Jita Park Speakers Corner

I generally like the Goon candidates ... but telling 6000 people to vote for X does not confer any leadership qualities upon X.

Test, this year, could tell their 11000 members to all vote DurrDurrDurr, does that somehow mean DDD will be a good leader?

Having The Chair as the highest vote, makes it little more than an ego trip.

Being on the CSM should be ego trip enough for the members, The chairperson should be the best person in a leadership and communication not the person who is looking for the biggest swollen head.

Personally I don't see infighting, some deals might be made but honestly anyone who starts infighting over the CSM chair, do we really need that kind of egomaniac as chairperson?

What I am saying is that I would prefer the decision be made by 14 representatives of the people so that the chairperson selected is the most qualified for the job, not the person able to obtain or scam the most votes. We elected them with the trust to do the right thing. Allowing them the ability to take the time to chose the right person to speak for the CSM and take the leadership is the right thing.

With luck as it becomes a more normalized thing the CSM will spend more time debating this decision, rather than as it was there forced on them. A council working in harmony will attain more than a council run by a huge ego that is not suited for the position.

Can't really compare CSM 7, as their vote on the chair was unexpected. A CSM where the vote for chair by the council is known well in advance is an entirely different kettle of fish, especially if *ahem* differently-aligned members win seats.

You keep calling the Chair position a job, but even you've admitted there's more to it than that. Picking the secretary etc, you're right, those are simply jobs and are best decided by the council. The Chair position isn't as simple, and shouldn't be treated as if it is.

Granted, I don't think that "top votes=chair" is some wonderful or optimal way to do it, but it's far better than letting the CSM vote on it (or god forbid having CCP choose).



Now this is interesting. Obviously, the top vote-getter should be well within their rights to relinquish the spot, though where it goes from there is a very good question. Personally, I think the top vote-getter should be able to choose the new Chair if they want, or put it to a vote if they have no preferred candidate. I know I just argued against a vote, but I think in this case it'd be similar to the current CSM's vote, in that the lack of advance notice prevented things from getting too dumb.

I very much do not consider the chair something simple which is why I feel it should be more than an ego trip for who ever manages to get the most votes.

The chair should be something given for ability, not just the ability to get votes. Especially as scamming votes will still be an acceptable way of getting them and if the new interface allows easier voting it will allow easier scamming as well.

It is my belief that the CSM will have a better idea of who is better as spokesman and leader than the voters as the voters are going on charisma and lets face it in some cases spoon fed drool.

Take mittens for example if he was say the seventh down and there was no one better qualified (I add this as these people possibly do exist in a base of a few hundred thousand people) he should have been chairman with or without the backing of votes. He had leadership skills and the ability to speak to large masses and did not just run away and hide.

So the talent should get the position not the votes.

Yeah, Mittens was an obvious choice. What happens for councils where there is no Mittens? What happens when say, there's 2 members who are both good at it and both really want it? OR, to use your example, what happens if Mittens came in 7th but the council chose someone inferior but perhaps more popular internally than him?

Why would the CSM have a better idea who's good at what? Remember, they'd be voting on a chair nearly right away, well before anyone's attributes could really start to shine (or well before their less-desirable attributes become apparent). They're in no better position to choose than anyone else.

The candidates are those that say they will accept the post if elected.

The election in CSM7 was much closer than it appears. For me it was a 51/49 situation.


Please explain how any of these situations is worse than arbitrarily assigning chairman to the top vote getter.

My experience over 3 CSMs has been that the politics ends when the voting ends. Pretty much everyone understands that the point of the CSM is to do as good a job as possible in influencing CCP, and makes their decisions accordingly.

In the unlikely event that the 14 people the community has just elected to represent them descend into squabbling and butthurt over a bit of ego-massage, then they're off to a pretty ****-poor start, and better everyone should know it.

I suppose Two Step's threadnaught is an excellent example of CSM cooperation. Or when most of the CSM quickly distanced themselves from your voting reform thread. Yeah. You're right. The politics do stop when the voting ends.

1) I think making the top voter getter into the chairman is a right of the voters and the CSM should not have the power to overwrite this under normal circumstances. Trying to argument that they only got there due to block voting does not rule out this right.

2) Assigning chairman to the top vote getter is the least controversial way of handling this, especially in an environment where not all the communication can be disclosed. Allowing the chairman to be elected internally means dooming all future CSMs to deal with the commotion of "how the chairman was selected this time around" and all the tinfoilhattery that will invariably arise.

You were one of the first to say that the chairman has no special powers because, summits apart, all representatives are given the same accessibility to the devs. That means any amount of time dealing with a community backslash over this, no matter how small, is wasted, detracting from more important discussions.

3) We have no evidence that the representatives are able to choose a better chairman than the voters do. As was said before, the decision must be made before there is enough time to build an informed decision on the other members' capabilities and a lot of it is based on subjective factors anyway.

You have yet to explain how having the CSM choose instead of the players changes any of that.