The CSM 11 Election: The Dev Blog

On Friday, CCP Leeloo ended all question about the short-term future of the Council of Stellar Management, releasing a dev blog outlining the upcoming election. Of special note to me is the following:

• January 15th, 2016 – Candidacy period begins
• February 9th, 2016 – Candidacy period ends, background checks begin
• February 29th, 2016 – Voting period begins
• March 25th, 2016 – Voting ends
• April 21st, 2016 – Results are announced at Fanfest 2016

That's right, people can start submitting their applications to run starting on Friday. Since CCP updated the CSM White Paper with all the rules and regulations, I figure I will just copy and paste the qualifications for running below:

• To become an eligible candidate for election to the CSM, a player must be 18 years of age or older, unless the legal age of majority in their home country is higher than 18, in which case the minimum age is the age of majority.
  
• To become an eligible candidate, a player must have an EVE Online account that has been active for at least three months (90 days).
  
• CCP employees, ISD volunteers, CCP interns, CCP affiliates, CCP strategic partners or employees of other gaming companies/games/gaming media and family members of CCP are all ineligible to run for the CSM. In cases were an active CSM delegate becomes involved in any of the above activities they must resign from the Council.
  
• To become an eligible candidate a player must consent to provide their personal information to CCP. A CSM candidate can publish their personal information to the player base at their own discretion. On the application page field “Country” is visible publicly. The remaining information is visible only to CCP Staff and other CSM members and is held in full confidence unless a CSM candidate chooses to reveal it.
  
• To become an eligible CSM candidate player must not have any records of serious breach of the EULA, TOS and\or forum rules. The player’s account will be submitted for a security background check. If any violations are revealed, the candidate will be removed from the election process.
  
• All CSM candidates must ensure that their personal information and contact email address is up to date in account management before declaring their intent to run as a candidate for the CSM.
  
• To become an eligible CSM candidate, player must provide a copy of a valid, internationally recognized identity document to CCP. This is required to confirm identity of the candidate and to prove the ability to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement and travel to CCP’s office in Reykjavik, Iceland should a CSM delegate be selected to attend the CSM Summit.
  
• If, due to candidate’s real-life circumstances or medical conditions, they are not able to physically attend any of the CSM summits or other CCP or player hosted conventions – we don’t require them to.
  
• Participation in all CSM activities is entirely voluntary. However, complete inactivity will lead to the removal from the Council.

CCP Leeloo listed the following major changes to this year's election rules in the dev blog:

• Age restriction has been lowered to 18 years. After trying this out during the last election, we’ve decided to keep the age restriction at a lower mark of 18 years. This provides more opportunities for our younger players who wish to try out a little bit more of space politics and contribute to the development process of EVE Online J
  
• Privacy. Again, after seeing the feedback from the candidates and voters after CSM10 election, we decided to remove the requirement of sharing your real life name publicly if you wish to run for the Council seat. We feel like this is an unnecessary requirement and we would rather let people decide if they want to share their real life information publicly or not.
  
• 4 permanent attendee seats. We are increasing the number of permanent seats for the Council because we want voters to have more power over who should attend the summits. As we now bring up to 10 members of the Council to each summit, this is a fairer split.
  
• Replacement mechanism. It’s been a while since we first tried replacing resigned or removed CSM delegates. Now this process has been formalized and is included in a whitepaper. The reasons behind this are very simple. By leaving an empty chair on the Council we are not utilizing the full potential of STV based voting. Besides, having more delegates equals more feedback, so running short is not always the best option. This lets us re-use all votes that were cast during the election. So please pay attention when you vote.

Reading the White Paper, I did notice one other change that I guess CCP considers minor.

Games media need not apply

CCP added employees of game media companies (and I assume freelance games journalists) to the list of people who cannot serve on the CSM. I can understand CCP's rationale to putting the language in the White Paper. Not only is CCP working on the first wave of virtual reality games, but the Reykjavik facility will soon host the development of a new game. One of the last things CCP needs is for a games journalist to overhear some talk about CCP's future business plans in the cafeteria.

I will go into more detail in the upcoming days about the CSM election. I will add a plug for an effort I am contributing to again this year. The Cap Stable crew is once again going to interview as many of the candidates as possible. For anyone who is running for a CSM seat, I would recommend visiting CSM Watch and reading the post on how to sign up for an interview.