NationStates Jolt Archive

Obviously, only a minority of UN members have submitted proposals, and of them, only a tiny fraction have had their proposals reach quorum. I for one have never had a substantive proposal make it all the way (I'm not counting repeals, for the moment). So, partly for the benefit of those who want to write a proposal, but aren't sure where, and partly to entertain a bored Gruenberg who's sick of TGing, where do you get your ideas from? They can be the ideas you've seen become resolutions, or those which have never made it past (or even into) draft form. It might be interesting to see the range. Poll coming.

Obviously, only a minority of UN members have submitted proposals, and of them, only a tiny fraction have had their proposals reach quorum. I for one have never had a substantive proposal make it all the way (I'm not counting repeals, for the moment). So, partly for the benefit of those who want to write a proposal, but aren't sure where, and partly to entertain a bored Gruenberg who's sick of TGing, where do you get your ideas from? They can be the ideas you've seen become resolutions, or those which have never made it past (or even into) draft form. It might be interesting to see the range. Poll coming.

rights of Indigenous peoples was based on RL legislation. Most of my ideas come from odd places (such as my head), but I do use RL sometimes for further inspiration.

The Wolfish Convention on Prisoners of War - obviously - was a modified version of the Geneva Convention. I should note that such direct editing of RL material is now frowned upon.

The Rights of Neutral States was inspired by the debates that took place during the treaty negotiations at Westphalia...

Touching the Affair of Hesse Cassel, it has been agreed as follows: In the first place, The House of Hesse Cassel, and all its Princes, chiefly Madam Emelie Elizabeth Landgravine of Hesse, and her Son Monsieur William and his Heirs, his Ministers, Officers, Vassals, Subjects, Soldiers, and others who follow his Service in any manner soever, without any Exception, notwithstanding Contracts to the contrary, Processes, Proscriptions, Declarations, Sentences, Executions and Transactions; as also notwithstanding any Actions and Pretensions for Damages and Injuries as well from Neutrals, as from those who were in Arms, annull'd by the General Amnesty here before establish'd, and to take place from the beginning of the War in Bohemia, with a full Restitution (except the Vassals, and Hereditary Subjects of his Imperial Majesty, and the House of Austria, as is laid down in the Paragraph, Tandemomnes, &c.) shall partake of all the Advantages redounding from this Peace, with the same Rights other States enjoy, as is set forth in the Article which commences, Unanimi, &c.

Of course Westphalia didn't go so far as to determine rights and obligations of neutrals...nor did the League of Nations, who in the aftermath of WW1 did debate neutrality, which would be tested to its limits by Spain in WW2.

It has never proved workable in RL - which made it fun to pass in NS - the land of ideals.

Sorry - should have also added additional sources like these:
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0835327.html

But as for idea generators - the Hague Convention has many, many parts that haven't been addressed in NS-UN resolutions. That's a good place for nations to start. Just don't copy.

But as for idea generators - the Hague Convention has many, many parts that haven't been addressed in NS-UN resolutions. That's a good place for nations to start. Just don't copy.

Absolutely. When I said 'ideas for', I meant just that. Copying RL laws rarely works anyway, because they're usually much longer, and based around understood definitions. Not to mention the fact it's 'cheating'. So yes, I'm talking about inspiration, rather than literal textual bases.

I'm just a lackey for the voices in my head.

I was interested in Amnesty International a while back, when I played as Nargopia. I had a semi-decent draft of "Outlaws Political Imprisonment," but I never got it worked to the point of being proud enough to bring it to the floor. Nargopia died shortly after, and when I came back as The-Republic I noticed that a "Freedom of Conscience" resolution was passed, so now I need to pull something out of my arse if I ever feel the urge again. :p

Largely real life experiences, for me. Diplomatic Immunity was, as is the Passport thingy (which I'm hoping to resurrect, when I have the time!).

Open skies (which has never made quorum and aI may ressurect at some point) comes from RL EU legislation. Ish.

Largely real life experiences, for me. Diplomatic Immunity was, as is the Passport thingy (which I'm hoping to resurrect, when I have the time!).

Open skies (which has never made quorum and aI may ressurect at some point) comes from RL EU legislation. Ish.


Are you a diplomat in RL? nice

For right to divorce, as i have said, the idea come from RL Sweden and Finland legislation.

IVF is legal in many nations, same sex couple adoption is legal in several: spain, belgium, Nederland and i think also, but not sure, Canada, South Africa

But obviously most come from news.


Wordwide media act is different, it comes from a frustration several millions people in the world share together

I just peruse the list of past resolutions for shit to repeal. Next on the chopping block: Stop Dumping - Start Cleaning.

I just peruse the list of past resolutions for shit to repeal. Next on the chopping block: Stop Dumping - Start Cleaning.

Amen to that.

I second that emotion.

OOC:

I've only submitted one proposal, "Chemical Weapons Ban," which failed to make the queue. The reason was an odd one. When Powerhungry Chipmunks submitted his repeal of the old "Ban Chemical Weapons", I asked him if he planned to draft a replacement. When he said he didn't, I started work on mine. It was pretty much an effort at a pre-emptive strike. I wanted to see if I could get a decent replacement on the books before something got passed that was worse than the original. Figured, since I had some RL experience with chemical agents and munitions, I might be able to do that. Didn't work.

The only other draft I've done was on passport standardization. That one was started when I ran across the "lost" "Passport Harmonization" resolution. Gave up on that one when it didn't seem it had much chance of passing.

The-Republic']I was interested in Amnesty International a while back, when I played as Nargopia. I had a semi-decent draft of "Outlaws Political Imprisonment," but I never got it worked to the point of being proud enough to bring it to the floor. Nargopia died shortly after, and when I came back as The-Republic I noticed that a "Freedom of Conscience" resolution was passed, so now I need to pull something out of my arse if I ever feel the urge again. :p
Heh. I voted for my arse (now there's a slogan) as the idea that I might have a proposal in the offing came pretty much out of nowhere. FoC started off as an attempt to get the full Amnesty mandate on the books until I realise that much of it was already enshrined in NSUN law. What was left (death penalty aside) went into FoC.

I contemplated repealing UCPL when it came up in discussions recently, but fortunately Gru ran with it, saving me any effort. I have another idea for a proposal based on a recent RL news story but I'm not sure I can face another campaign.

...but I'm not sure I can face another campaign.

That is perhaps the biggest deterent to putting forward a serious proposal or repeal. Getting the resolution voted on is the easy part (present resolution excepted) - the initial drafting and the proposal stage require hours of work and serious planning to execute properly.

The idea for Civilian Rights Post War came to me while I was rereading Gone with the wind believe it or not. That got me thinking about the plight of civilians living under occupation after that, and other wars. Hence the resolution was born.

I know the wiki entry says that it is an extension on the POW resolution, but thats not true. My resolution was almost fully written before I remembered that the POW resolution existed.

This current disaster at vote was the result of people posting drafts here that included banishment as punishment.

The draft I'm proudest of, and wish I'd been able to submit is my Aged/Disabled Care Accreditation Program proposal. That was born from my real life work as an aged care nurse. I might resurrect the idea one day and try to make it suitable for submission.

i work in the hospital catering trade and seeing the vast amount of styrofoam items around the various kitchens in our hospital got me thinking.

that got me involved with Vihrea who submitted a proposal to ban styrofoam products. I helped redraft it but didn't want a co-authorship because i refined his ideas rather than do anything new.

We resubmitted this under my name but i made sure that Vihrea got the credit. despite the large amount of legwork we did and the many TG's sent we didn't make quorum. thats life i suppose.

i'll be contacting him again in the new year to have another stab this.

all of my proposals have failed at some point, but i'll try to think:
ISX/UNSX: just came up with it, as something different
Tourist Information Act: what was happening in bali and singapore, in reguards to fellow australians there
ban on tobacco: very old, got shouted down, but it was pretty much because it can have very serious side-effects...
cant remember what other ideas i came up with...
oh, found one more
Resposablilities of the Press: there were a lot of things there, media digging into private lives, giving only one side of the story.... failed miserably.

btw, those last two were under the former nation of Resistancia

Well the idea of the 'sexes' proposals came about from a discussion on something called 'The Rights of Women' or something like it. Komokom objected (as did I) to the way women were granted rights that men weren’t. I ripped him off but my half failed anyway, so…

Habeas Corpus was something that, to me, was a glaring absence from all of the previous resolutions about legal practices. The campaign to get that to quorum took so damn long I've only just got over it, and have started on Drugs Trafficking Act.

DTA began as a way of getting something passed using the Drugs categories. Changed a huge amount since then, but is still related to drugs. I vaguely remembered a previous attempt (by Rehochipe, it turned out) and that formed the basis of the new proposal. Still working at getting it to submission/quorum.

Basically, Both my Resolutions and the other Proposals that didnt make the grade came out of Discussing things here on the forums. We would be discusing the finerpoints of this and that and i would come across somthing which had not been as yet addressed in the Annuls of the UN Resolutions.
So off i would go and think about a draft for a few days and then stick it up here for tweaking.
UNWODC came out of discussions relating to Blood shortages in my region which suddenly became Organ Doner shortages and i noted while my nation had plenty to go around, my regional neighbours were hit with shortages.
then came my moment of Eureka!
UNCoESB came out of my seeing proposals to protect herring, Otters, Badgers, Fliibet Jungerats, Erse Bandito Monkeys etc on the proposals thread and i decided "Why not have a single Resolution Covering them ALL?"
I am currently awaiting my next Eureka Moment.

Um....LAE said "hey, how about Divorce" and I said "that makes so much sense - seeing as we've defined what a marriage is and yadda yadda yadda, we should make......." I think everyone can finish that sentence.

I tend to get my ideas from things that I honestly feel are both important to me as a player and that have merit to the international community, and tend to focus on cooperation.

The Ballast Water resolution was *not* my idea. Jamalya created a proposal by the same name and posted it here on the UN forums shortly after I had joined NationStates. Jamalya's idea was attacked rather harshly and undeservedly ... the basic idea was good, but players were jumping all over him using some bad science. Having attended a conference on estuary science months previous, I remembered a number of posters about invasive species, in particular species transmitted through ballast water, so I created a rewrite for Jamalya after reviewing actual: California, Canadian, and US laws on ballast water. Jamalya did all the campaigning (and slightly rewrote the version I handed back to him/her).

The Tracking Near Earth Objects was another rewrite of a previous resolution that failed -- SCOS OJ's Space Defense Initiative. SCOS OJ wrote his resolution due to current events ... a NEO had passed fairly close to the Earth in early 2004, catching the world by surprise ... IIRC it was uncharted, but I could be misrembering that. I grew up in Houston Texas (next to NASA) and actually did a Science Fair project on gauging the distances of binary stars from the earth by measuring changes in their light intensity (it was a kit project taking from Sky and Telescope) ... so I started reading Sky and Telescope. I also was in a Model UN at the time, and wrote a resolution on NEOs, which I called the "Totaly Awesome Jammin' Action Asteroid Resolution" (TAJAAR) -- yes, that was its name. The content was great, the name was a mistake I lived to regret ... the college Secretariat (MUN Moderators so to speak) had no sense of humour, so it was "lost". Even when I resubmitted it, the new version was "lost". So the Tracking Near Earth Objects had early origins in the late 1980s! :) Later in grad school, I focused on drought physics and managemen, so I've always had an interest in the mitigation of natural disasters.

The Needle Sharing Prevention actually came from the Tracking Near Earth Objects off-site discussions. A number of nations from Africa sent rather strong telegrams because the NationStates UN was ignoring the issue of HIV/AIDS, which they felt should be a priority. They asked me to consider making a resolution on that topic ... so I did some research and found that the RL UN was hosting an AIDS Conference in Thailand at the same time. The Needle Sharing angle came from real life stories I've heard about living here in California and because a German industrial band I like is named "Needle Sharing".

The Good Samaritan Laws was a Cogitation aided rewrite of a previous moderator deleted proposal International Disaster Assitance. I wanted a resolution that would bring the NSUN focus back to the Red Cross. As an engineer, I wanted to start a series of international resolutions that would remove cultural, political, and legal barriers between our roleplayed nations in the event of disasters. The laws in the resolution were modeled after laws many US States adopted post 9/11. California has had good samaritan laws (by that name in fact) for years prior to 9/11 due to earthquake risks. I also wanted to show people that resolutions need not be voted on based on their category (i.e. stat impacts) ... and I wanted to test to see if a well written Moral Decency resolution would suffer relative to a poorly written Human Rights resolution (sadly they do). :(

The Tsunami Warning System was a collaboration between Grosseschnauzer, Groot Gouda, and myself, based on the prior proposal from Tejasdom (sp?). It was inspired by the NOAA program that currently protects the US, after the Boxing Day tsunami. Max mentioned it once (in a Max Chat) as an example of how the NSUN is sometimes more effective than the RL UN. (Grosseschnauzer and I still want to bring a Universal Building Code resolution to the UN floor.)

Migitation of Large Reservoirs was based on my RL work experiences. While US rivers tend to travel through one or two countries at most, in the rest of the RL world rivers not only form boundaries between nations, but are a shared resource (which sometimes leads to disputes over use). The resolution was to really just bat around the number of different ways that the negative impacts of larger reservoirs could be mitigated (i.e. off-set).

There is another half of the International Disaster Assistance resolution that could be revived, and there is a Beer Tariff Reduction proposal (Free Trade) that I also once thought about submitting, but who nows. The last idea that never came off the table was a resolution about the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. I think it is important in RL, but I've come to realize too many players are traveling the stars and so a peaceful resolution like that would put a cap on all of their space warfare (which isn't remotely fair to them). I have a way around that, but I'm hanging onto that one for now. I'll just say that the idea is narrowly focused to limiting weapons of mass destruction, but not space fleets, and *is* Future Tech friendly.

I used a combination of NS events and pulling out of my arse for Nuclear Armaments, the two failed nuke bans being the NS events, and the fact that I came up with the idea (and the first draft) while at work being the pulling out of my arse (and considering that I work in the dishpit of a restaurant, that meant that I had to try to remember that first draft until I got home where I could write it down).

Actually, Nuclear Terrorism and Reformed Literacy (and, to a degree, NSoT/RiT) came from other posters: ideas they'd given up on.

All other texts were created under the influence of laxatives or the occult. Or both.

The first proposal i submitted was about Bonobos, i asked mods to delete it.
I was interested in bonobos for a while, but it was mainly the following experience, which give me the will to write it:
http://www.greatapetrust.org/

The second one the sex ed act, is not a very original idea
but there was a direct link with my former bonobos proposal, as woman and females bonobos are the only mammals, (not 100% sure about that, please let me know if i'm wrong as i didn't check for any mammals) to have their statistically most sensitive organ not directly/phisically aroused by intercourse.

The 'Sapient Rights' proposal that I've been drafting was inspired by a combination of seeing so much 'Human Rights' legislation here and the fact that I've also been designing a multi-species setting for an SF roleplaying campaign.

I'm also working on a draft proposal to repeal 'Compulsory Metrication', which [obviously?] comes from seeing that existing Resolution here plus my unhappiness with the way in which metrication has been forced on the RW UK...

My repeals have been in the line of Omigodtheykilledkenny's approach. As for substantive proposals...the replacement for UCPL - tentatively named PISS - is obviously out of necessity, the UNMA was based around what looked like interesting but forgotten discussions, and Freedom of Transport began as yet another hopeful "one in the RDU category" attempt, and turned into something different. But I guess it's really all NS in my case.

I based the FGM resolution on real UN policies.