Subject: Nomic: Call for Judgement CFJ001

From: "Windrant" <windrant@n...>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 18:09:22 -0500

February 13th, 2001.

A Call for Judgement has been made. According to rule 214, "If judgement
was invoked by a Voter, then the first Judge to be selected to judge that
statement shall be the Speaker." I will have one week to rule on the case.
The legal judgements are true, false, or undecided. "The judgement may be
accompanied by reasons and arguments, but such reasons and arguments form no
part of the judgement itself. If a judgement is accompanied by reasons and
arguments, the Speaker must distribute the reasons and arguments along with
the judgement. " See rules 213-217 for details.

Assigned Case ID: CFJ001
Plaintiff: Jen
Judge: Chuck
Verdict Due Date: February 20th, 2001.

Text of Call for Judgement:

I strongly believe that there should be a hiatus in submitting and voting on
proposals until there is a greater level of clarity provided regarding Rule
332 "Support your local lobbyist." I feel that without further clarity there
will be a wide variation in how proposals are submitted, and that players
may get their proposals rejected due to misunderstanding of the ruleset.

First and foremost, the rule does not CLEARLY state how proposals and
letters of support from other players are to be submitted to the Speaker.

Rule 332 states that 2 letters of support must ACCOMPANY a proposal sent to
a speaker. However, further along in the rule it is stated that "These
letters of support must be submitted to the speaker in the same manner as a
proposal would be."

It becomes unclear whether a player is to send a COMPLETE package containing
the proposal itself and the 2 letters DIRECTLY to the speaker. This would
require the player submitting the proposal to either pass their proposal
around and have people attach their supportive comments (in which case after
two series of supportive comments the proposal would be forwarded to the
author who would then forward it on to the Speaker), or devise another
method of ensuring that the Speaker received both letters and proposal
together.

If the letters of support are to be sent to the Speaker DIRECTLY FROM THE
LOBBYIST the author of the proposal has no way of knowing if they have
achieved the support of two other players, nor are they able to view the
comments made by other players to improve their proposal before submission.
It is not stated in Rule 332 whether the author retains the right to read
the comments made by other players targeted to lobby a proposal. It is
feasible that the Speaker could receive a negative letter from a targeted
lobbyist.

Lastly, it also is not stated in Rule 332 whether the Speaker is allowed to
be a lobbyist. The Speaker has no voting rights, yet is not omitted from
commenting and agreeing with a proposal. Can we target the Speaker for
lobbying?

It is my interpretation that presently we should forward our new proposals
to other players in an effort to gain support. To do this we should send
our proposal via email to other players and have the other players make
their comments directly in the same email containing the proposal. The
header of the email must be maintained as it is passed to each player to
ensure to the speaker that the comments were made from lobbyists and not
merely by the author. After lobbyists have approved the proposal and made
any comments they will return the email to the original author who in turn
will have the opportunity to read the comments and apply any suggestions to
the proposal. The author in turn will forward the completed proposal to the
Speaker, once again with the headers retained. Since it is not stated in
Rule 332 it is interpreted that the Speaker can serve as a lobbyist. It is
also interpreted that we as authors retain our right to view all comments
and criticism regarding proposals.