

the judge's identity is not anonymous. Also, if any representatives (electors or delegates) are on a council, their identities are not anonymous either? not sure about that.. maybe they should be deanonymized only after the conclusion of the council session.

resigning from a jury, or being kicked off by being absent too often, subtracts 1 from your score. this can go negative. it costs 1 to bring a case. corporate entities can bring cases only using their officers' pts (so the corporation better have at least one officer who is a good citizen -- hiring someone to only do that (only provide points), without having other powers comparable to the company's other officers, is illegal). points are non transferable and cannot be bought.

but since it costs 6 pts and only 5 ppl get 1 pt, and there are negative pts for nonagreement, the system will run out of pts and no one will be able to propose anything or bring a case. so, give ppl pts for offering to serve when no case is assigned. split pts into 'skill' pts and 'effort' pts. only effort pts are incremented just for offering to serve. otherwise, both are affected similarly by actions. pts are per-category. everyone starts with 0 points in each category at the beginning.

defending a case cant give you negative pts: the price you pay when you lose a case that you were defending cant push you below 0 (effort pts); and the price for being on a council that didnt come to consensus cant push you below 0. if you were already below 0, it cant push you lower. skill pts can go below 0.

effort pts are the things that you spend. skill pts are used in selecting appeals courts. remember, both skill and effort are normally incremented and decremented together depending upon the outcome of things, except for the effort below 0 exception, and the effort points awarded for offering to serve but not being assigned.

effort pts can be decremented by voluntary actions such as resignation or too many unexcused absences for council sessions.

effort points are awarded for offering to serve but not serving only until you have 6 pts in the category. you can only earn more pts than this by actually serving.

the parliamentary categorization councils, not the chairs, determine vote thresholds for reps, too (so as to have a uniform standard)

hmm now that councils are so great, i'd rather have them immediately, rather than the three phases of org size. how would we handle that, though? it seems silly to tell people that if there are 6 people in the organization, 5 of them must be delegates. usually in that situation, 1-3 of them are more involved or respected than the others. i guess the answer is to allow 1 person to hold multiple elector or delegate seats. disallowing this could be an option that the group could enable later. i guess that term limits should be similarly made optional, to allow small projects to adopt this system immediately in full form. and similarly the same person can be an elector and a delegate. maybe these restrictions could automatically come into being when the group got sufficiently large.. or maybe not.

this is a little dangerous though.. if the same person holds a majority of the elector seats, and a majority of the delegate seats, then they are a dictator and can't be overruled by anyone else. if they hold a supermajority of both, they can amend the constitution. maybe let that go though... if 66% of the voters want that to happen, how could anything be done about it? That's a constitution-amending supermajority already. another answer would be: this is one cases where the rules for a government should differ from the rules for a private organization.

btw did i ever write down anywhere that p should be 5 (not 7 or 11), because it's just too hard to get anything done with lots of people, and

open question for amendable code: should non-top-level delegates have open or secret ballots? split it somehow (some levels open, some secret, or maybe some delegates on each level are open, some secret)?

each delegation can pass resolutions with a 66% vote. the set of such passed resolutions become the 'platform' (as in 'party platform') of that delegation. delegates are encouraged but not required (e.g. they are allowed to disagree and to vote their conscience) to try to get their delegation's platform resolutions passed at the next higher level.

resolutions may not say anything about individual candidates for higher levels of the delegate pyramid -- they may only discuss general issues, not individual people.

each candidate must say if they 'agree as stated, disagree, sort of agree (agree but think there's a minor problem with the wording of the question, or think that their opinion on this issue cannot be reduced to a yes/no on this question)'. each candidate must also rank-order their priority of the resolutions for their delegation.

if constituents of a constituency can complain if they think that their constituency's parliamentary procedure was not followed. a candidate with more than 40% complaints is not elected (e.g. that constituency has no delegate). as a side-effect, the std/default parliamentary procedure requires a candidate to get at least 60% approval.

delegates are provided standard software for doing all of this by the organization as a whole, but each constituency can, if it chooses, adopt its own parliamentary procedure and not use this software. in fact, all this stuff about platforms and voting thresholds is itself only a default. all the top-level organization cares about is the registration of who is with which delegation (each delegation submits a list, and so does each persion, and a person is considered to be with a delegation only if both the delegation and the person say that they are), and which delegate was selected, and how many constituents lodged a complaint. actually, just unify the complaint and the resignation process; recall that to initially form a constituency you need 50% more than the minimum threshold below which the delegate will be removed; so if 1/3 of the ppl leave, then the delegate is removed. so instead of complaining you can resign, which just means that you leave the constituency and the delgate doesn't have the power of your support.

if a higher-level constituency passes a resolution, this is (in the default parliamentary procedure) put to a vote in each supporting delegation. this gives supporting delegations a chance to express dissent by not passing the resolution or even by passing its opposite.

architectural principals: -- competition between constituencies -- no mass campaigning for delegates -- delegates chosen bottom-up, no top-down influence or circle of power in the delegate pyramid -- little incentive for negative campaigning -- small groups -- when no firm agreement, usually better not to pass legislation (which is restrictive) or (negative) judgement -- in the absence of strong opposition or procedural obstacles, the executive should just decide things unilaterally -- the chair's role is solely negative -- the chair opposes the government -- the chair is a position of individual conscience, not a position where one relays the views of those who elected you -- judges are a position of individual conscience, not a position where one relays the views of those who elected you -- electors and delegates are free to vote their conscience, but the system encourages them not to via the threat of losing the next election or being recalled

a condition for elgibility of a person to be initially appointed a judge in a circuit is that they, as a councilmember, have more than the median number of skill points out of councilmembers in the highest appeals level of that circuit (e.g. the same condition to be on a higher appeals court, except that here there aren't any). in addition to their other confirmation requirements, they must be 'confirmed' by a court (starting at a low level court and working their way up via appeal if they lose).

maybe instead of nominating judges/parliamentarians, the chair only approves them. this keeps their role more negative.

maybe the number of appeals levels is set to be the same as the number of delegate pyramid levels, because we already have math there that strikes a balances between minimizing levels, and not having too much funnelling.

in a civil case either side may appeal, in a criminal case only the defendant may appeal. when the council is evaluating something for which there is only one 'party', that party may appeal.

if the verdict of guilty, the judge proposes a sentence and a majority of the jury must accept it.

(all) appeals courts decide by majority vote which cases to hear.

judges are supposed to only vote based on determinations of law, not determinations of fact; that is, they should vote in agreement with the non-judge-councilmember consensus, even if they personally disagree with it, unless they think it is wrong on a point of law.

perhaps every time you go up 2 appeals levels, you get 2 more judges added to the case. these judges vote and do not have to be in consensus with the non-judges for a decision; but the majority of the judges must be in consensus with the non-judges for the non-default decision to be made.

in trials, the default in innocent. for resolutions, the default is to allow them. for flags of abusive posts, the default is not to flag.

idea for a politicizied high court selection process:

another idea for a politicizied high court selection process: reweighted score voting by the electors and delegates where all judges are candidates. that satisfies proportionality, too. but perhaps it is not as centralizing?

judges start at the bottom and get into appeals courts by seniority? or randomly assigned to appeals cases? or randomly assigned but with a seniority weight?

judges removed by court. supreme court judges are by seniority? but then chairs don't fill in. mb by seniority but with consent of chair, unless no other candidates left

or maybe the chair can flag judges to be removed by a court! only if they are overturned on appeal or are on a highest court

naw, too much power for the majoritarian chairs. how about: the high court is a council of judges, eg each faction gets a judge somehow. how would that work?

consider politicizing the high court; instead of a term, each judge is nominated (out of the current, confirmed judges) by a delegate, and the court as a whole is accepted by an Act. court can be replaced at any time

instead of deanonimizing candidates, just have a jury check for real participation On Feb 22, 2013 6:10 PM, "Bayle Shanks" <bayle.shanks@gmail.com> wrote: