Blog of Admin
Jul 23, 2010 - 11:27
On Titulia v. OwenMerry (10GC00013) and Moderation in General
On June 21, the General Court ruled Owen Merry to pay a fine of T$3.000 for the violation of the Terms & Conditions by excessive profanity. Since the fine was not paid, the Court ordered to convert the fine into a 9 days ban from the website of the Republic.
Owen Merry appealed to the Administrator of the website, claiming he was not given enough time to present his defense. The Administrator allowed him to present his defense, however, he failed to do so in a reasonable time frame.
Therefore:
The decision of the Court is upheld and Owen Merry is banned from this website for 9 days for the violation of the Terms & Conditions, effective immediately.
Comments:
This event highlights the need for better moderation of this site. As the number of users hopefully grow in the future, a complicated court procedure in case of every violation is just not feasible. We admit Admin's negligence in this matter in not moderating the comments in question at the time - we simply were not aware of it.
We would like to remind citizens that we have technically implemented the possibility for the President to appoint a moderator a long time ago, but the people of Titulia chose not to use this feature. Now We will implement a "report abuse" function that citizens can use to notify site administrators who can then act on them appropriately.
Comments: 5
Jul 14, 2010 - 09:59
New Site Infrastructure
The official website of Titulia will be moved to a new architecture. This is a gradual process that will start immediately after the end of the currently ongoing presidential elections and will take a few months to complete. Features will be moved one by one. Apart from improving the appearance and usability of the website, this will also enable us to achieve faster turnaround times for changes. While it is understood that the coexistence of the two architectures will cause some confusion, we decided not to do a one time "bing bang" approach for timing and risk mitgation reasons.
During this process, some new features and changes will be added directly to the new website. Also, some features that citizens deemed useless will be discontinued.
The following features will be moved first to the new website:
- Registration / Log in / Log out - Users register, log in and out in the new site.
- Presidential Elections - From then on, presidential elections take place in the new site. This new election procedure also implements a change request to allow anyone run for president with ten nomination votes, regardless of party presidential status. This basically eliminates the significance of party president status in terms of presidential elections - all citizens who wish to run for president are treated equal. Please also note that the built-in safeguards that try to prevent multiple accounts from voting are now designed to be stricter. More details on this election process will be published in a subsequent post.
- The next major set of features to be moved and changed will be the parties. This will enable citizens to form more kinds of communities with elected leaders, based on whatever criteria citizens wish, e.g. geographical location, interests, etc.
The timing and potential changes of all other features will be published later.
Comments: 9
Jun 25, 2010 - 11:11
The Resignation of the President
The President of Titulia sumbitted his resignation today. We have contacted vice president Reformer to ask for his confirmation that he is willing to serve as president for the remainder of this presidential term. Upon receipt of his positive answer, we will remove the current president and appoint Reformer as the President of the Republic.
Admin
UPDATE:
Reformer is now officially the President of Titulia.
Comments: 3
Apr 22, 2010 - 00:54
Important Change to the Terms & Conditions
The following change will be implemented to the Terms & Conditions:
By using this service, you agree that the IP address of the computer you use is not confidential information.
The Operator of this website maintains the right to regularly publish full lists of citizens that connected to this website from identical IP addresses in any given period of time or control your access to any of the features of this website based on this information.
The purpose of this policy is to increase users' confidence in the election processes.
If you do not accept this policy, cancel your registration immediately and never log in again. Your continued use of this website is considered as acceptance of this policy.
Comments: 6
Mar 30, 2010 - 19:34
New Official - Moderator
Although there was little need for it in the past in Titulia, sooner or later all websites need a moderator.
A new official function, the Moderator was created today.
The Moderator can be appointed by the President. The Moderator is able to delete any posts in the forums and under propositions / polls. Instead of the deleted post, citizens will see the statement "Deleted by Moderator XY".
It is up to the people of Titulia to define the rules the Moderator needs to follow, or if there is a need for a Moderator at all.
Of course, the Administrator reserves the right to delete posts themselves that are deemed to violate the Terms & Consitions.
Comments: 12
Mar 29, 2010 - 12:33
Some Clarification on the Monetary System and the Possibility of Fraud
This is to summarize some important points about the Titulian monetary system and the possibility of fraud. None of these should be new or surprising to anyone who has carefully read the Bank of Titulia home page.
1. When you bought tollars from the Bank of Titulia, your "real money" was immediately spent on the technical maintenance of this website. You cannot ask for a refund.
2. The Bank of Titulia, apart from registering your ownership of the tollars you have, do not provide you, or promises to provide you in the future anything for your tollars whatsoever. In this sense, the Bank of Titulia is like any real world currency issuing authority - e.g the Federal Reserve Board or the European Central Bank do not promise you to provide anything in exchange of your dollars or euros whatsoever. Similarly to these institutions, the Bank of Titulia is not in the business of exchanging tollars to other currencies.
3. However, the Bank of Titulia provides an important additional service - they always safeguard all cash, and keep track of who owns how much. This results in a very important feature: tollars can not be stolen. It is physically impossible. The only way you can get rid of your tollars is when you decide to give them away to someone else.
4. Although the Bank of Titulia do not exchange tollars into other (e.g. real world) currencies, nothing prevents anyone from doing that. If you or your company for this purpose decides so, you can offer any other currency for tollars at any market rate you wish.
Also, if you have tollars, you can offer those for sale for any other currency, at any rate you wish, even at a rate lower than the Bank of Titulia selling rate.
Of course, the "other currency" leg of this transaction would be completed physically outside of Titulia, therefore the operator of the Titulia website would have absolutely no control over that, and will take no responsibility of any kind.
5. Fraud, of course, is possible even within these rules. One example of fraud might be that you decide to pay tollars for some product or service, and the seller fails to provide you with the products or services you bought. Or, you provide a service and the buyer fails to pay. As far as we know, there is no current legislation on such matters and there are not yet procedures in place to enforce compensation. The Administrator of Titulia is ready to accept such legislation and work with the Court once such legislation is in place in a way consistent with the constitution and the TC.
It is important to note, however, just like in real world, this is mostly based on trust you achieve by a track record in business. When you order from a reputable internet seller, you can usually be sure that they will deliver.
5. Investing in a company is a totally different issue. Investment in a company, just like in real world, is a risky undertaking, which you only do when you believe in the success of a company and trust the management of that company. There is no guarantee, however, that you will ever get a return on your investment.
6. As to the issue of company owners emigrating: Based on an earlier request, the Administrator of Titulia follows the policy of distributing the shares of emigrated citizens between the remaining owners proportionally to their ownership, on specific request of the remaining owners. The remaining owners can then elect a manager who will be in control of the company funds.
Should any of this be unclear or if further questions arise, we will be ready to respond under this blog post.
Comments: 4
Feb 27, 2010 - 11:02
What we are working on
This is to let citizens know what the Administrators of the Titulia website are working on these days, and what our plans are for the medium term.
There have been lots of requests recently that had to do with various features requiring new kinds of organizations (i.e. a Senate) or subdivisions of Titulia. The nature of these requests is that they usually require a lot of programming work.
Our objective is to create an environment where citizens or their elected leaders can create such features themselves without the involvement of the Administrator. More specifically, for example, we have decided not to create a Senate ourselves. Instead, we are creating an environment in which the citizens can create a Senate or any other similar feature of their liking, and define the rules of those themselves.
The first requirement is to enable citizens to set up more sophisticated websites for entities. Many citizens already decided to work around the current limitations of this website by creating external websites for entities and companies, using external free services such as weebly.com. These websites have a serious limitation: there is currently no way to integrate them with the Titulia website, i.e. letting Titulian citizens log in with their existing account, become members, define roles, etc.
Therefore we will start by installing a website management system that enables any citizen to set up a more sophisticated website for their companies or entities. There are many suitable software products for this purpose, and when selecting one, we have to make an important trade-off: that of between flexibility and that of ease of use by non-technical users.
We could install a system that would enable citizens to do virtually anything, but these systems are very difficult to use by ordinary (i.e. not IT educated) people. On the other hand, we could install a system that is very easy to use, but the possibilities are more limited.
On this scale, we aim to be somewhere in between, but closer to the second. We are currently testing Wordpress, and developing an integration with the Titulia website. This would enable anyone to set up a site, and make any existing citizen a "member" of that site, granting them various levels of access rights. These sites then will have their own possibilities to create votes, polls, discussions, etc., limited to members if the owner of the site choses so.
E.g., this will enable the government to set up an entity called "Senate" and create its website. Then, the government may define the election rules for the Senate, and use the existing custom votes feature to have senators elected. Some government appointed election officer can then make the elected senators members of the Senate website, where they can start to function.
We are hoping that this system will make the Republic of Titulia much less dependent on the Administrator, which is one of our major objectives.
Once this system is in place, our next objective will be to to something with Titulia City to make it more "functional" and interesting, with the objective of involving it more in the daily life of the Republic. This effort is in the brainstorming phase today, and we would appreciate any ideas.
Comments: 14
Jan 16, 2010 - 13:11
Facebook Integration
Shortly, we will make the first step of integrating the Titulia website with facebook.
1. The Republic of Titulia will show up as a facebook application.
2. The website will remain largely unaffected by this change, citizens will be able to log in to Titulia the way they always did, if they do not wish to make use of the facebook integration feature.
3. Existing citizens, if they wish, can link their Titulia citizen ID to their facebook account. This will open up a lot of possibilities for interesting facebook features to be implemented later, with the intention of attracting as many facebook users to Titulia as possible. If your facebook name is different from your Titulian citizen name, your Titulian name will remain unchanged (your facebook name will not show up on this site).
4. Facebook users interested in Titulia will be able to immigrate by a simple press of a button, showing up in Titulia with their facebook user name.
This feature will be experimental for the fist few weeks and we will create further integration features based on our experience. All these new features will always remain optional to you. Please let us know if you have any questions or experience any technical difficulties using this feature.
Comments: 7
Jan 15, 2010 - 10:49
Current Presidential Elections - Potential Software Bug
We are currently investigating the circumstances of the initiation of the current presidential elections. If we find that these elections were initiated unconstitutionally (probably made possible by a software error), the elections will be cancelled.
We are sorry for the inconvenience. The option of initiating an election should not be available for those who are not presidents of founded parties.
Comments: 6
Dec 28, 2009 - 18:42
Response to Change Request 23/2009 - Censure the Admin
Change Request 23/2009
Submission Date: Dec 22, 2009
Submitted by: President Hock
Change Request:
Censure the ADMIN
As a free member of this Republic I am calling for the censure of the Admin. The Admin has once again overstepped his bounds by dictating law to the Citizens of this Republic instead of abiding by the process set up by him and the hard working citizens of this Republic. Due process must be respected and not thrown into the garbage at every whim of the Admin.
Censure the Admin for his lack of respect and understanding for the due process of law and make this prop substantive.
Administrator's Response: Duly noted.
Comments: 0