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Democracy in the SHL
#1

Hey it's your boy back with another half-baked idea that I aim to get paid to write about.


Lately, I've been thinking a lot about who makes decisions in the SHL and how and why. More specifically, I've been thinking about rules and rule changes. And while I'm certainly not going to put any work into making things change, I do like to wax poetic about possibilities and potential futures. Or, wax haiku perhaps.

It's no secret how the SHL is run, but it's also not like obvious unless you've been around. So let's lay it out, especially since if I'm wrong someone will correct me and I find that is the best way to find information. So here are the players.

I feel the need to interject that none of what I am writing is a criticism of current or past administrations or their members.

Owners

Owners pay for the site and are the top level of authority on the website. Generally speaking, their authority derives from the fact that they hold collective ownership of the site in real life terms. They have the final say in many matters, but mostly from the top-down direction. ie, they don't get to decide who gets drafted where. But they do get to decide who gets to be the Commissioner. "Owner" shows up in the rulebook 10 times. Once for name changes, once for money transfers, and 8 times regarding the duties of the Head Office. So suffice it to say, they are the council above the Head Office.

There are 5 owners and you've likely seen them around: Leafs4ever, teztify, Eggy216, DrunkenTeddy, and nour. All good chums in my experience.

SHL Commissioner and Co-Commissioner

The Commissioner is what you'd expect. They are the highest authority in the head office and act primarily as a central administrative authority figure. The rulebook states it plainly: "In addition to the responsibilities of all SHL Head Office Members, the SHL Commissioner is responsible for overseeing and organizing all members of the SHL Head Office". In contrast to the owners, Commissioner appears in the rulebook 45 times. The brunt of the administrative authority in the SHL is placed in the hands of the Commissioner and Head Office.

To balance the Commissioner, not only do we have site owners who have the authority to expel the Commissioner at any time for any reason, there are Co-Commissioners. A Co-Commissioner is like a vice-president: Not really all that different but only when it really matters. A Co-Commissioner is appointed by the Commissioner, again by approval of the owners, and there may be one or two of them. There are mitigating rules about conflict of interest in play as well. A Co-Commissioner is "A second point of contact", has all the same responsibilities, and can act as Commissioner in the event that they are absent. Plain and simple, they are a council of 2 or 3 figures that oversee the Head Office. As with all positions in the Head Office, they are open to applications and approved by the Owners. I have not seen any indication of term limits regarding the Commissioners nor the Co-Commissioners, though the implication seems to be that the Commissioner may fire and hire Co-Commissioners at any time, though there are no hard rules in place dictating this. As written, the Cos hold office as long as the Commissioner who hired them does.

We have 1 Commissioner -- WannabeFinn -- and 2 Cos,  skoldpaddor and Rangerjase. Again, good people you've probably met.

Head Office

As with the Commissioners, the brunt of administrative authority and labor rests in the hands of the Head Office. The Head Office is a tribunal of sorts, with mitigating laws to counteract conflicts of interest. The Commissioners are part of the Head Office and carry the same duties. Members of the Head Office apply to and are approved by the Commissioners. This offers a small layer of separation between Site Owners and Head Office in day-to-day decisions and activities, but again the Owners control who is Commissioner and by extension the Head Office.

Generally speaking, the Head Office -- which includes Commissioners -- is the authority on almost all matters in the SHL. They discuss rules with Owners, GMs, and amongst eachother, implement changes, discuss and execute punishments, and largely keep GMs in check. Head Office terms last for 2 seasons, and applications are open once a season.

The Head Office members are: Chevy, Frenchie, Fluw, NYR73, Lore, RedCapeDiver, ACapitalChicago. Once again, great people you've probably met.

General Managers

General Managers do not have any explicit authority in the direction of the SHL, but they are often polled and weigh in on discussions with the Head Office. Thankfully, there is not much communicative separation between the GMs and the Head Office. They work hand in hand, but without any real authority or explicit ability to make changes to the league. GMs are appointed by Head Office during an application process, though I can't seem to find explicit rules about the process. But most of us know, you apply to Head Office and they make a decision.

While GMs hold no administrative authority, they run the actual league collectively. This is well known and not worth explaining, but it is worth pointing them out here because they are commonplace in the rules and hold conflicts of interest that may prevent them from running for Head Office. That is, General Managers may not be in the Head Office.

Players

Then there's the rest of us. We play the game and do the things. We have no authority or say in any matters.


The Rub

By now you may see what I am getting at. There is no democracy in the SHL. Which, perhaps, makes a lot of sense given the culture we find ourselves in. After all, most companies operate this way. They are not democratic, but it works well enough for a lot of us. Authority is derived from ownership, and there's usually few owners. You may think of it like a ship, with a Captain at the helm. People don't always want the ship to be steered by committee. And of course, "Design by committee" is a 4 letter word in the professional word.

Democracy can take many forms and means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. We might indicate that the United States is a democracy, with each citizen holding the right to vote for many forms of public office, but also with contingencies that can make it feel less democratic. Political parties are under no obligation to follow the will of the people in primaries, but they have their own systems in place to mimic democracies. One example, the DNC has super delegates who can and do vote against what their delegates have voted for. Idk how the GOP works, so sorry there's no negative example here lol. Sometimes, the less popular vote gets beat out by the Electoral College. Layers and layers of "Democracy" is what I'm getting at. We appoint leaders (sort of) with the hopes that they do what we want them to do. Obviously, this works and doesn't work to varying degrees.

Another system that has seen (disastrous) play is what I'm calling Capital Democracy for lack of a better word. The parallels between this example and real life may be upsetting, so just pretend that the U.S. Democracy is perfect. In A Capital (chicago) Democracy, votes are designated by ownership of capital. More specifically, we've seen this play out in things like Decentraland, a block chain NFT meta verse bullshit of an experiment whereby users can own digital land. Their land ownership, among other things, contributes to how many votes they have. Almost all process are voted upon by the user base, something that seems like a great idea on paper, but in combination with the way votes are distributed has disastrous results. For instance, it is not uncommon for the percentage of voters (the people voting, not the votes themselves) to be in favor of something 95% to 5%, but the cumulation of all the votes to make the final outcome more like 40% to 60%. Meaning, 5% of the voters control 60% of the shares. This is the worst parts of capitalism with zero of the alleged benefits.

We even see forms of "Democracy" at play in monarchal societies like the United Kingdom, where technically people are voting for representatives but by which the King or Queen still hold ultimate authority.

So where does this leave us in the SHL? We have 5 owners who pay for the upkeep of the site and own it collectively. They appoint Commissioners by their own vote and weigh in on certain issues here and there. Commissioners appoint Head Office, and both run the league. General Managers run the league in competition with each other, but also together towards the ultimate goal of fun. And players ARE the league, without which there is no league to run. Players have little say in what actually materializes.

In practice, the Owners and Head Office listen to the will of the people as best they can. We're not saying they are dictators, but of course the only thing stopping them is that we can all leave. Players have authority by our willingness to be here, and so there is some obfuscated nebulous democracy at play, but only in the sense that all of human history has a nebulous democracy by virtue of the fact that they can always overthrow their oppressors at great personal cost.

What that means is that the will of the ruling authorities may not align perfectly with the will of the people, and the only way to know if they have drifted away is by us slowly leaving the league. No one really says why they give up on the league, they just do it. And so the result is that if the will is misaligned, there is a massive delay in recognizing that effect and even more massive inability to know how to realign it.

And that is why I am suggesting (or merely having fun thinking about) that we make our league as democratic as possible. The players should vote and have their voice heard.

But does everyone get a vote?

Surely, there are reasons we run the league the way we do. For one, the league can exist with only 5 owners and not much else. It's their website and there's nothing any of us can really do about that. As stated previously, that's the way the world currently works. And to be sure, Ownership and Head Office believe, within some part of themselves, that they know what is best for the league. They can steer the ship quickly. The lag we mentioned earlier is not present in the decision making itself. Ownership and Head Office can, at any point and with great speed, steer us away from hidden obstacles. In fact, this benevelant dictatorship, for lack of a nicer phrase, is at the core of the most popular religion on earth: Christianity. Dictators are bad generally, but if only there was one supreme, good, perfect, just, loving being who could rule over all of us! And even in history, rulers with complete authority are able to quickly steer their people for better or for worse. Though, there's a can of worms there when we open up history, as it's always in flow and constantly inaccurate in the minds of lay-folk like us (emperors are often "imprisoned" by the administrations around them and their authority only goes as far as they can physically see with their eyes, but no futher).

So lets go to the other end of the spectrum. What if everyone gets a vote?

I think the thought on the tip of everyone's tongue is why should StormFront88, everyone's favorite nazi infiltrator, get the same vote as me? Or even, why should a brand new member get the same vote as me if they don't really understand how the league works and why?

How can we decide who is a good-faith actor and who is a bad actor? How can we decide who has the faculties to vote and who is incapable?

To my mind, voters should be educated and there is no better teacher than experience. Experience is also a factor of time, which can be a barrier to bad-faith actors. Those folks rarely last more than a year in my experience.

So here's my proposed solution, subject to tinkering and all that shit. Rules and rule changes should not be decided by the Head Office or Commissioners. To be true, i think they still play an important role in all of this. Some type of authority is warranted. But, not not all voters are equal. Votes are accumulated over time to a maximum. Positions like GM, Head Office, Commissioner, and Ownership have additional voting power that is stripped when they resign. Votes are assigned once a season.

For the sake of argument, lets put some numbers to it:
- 1 vote is awarded after 132 SMJHL or SHL Regular Season games played (that is, 2 times the number of games in a season). DFA games do not count.
- Thereafter, 1 vote is accumulated for every 66 SHL games played.
- A maximum of 20 votes is possible to be accrued this way. (or whatever)
- An additional 20 votes is awarded to Gms only during their tenure.
- An Additional 50 votes is awarded to Head Office only during their tenure.
- An Additional 100 votes is awarded to Ownership only during their tenure.
- Additional votes for other jobs??
- Every season of inactivity subtracts one vote from a user down to a minimum of zero.
- Inactive users are unable to vote.
- Inactive users restore voting rights after 66 games played in either league. An inactive user with no votes cannot vote.
- Suspensions do not count towards games played, thus suspensions carry more weight.

Obviously these numbers are pretty flimsy, and I've not done any calculations to see if any of these groups act as tie breakers, the way the Ownership group is set up for right now. But, mostly it just details the idea that Gms, Head Office, and Ownership still act as authority figures with legitimate forms of control (instead of verbal sway) while still respecting the will of the people. These figures probably need to be adjusted by a lot. There's something like, what, 600 users here? I'd wager a large number of them already have 20 votes.

So what do we vote on? Well...everything we can.

There are times when authority figures act on their own, usually under scrutiny of other figures. Things like team branding, for instance. Should we not vote on the designs that are normally presented only to Head Office


Or perhaps punishments and appeals? We run into contentious punishments and appeals all the time. What better way to prove to everyone that the majority rules?

Probably the most important is who actually holds authority in this group? Should we not appoint people who we feel represent us? Should their job performance not be in question often?

Even ownership could potentially change, since authority is derived from ownership in this system. What better way to distribute authority than to distribute ownership? This is entirely different pandoras box altogether and personally I am fine if a small group of us handles the day to day expenses and all that. It's quicker and more reliable this way, albeit not as democratic as one might hope.

And to be sure, authority figures still hold verbal sway in this system. The figures we appoint arent nobodies. They necessarily require our support and therefore their support in these matters can sway voters because we trust them to a degree.

Let's be perfectly honest at the end here. None of the decisions made by our current system are bad (that I can think of, I'm sure others have ideas). We're not putting into question decisions already made, because I think generally speaking Ownership and by extension Head Office has been doing a good job. Or if you disagree, I think their intentions are pure.

And that's what this all comes down to: The means. The ends cannot justify the means, because the means are what make the end a reality. We must align the means the best we can to ensure future decisions carry with them the intent of the people. It becomes each member's responsibility to be educated and thoughtful, but the end result should be a league that represents the users while mitigating risk of outside influence.

If you made it this far, you have my thanks. I'm not always interested in bringing about change, but I find it fun to think about and write about different ways we could do things. So I encourage you to also think about what this league could be like, for better or worse, if we did things drastically different. What if we had a king and no head office? What if we had a meritocracy based on buy-in? (barf). What if we had pure anarchy?

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

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Fuck the penaltys
ARGARGARHARG
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#2

If you go to a true democracy on anything that matters, the shitposters win.

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#3

I can’t wait for the great democratic vote to rebrand to the Gnomedab Hockey League where all the teams are named after a copypasta of the past and we sim all the games by making jase and mcgrids play bubble hockey in Finn’s basement

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#4

That definitely is a media piece

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#5

nah I’ll just trust people who have the bigger picture more than I do

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#6

04-20-2023, 02:41 PMsköldpaddor Wrote: I can’t wait for the great democratic vote to rebrand to the Gnomedab Hockey League where all the teams are named after a copypasta of the past and we sim all the games by making jase and mcgrids play bubble hockey in Finn’s basement

FWIW I need to start test simming. Mcgrids beats me every time

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#7

04-20-2023, 02:29 PMPremierBromanov Wrote: There are 5 owners and you've likely seen them around: Leafs4ever, teztify, Eggy216, DrunkenTeddy, and nour. All good chums in my experience.

cap

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#8

04-20-2023, 02:41 PMsköldpaddor Wrote: I can’t wait for the great democratic vote to rebrand to the Gnomedab Hockey League where all the teams are named after a copypasta of the past and we sim all the games by making jase and mcgrids play bubble hockey in Finn’s basement

if thats what we vote for then i don't see the issue lol. are we running the SHL for 10 users or ~400

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Fuck the penaltys
ARGARGARHARG
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#9

04-20-2023, 02:47 PMRangerjase Wrote: FWIW I need to start test simming. Mcgrids beats me every time

this is why the Rangerjase Come Down to Houstons will never win anything, you just don't put in the effort.

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#10

Interesting idea, but I think we have enough checks and balances in this league we do not need a democracy to get the best results for the people.

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#11

04-20-2023, 03:04 PMPremierBromanov Wrote: if thats what we vote for then i don't see the issue lol. are we running the SHL for 10 users or ~400

also, HO would still be in charge of proposals, so dont submit the gnomedab proposal if you think it's a bad idea lol

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Fuck the penaltys
ARGARGARHARG
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#12

I vote for Jase to finally give Ben the $100M

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#13

04-20-2023, 02:32 PMAce Wrote: If you go to a true democracy on anything that matters, the shitposters win.

maybe the shitposters stop shitposting once they realize their voice matters again.

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#14

04-20-2023, 02:41 PMsköldpaddor Wrote: I can’t wait for the great democratic vote to rebrand to the Gnomedab Hockey League where all the teams are named after a copypasta of the past and we sim all the games by making jase and mcgrids play bubble hockey in Finn’s basement
Can I claim "You can't be a GM if you haven't regressed your player one?" it only seems appropriate

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#15

04-20-2023, 02:47 PMRangerjase Wrote: FWIW I need to start test simming. Mcgrids beats me every time
Right here officer, he's the one who wants to test sim

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