Recently, the Etherwind (KW-688c) government tried to poll the Etherwind population on the topic of taxes for regional development. Without going into that specific discussion, I think we can all agree that there are situations where input from the planets population can be useful for policy making.
The Etherwind poll was carried out in local chat, which not only went unnoticed by the majority of players (around 10 votes on a planet with 400 bases) but quickly got drowned in discussions and comparisons with other planets.
I am proposing a new “Poll” feature, where a government votes to start an in-game poll with a defined question and answers, and all players with a base on the planet receive a notification and a timeframe (e.g. 48 hours) to vote on the poll. Voting could be anonymous or public. A further “Reason” field could also be useful. The aggregated vote results should be publicly visible after the poll ends, to hold the government accountable.
I believe this system would bring several advantages:
- It creates an in-game record of the players’ opinions at a certain time, which does not disappear like chat logs after 6 months or enough messages
- It offers a distinct space to vote (the poll) and to discuss (the planet’s chat) that don’t conflict with each other
- It notifies the players on the planet to increase the polls visibility and to make it more representative of players’ opinions
- In the case of anonymous polls, which should be optional, it gives players a chance to give their opinion without fear of reprisals from others
The planets government could currently also outsource the poll to an external polling website. I believe an in-game polling feature to be superior because it (1) notifies players in-game and (2) improves the governing experience as a whole.