This forum post is a notice that I’m suspending Rosie Gray and Sudane Erato as Estate Managers for one month. This is because both EMs have made changes to CDS infrastructure without authorisation. Both EMs will be reinstated after 30 days. None of the changes made will be reversed; they were helpful upgrades to our existing infrastructure and will need to be developed further. The issue here is about how change is authorised in a democratic self-governing community which sets rules (or ‘laws’) for its members.
The CDS Constitution grants the Chancellor the power, subject to CDS law, "to determine the use to which any and all land in CDS shall be put”. Following the appointment of Estate Managers I set out in their job descriptions that they “work to direction from the Chancellor” and that one of their functions is “helping to beautify CDS”.
Sudane and Rosie have carried out some much needed improvement works - renovating the roads in a number of regions and fixing the textures on the LA quayside respectively. This has been really helpful and I have heard only positive feedback on the results. The problem is that neither of these improvements were done with my prior authorisation. (Several other improvements have been carried out with my authorisation and for these there is no problem).
I feel it is important to stress this, and to impose a mild sanction here, because we have two choices as a community. We can choose to develop laws, assign responsibilites and stick to the rules we have chosen. Or we can decide that rules don’t really matter if it’s expedient to ignore them or to bend them for our friends. We are often accused of being the latter (“it’s only a pretend democracy”) and to disprove this we need always to demonstrate that we are the former (“change the rules if they don’t work but follow the ones we have”).