Council of Intergalactic Representatives

[koksvik]

koksvik you seem to be forgetting something important.
We have a chat. There are discussions there as well.
Numbers mean nothing, they are just a vague guide for those who do not know. Post count (so long as it is above the minimum), threads started, content uploaded (which I believe to be not important in the slightest) and even age are the tools of fools.

The more you do of something, the better you get? Not always true, because you don't know about what they did before. You make it sounds like Star and Thad would be excellent candidates, because they have many posts and simply must know what's going on. Someone with 50 posts may have a background in dozens of forums with political or moderator-al powers, and someone with 1000s of posts might just be a spammer.

But yeah, vote for whoever you want, but don't try to apply your logic to everyone else. Well known is not the same as well respected, nor does it mean they represent popular opinion.

"but don't try to apply your logic to everyone else ?"

isnt that what you're doing right now ? -.-

and yes practical makes master !

and every community is different, so even if there is someone who has 100 million post on another totally different community that would not imply he would be any good in starmade community, every community is difference

 

[Calbiri]

Points taken, can we stop derailing over misunderstanding and arguements, those can be handled outside of this thread.

Thanks!

 

[Incendiario]

Hi everyone... I think that it is a very good idea to form a "council" of players that will make sort that all of our opinions will reach the dev's...

As i read this thread, i could see diferent players opinions, and like some of them i also think that it is not the quantity the most important, but the quality... There is one way to see what anyone as been posting, and like that we can judge for his/her qualities/interest for StarMade.
Click on his/her profile name, then choose: Profile Page in the little window that opens.
Like that you'll have access to his/her Profile Posts, Recent Activity, Postings, Information, and in some cases Awarded Medals...

Keep it up.

 

[Blakpik]

and i think you need a pair of new glass, because you obviously can't read, i said
" with a valid enough reason and ideas you could "
do you even know what a council ?
what you think this is some kind of popularity contest ? no buddy this is a council, anybody can get in if they have good enough ideas and can manage to work as a link between the community and the devs, which i can tell you ain't easy, as a matter of fact its takes both time and reasoning !

the reason why i said that he had no content and few msg/rating, is because of course the longer you been on this forum the more you know of it and the more you know of how the community works and what is likes, WHICH IS THE MOST IMPORTANT !!!!!!!!

YOU need an attitude change ! i was simply trying to help the guy, stop being a bigot about it !
[DOUBLEPOST=1425130441,1425129795][/DOUBLEPOST]

shouldn't you say the longer you been here and the more active you been the more you know what the community wants and
"what people agree or disagree with" hmm ?
and the reason why i said content and rating/msg is because obvious the people who the community knows and like has a LOOOT higher chance of winning then somebody who nobody really knows who is, the council must be someone we can trust and know will work as a link between us and the devs.

that is the way a council works !
[DOUBLEPOST=1425131448][/DOUBLEPOST]


well the more you do of something the better you become at it ! someone who has been a lot more active and a bigger part of the community has of course a lot higher chance of winning, because people know them and like them and know they can trust them ! that is why i said that he could of course be a council member but it would be hard work because there is other people here who has been a lot more active part of the community and who people knows.

You are digging yourself into a bigger hole, pull out while you still can.

 

[koksvik]

You are digging yourself into a bigger hole, pull out while you still can.

lol even after the admin said to stop you continue ? you got balls man.....

take it somewhere else !

Points taken, can we stop derailing over misunderstanding and arguements, those can be handled outside of this thread.

 

[hzzzln]

What are the current plans for communication between the council and the Schine Team? Will there be weekly meetings? If yes, will they have logs? Are they open to the public? While I know that there are sensitive topics that can not be published, I hope that there are at least monthly meetings that have the most of their logs published to to community.

How will the council communicate with the community? As I understood it, they will get their own subforum. Will the council members be moderators in this subforum? How will the work of the council members look like exactly? Are they free to do what they think is best for the job or are there already concrete plans on what the members will have to do?

I think you guys already do a great job of communicating with the players. While I do see great potential in this idea, I think there are many questions left to answer and forum drama will almost certainly happen. Please proceed with caution.

 

[Blakpik]

lol even after the admin said to stop you continue ? you got balls man.....

take it somewhere else !

Actually, I had started writing that before he posted that and didn't realise, but good idea.
I've prepared an argument thread for precisely this.
http://starmadedock.net/threads/the-argument-thread.6111/

 

[whooplaah]

Sorry, this post is long. I wanted to address all the questions posed by the OP.

Some questions:

• What should the application questions be? (Applications will be made public)
• How many councillors should there be?
• What other functions (if any) should councillors perform?
• Requirements for applying?

1. Apllication questions:

Spoiler

This depends on what sort of commitment the Schine team expects from the Council. Do you want hard-core data-miners representing public opinion, or do you want to capture a representative demographic make-up, or do you want highly qualified and creative types? Personally, it sounds like the team wants data-miners and people who can summarize ideas and patterns, so I suggest:

Age - Helps determine maturity and overall commitment to a project. Having a variety of ages on the council helps to offer more angles on input and development. Voters of a particular age bracket are more likely to agree with someone of their own age bracket than someone older/younger, but older individuals may be more reliable than teens and tweens.

Time Commitment - Helps determine how much time that member will be available for this project. Who would be more effective for the council, someone pledging 1 hour a week or 4 hours a week? This will also help the council determine a best practice to sync schedules on communing mining and events.

Game Theory/Priorities - Helps determine which ideas the candidate is biased towards (cause we all are in some way). This helps voting members find representatives and not just some forum name. It also gives the team an idea of how the council members might be focusing when they gather community posts/input. (James keeps saying that the community wants more weapons but no other council members are. That may just be from his game theory.)

Profile - This area is just a personal summary of the individual, their qualifications, and why they think they should be voted for. This will help voters see the elloquence of an individual - we don't want to vote for someone who is just going to troll the Devs on our behalf. This also helps make them a relatable person rather than just some name.

Desired Role in Council - If the council is organized into roles as suggested below then council members should run for a specific seat (Newsletter/Blogger or Live Event Host) rather than a generic position that results in them being assigned tasks for which they are ill suited.

2. Council Size:

Spoiler

Anything less than three would be more Ambassador than Council.
This should take into consideration the size of the active forum-using population or, if Devs allow the Council some freedom of marketing, the number of active players. This will help to maximize the utility of councilmembers so that no one is doing nothing, no one is repeating the work of another member, and no one is overly taxed. I don't know how large the community is, so I can't say more than this.

3. Council Functions:

Spoiler

Well, we want them to summarize community opinions. That's a great idea, it bottle necks the information in a way digital forums just can't do. But once again we have to ask how much freedom the Council gets. We also have to consider how formalized this association is to be.

Live Council Meetings: join a chat room and speak directly with the council members. Engage in a real time dialogue (VOIP or text) and get feed back, clarify opinions, and offer suggestions that might be too lengthy to type up yourself.

Update Council Blog/Newsletter/News: for those members unable (unwilling) to attend live events/meetings, offer a public record of meetings, topics, and decissions to keep the community up to date on the Council's activities. Announce when the next open forum will be, or when themed forums will be. This is one way to keep the community aware of the new channel for input (especially if this can be RSSed or emailed).

Design/Maintain Outreach Projects: not all players are active on the forums. How can we reach more steam users? How do we connect players with the community? Whatever the methods, they will need some maintenance now and again.

Assigned roles: This sort of depends on the size of the council, but assigning tasks to each member will help them coordinate their efforts and roles making them more effective as a unit.
Council coordinator (keeps the council members in contact with one another and with the Dev team)
Community Coordinator (announces events and meeting decisions and forum time/location, handles newsletter, determines events/contests to encourage engagement [art contest, story ideas])
Scribe (tallies votes and opinions on topics, statstical duties, survey design)
Docketteer (facilitates live forums/debates/discussions, designates topic, handles disagreements/aruguements during the event)
Support (assigned to another council member, assists as needed)

4. Applicant Requirements:

Spoiler

This is tricky sense most of the data about the candidate will be supplied solely by the candidate. If we put in an age minimum or skill requirement then candidates can lie and no one is the wiser. Are we going to devise a test of some sort? Requirements need to be things that can be tracked/validated, otherwise there is no point.

(a) I'd say that proficiency in communication is a big deal. If members of the CoIR will be talking back and forth with the community and Devs we want them to be eloquent, not trolls. We want them to be clear, not stumbling around with a limited vocabulary. We want them to communicate in all the languages that Starmade is available in (if it gets translated in the future) and be able to communicate/represent the languages of the players (if it goes international).

(b1) Participation in the forums (posts/week over the last few months). This helps show how active they are in the permanent community.
(b2) Participation rate in events/contests/forums hosted by the previous Council. This shows how engaged they are with the polity and how much time they are willing to invest in special events/focus groups. It won't help the first council, but will with the successive elections.

(c) Gameplay Hours. I'm not sure if that is a statistic that Schine can get from Steam, but logging a minimum number of hours within a month of the election shows how up-to-date they are with the current game mechanics, how invested they are in Starmade, and how fresh their ideas will be.

 

[CyberTao]

(c) Gameplay Hours. I'm not sure if that is a statistic that Schine can get from Steam, but logging a minimum number of hours within a month of the election shows how up-to-date they are with the current game mechanics, how invested they are in Starmade, and how fresh their ideas will be.

I like most of it, but this part in particular is beyond possible. Starmade existed for quite a while before steam, I was already over a year old member before it got there, and I'm still a youngin compared to some, like fire (a Mod who fits into the 'younger' bracket). That's ignoring tha fact that some people don't use steam, I share my library, so being able to play a game not on steam allows more time for other people to play my games (Plus steam version is 1.2 times as buggy). Not to mention you don't even have to uplink to play in the first place!

You can generally tell who is active on forums or chat, because you can just ask if anyone knows someone, same with servers, but is harder. One way to look at it is the more active a person is, the more people will know him/her, and the more likely they are to vote for said person. The rest boils down to those who don't know many people voting based on the applications (It's honestly probably going to be a lot of reading, so I'm curious to know how many of these there will even be).


I also don't get the whole age thing, yes it is a some minimal measure of maturity, but we've had a few server admins, owners, factions leaders and mods who would just be starting highschool really.

Would also prefer to see text be the main form of messaging, because not everyone is able to use VoIP, and I find that text can actually be a better medium in some cases, as you can't be interrupted midway through explaining. On the flip side, VoIP is faster, so clearing up misunderstandings and progressing is much easier, so I can see why people would want that.

 

[Bench]

What are the current plans for communication between the council and the Schine Team? Will there be weekly meetings? If yes, will they have logs? Are they open to the public? While I know that there are sensitive topics that can not be published, I hope that there are at least monthly meetings that have the most of their logs published to to community.

At the moment we're thinking a public and private council forum. It's unlikely that the council will be in a VOIP meeting with the whole Schine team due to geography so the primary means is most likely going to be the council forums. As such logs are posts anyway. We haven't discussed additional methods of meeting but we're open to suggestions. As devs we will communicate with the council privately, and then they will be responsible to disseminate any information worth sharing to the rest of the public through their own means, such as the public council forum, as well as responding in any other forum threads or on servers.

How will the council communicate with the community? As I understood it, they will get their own subforum. Will the council members be moderators in this subforum? How will the work of the council members look like exactly? Are they free to do what they think is best for the job or are there already concrete plans on what the members will have to do?

Again I think it will be open to how the council finds it best to operate. If they decide they want to give people roles within the council then that's fine, but we haven't made plans to say no this person must fulfill this role on the council.

We're still finding our feet with this idea. But for me personally the key thing is to be able to discuss ideas and what we're doing with the council, and if there's any alarm bells from a community perspective they can then be addressed. I'd like to see the council bringing together the key ideas and issues of the community to present to us for then us to discuss, and for us to give them information they can then share to the StarMade communities they're involved with.

 

[Crimson-Artist]

At the moment we're thinking a public and private council forum. It's unlikely that the council will be in a VOIP meeting with the whole Schine team due to geography so the primary means is most likely going to be the council forums. As such logs are posts anyway. We haven't discussed additional methods of meeting but we're open to suggestions. As devs we will communicate with the council privately, and then they will be responsible to disseminate any information worth sharing to the rest of the public through their own means, such as the public council forum, as well as responding in any other forum threads or on servers.

if a member of the council is a youtuber, would it be ok for them to make videos announcing/hyping new features?

 

[Bench]

if a member of the council is a youtuber, would it be ok for them to make videos announcing/hyping new features?

if the other council members agree and the developers agree that it can be shared publicly then I don't see why not.

 

[Crimson-Artist]

if the other council members agree and the developers agree that it can be shared publicly then I don't see why not.

Awesome! Maybe I might enter to see if I can bring a little more hype to updates

 

[tete30000]

That's an awesome idea ! :3

 

[NeonSturm]

At least 3 per position.
If 2 have different opinion, a 3rd must decide
Better 4-5 for the case somebody has an online-break.


Each utter deny should require at least 2 voices.
And 2 more for each disagreeing voice.


For new suggestions : please answer to 2..4 others in queue. (2..4 depends on length of queue)
After you got 3 responses, confirm that it was a good idea, based on feedback before it annoys more peoples because it is trollish or something repeated over and over again.
I think this would reduce spam and keep peoples motivated / not left alone without feedback.

 

[Ithirahad]

So... Uh, when will applications open up?

 

[Saxopi]

SOON. (TM)

 

[CyberTao]

I imagine there will be a new post when they finalize the council's workings, the application details would probably take a bit of time to iron out. Plus there is a medal involved, and those tend to take a little bit on top.

 

[DukeofRealms]

SOON. (TM)

Yep.