I personally believe a voting system will always be flawed, do note this is my 'opinion' and i am by no means disputing anyone else.

My reason for believing this is that people are inheritantly lazy when it comes to things they don't see of importance.
I believe a large percentage of the gaming base will be content and just playing along as is ( I mean this in general across many games with varying administrations. ) So those players will not want to bother with 'game politics' because they have enough stress in their real lives and want to game as a means of escapism without the responsibilities or pressures and concerns.

Now amongst that number, i am convinced the better leaders / council members / advisors / designers / analysts will be.

Time and time again we see that those who 'desire' to be in a position of authority, generally do not have the capacity to do the role they are wanting, and generally have another purpose or scheme in mind. I would also say that generally, these people are more easily corrupted by the power they obtain and use it to influence people unfairly.

Now this is the crux of the point i'm making.... I truely believe that some of the greatest leaders have emerged from a rise in circumstances and situations. Those who didn't vie for the power, but felt change had to happen and because noone else stepped up, they felt they had to. Though this kind of person is not usually the type who craves power, more often they actually would rather not be leading but they have a natural capacity to and noone else is doing a better job so they step up and take the responsibility to 'help others', rather than 'help themselves'.

In my eyes... that is the kind of people we need on the council. Those who have the drive to shape things for the better of all, not just a certain group.

So this is where i believe voting is flawed.... The majority of those who vote will be the 'louder' breed of gamers, the ones who seek more depth, which i believe is a tiny percentage of the gamerbase. Whereas the majority will quietly be doing their thing and not getting involved.

Some will say.. "well it's their fault for not getting involved" .. and i'll agree with you. However, you then have to ask yourself whether this situation is a fair way to select people of quality then, and i'd simply say i don't believe it is, it can too easily become biased.

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So... what do we do?

I don't have some 'great all seeing answer' for you.. sure i wish i did, but...

i feel we need a system of election... where people can recommend people 'with their consent'. They can have their 'respected/skilled' friend fill out an application form and send it in to the council.

These applictions should then be made visible in full on the internet with personal names etc.. removed, just the content of why the person suits the role.

Rather than tolling a voting system, i believe a comment system should be used, people can look at the applications and post their comments on the suitibility of the person for the role based on the information provided.

The council can then review the applications, review the comments incase they notice something the council didn't. The council can then hopefully make a qualitive decision rather than a quantitive one.

Thus, hopefully providing with people who are inspired to help the populace and help push the game forward, shaping it to be 'balanced' for all, which means varying degrees of fairness and un-fairness. Remember balanced does not mean every choice in a game is I-Win. There are pro's and con's to everything, and balancing is a very difficult concept in a game, and rebalancing will be needed every time new things are added.

I hope that this idea will resonate amongst you, i'm sure there are flaws in the system, and i'm sure there are others out there who could refine the system, adjust it, tweak it to make it even better.

But i believe it would provide us a fairer way of getting the right people than a biased number based system. Voting systems in games i'm afraid simply become 'who has the most friends/influence wins'.

I'll just wrap up this again by saying, this is my opinion, i am in no way discrediting other people's systems, as they may also work, my beliefs in this post can even be changed if facts are provided and prove anything i believe to be false. So i'm not trying to antagonise anyone or deny them what they feel is their right, etc... Just throwing out an idea which i believe would lead to a fairer system and remove the need for a numeric based voting system. I hope people can have an open mind as they consider it, and feel free to please offer constructive critisism whether you agree / disagree and why.

Thanks all.

NanoCleric, I think the basic idea you have is good but I don't see how it could scale up. If there were only a few thousand of us then it might work. The problem is it would become useless if even a third of the CURRENT players become involved. It's one thing if an application has a couple comments on it, it's another thing entirely if each application has Hundreds of comments on it. Only a handful of people would actually read that.

Every single candidate for CSM is required to (and readily volunteers) their personal name when they decide to run for the council. My real name is Noah Garaas and I live in Seattle, nice to meet you all. See? It's that easy.

This has always been a requirement for CSM candidacy, and I'd be really surprised to see CCP change their policy for the Dust WC. We run as normal people - and represent the players as normal people. CCP takes on an immense amount of legal risk by sharing NDA information with players, and thus the entire process is done with a greater degree of transparency that is necessary to simply play the game and be a community leader.

This is not for the sake of retribution against people's real lives if something unpleasant is done in-character, harassment is harassment and will never be tolerated or seen as acceptable by the community as "part of the game." However, by putting my real name on the line in exchange for the privilege of representing you, the players, I know full well that a betrayal of CCP's trust and a legal breach of contract is something that other people wishing to do business with Noah (Not Hans or Heinrich) will know about my personal integrity.

http://community.eveonline.com/community/csm/candidates/

You could always petition their web team for violating privacy laws too.

By definition, the requirement to publicly divulge my name when I ran for CSM is also a waiving of my own right to name privacy. You have that right, and your information cannot be divulged, but I gave my name up when I ran for CSM. It's a matter of public record now.