Delegate/Senate Debate Process Guidance
Jul 22, 2020 1:46:46 GMT -5
Paffnia, The Tasmanian Islands, and 3 more like this
Post by Markanite on Jul 22, 2020 1:46:46 GMT -5
The below guidance serves to help New Republica South Senators run the Debate Process. Thanks to HumanSanity for the guide.
Pursuant to NS 300-4, the New Republica South Senator is responsible for conducting Delegate and Senate debates.
Since I am only the second New Republica South Senator to take on this responsibility, I wanted to document the process that I have used and preserve it as a Council record.
First, on the day of the beginning of declarations, I opened a forum Private Message thread with all of the candidates outlining the format I intend to use for the debate.
The primary format selected was to create a forum thread for debate discussion questions. Candidates were encouraged to interact with one another in the thread. Originally, questions were intended to be posted daily. However, activity levels were insufficient to sustain this, so I would recommend 3-5 periodically posted questions over the course of a week instead for the future. The debate was set to begin with 2 days left in the one week declaration period to ensure that most candidates will have already declared while also giving voters plenty of time to review information.
For the Delegate election, I offered to host a live Discord debate with consent of the candidates. A text debate rather than a voice chat debate would have been used so that the debate can be recorded and viewed by those who did not attend the live debate. However, since the Delegate election was not contested until the last moment, this did not come to fruition.
Second, after a few days of declarations I began a PM thread with me and a senior member of every political party with a candidate running in any Senate or Delegate race. In that thread, I distributed the questions I intended to ask and solicited advice on how to improve them and how to ensure they were politically balanced. Political party representatives were asked not to share questions with their party's candidates. Some of the questions were designated as for all candidates and other questions were designated as being for only certain seats. No questions were designated as only for a specific candidate.
Third, with 2 days left in declarations, I began the debate thread. Ideally, I would have posted one questions per day however activity levels did not sustain this. Accordingly, I cut back to one question every other day and prioritized the most important questions.
HumanSanity
Senior Senator for New Republica South - 10000 Islands
Pursuant to NS 300-4, the New Republica South Senator is responsible for conducting Delegate and Senate debates.
Since I am only the second New Republica South Senator to take on this responsibility, I wanted to document the process that I have used and preserve it as a Council record.
First, on the day of the beginning of declarations, I opened a forum Private Message thread with all of the candidates outlining the format I intend to use for the debate.
The primary format selected was to create a forum thread for debate discussion questions. Candidates were encouraged to interact with one another in the thread. Originally, questions were intended to be posted daily. However, activity levels were insufficient to sustain this, so I would recommend 3-5 periodically posted questions over the course of a week instead for the future. The debate was set to begin with 2 days left in the one week declaration period to ensure that most candidates will have already declared while also giving voters plenty of time to review information.
For the Delegate election, I offered to host a live Discord debate with consent of the candidates. A text debate rather than a voice chat debate would have been used so that the debate can be recorded and viewed by those who did not attend the live debate. However, since the Delegate election was not contested until the last moment, this did not come to fruition.
Second, after a few days of declarations I began a PM thread with me and a senior member of every political party with a candidate running in any Senate or Delegate race. In that thread, I distributed the questions I intended to ask and solicited advice on how to improve them and how to ensure they were politically balanced. Political party representatives were asked not to share questions with their party's candidates. Some of the questions were designated as for all candidates and other questions were designated as being for only certain seats. No questions were designated as only for a specific candidate.
Third, with 2 days left in declarations, I began the debate thread. Ideally, I would have posted one questions per day however activity levels did not sustain this. Accordingly, I cut back to one question every other day and prioritized the most important questions.
HumanSanity
Senior Senator for New Republica South - 10000 Islands