(13) To be eligible for membership in the Coral Guard, a person must:
Have maintained citizenship and a resident World Assembly nation in the South Pacific for at least six consecutive months prior to the date of their application to the Coral Guard;
Stems from a conversation on Discord. Since Coral Guard members are trusted to potentially be the temporary in-game delegate in the event of a sudden Delegate resignation, they should have to go through Delegate background checks. However, since they are entrusted with less than the CRS, the citizenship length requirement is dropped to three consecutive months.
I’ll contend that we should keep the six month requirement and apply that to citizenship, while we can move WA persistence to three months. While the CRS vets every application, we can avoid potential slop and bad faith applications by enforcing a two step rule that is largely similar to what we have in place.
Wait, why not just keep both at six months? This is a bare minimum requirement, not a maximum. Likely, all of our CG members are actually going to have been around for a lot longer.
The existing lack of a citizenship requirement comes from the CG not being a Charter-defined legal body and serving as a workaround where RMB active and (generally) loyal nations could hold more endos without off-site involvement, back when the concept of “a separate on-site and off-site community” was something we valued as a region. Obviously that general premise is pretty much dust at this point (and for good reason!).
Another thing I’d want us to consider is if maintaining your citizenship is a requirement of being on the CG. For other roles (e.g. CRS, CitComm obvi, PM/Cabinet, Justice, Chair, etc.) I think this is a pretty obvious thing, but I could see an argument for CG that it’s fine if someone’s citizenship lapses since their on-site endos are mostly what we care about. I also see the counter-point of “if you can’t be bothered to vote in elections, you shouldn’t get to stay a citizen and also shouldn’t get to continue to hold high government office because you’re clearly not that dedicated”.
I concur with HS; we should make it uniform 6 months.
My hope is that the CRS wouldn’t be accepting 6 month and 1 day applications as a normal course of events (and thus giving weight to longer tenures).
I also want to be sure that this amendment doesn’t auto remove anyone on the Coral Guard who is not currently a citizen who otherwise has a record of service. I think there might be 1 or 2, though I am not able to readily cross check citizen rosters with CG membership at the moment.
As far as auto removals, we can pass a resolution concurrently to grandfather them in.
My desire to keep WA membership at 3 months was to make it easier for potential active soldiers in the SPSF to transition to a WA lock and gather endorsements.
I could see that, but given that we are talking about influence in the other concurrent thread, it makes sense that we should have them wait the full six months to maximize influence too.
I’m inclined to agree with HS and Griff; both requirements should be six months. All of the current CG members have been around for a while, and future members almost certainly will have been as well. I see no reason to lower the barrier to entry when said barrier is already lower on paper than what it is in practice.
The SPSF transition argument for a three month WA requirement is understandable, but I would contend that we’re not talking about active soldiers if they’re staying-put for 3+ months, but rather those that are committing to a WA lock. In such instances where they’re making such a commitment, then, they may as well wait the full six months to, as Griff said, maximize influence.
…we’re not anywhere close to the debate period being over on this. By law, amendments to constitutional laws require at least 5 days of debate after being submitted.
In the spirit of both of these comments, I want us to consider the way the changes might interact with IX(15) as written. It says that continued membership in the Coral Guard is predicated on continuing to meet all membership requirements. I reiterate my above point that I’m not convinced citizenship should be a requirement of remaining a Coral Guard member, only that it needs to be a requirement of becoming a Coral Guard member. We would need to also include an amendment to this clause accordingly.