Hey everyone, I just did a "procedural" judicial assignment to myself with CFJ 4020, and one of those hasn't come up in a while and we've had player turnover since then. So I thought I'd repost (slightly edited from 2020 when I last posted it) the judicial assignment policy I've been using in general - it's neither strictly "from the top of the list" nor "random" but those are both part of the heuristics for making fair assignments. Happy to discuss!
----------------------------------------------------- FIRST, A REMINDER: *Please feel free to Favor or Disfavor individual cases* (in public please so my filter picks it up). I'll do my best to accommodate these (in general first come first serve, if you're doing it too much to crowd out others, I'll just politely mention it). If you don't read anything below, please remember that doing this is helpful to me, if not overused. MORE GENERAL POLICY: There's two general guidelines for judicial assignments in R991: The first one is: > The Arbitor is an office, responsible for the administration of > justice in a manner that is fair for emself, if not for the rest > of Agora. I interpret "fair for emself" as fair for the office of Arbitor which means to sometime jump on cases to make a procedural point without it counting as a "judicial turn" without taking rewards for doing so (e.g. CFJ 4020) - but more often, "fair for the Arbitor" means minimizing Arbitor workload, which means assigning cases to minimize motions and moots and get to the right answer the first time. Fortunately, this is also "fair for the rest of Agora" in that it expedites the resolution of controversy. So under this category goes: avoid materially self-interested judges (merely having an opinion doesn't count as self-interest, it has to be materially more self-interest than the average Agoran has in the case). Also, if someone's given a reasoned argument in discussion, they're thinking about the case, so that's a point in their favor for assignment. However, if that argument has ended up in some tit-for-tat with the Caller or with a rule-author about their intended reading, I might instead look for a third opinion. The second one is: > The Arbitor SHALL assign judges over time such that all > interested players have reasonably equal opportunities to judge. For "equal opportunities" I don't *just* think about # of cases per person although that's a lot of it - also think of "equal effort", so if you just had a really thorny case I might give you an easy one or give you a pass for a couple cases (or vice versa). Also, here's where favoring/disfavoring is counted as weighting a judge's "interest", as long as it doesn't rise to "self-interest" described above. Activity matters a little, if I haven't seen you post for a month I'd weight that as less interest at the moment - this also goes into the "fair for Agora" bit above - if there's an urgent case, I'm thinking about who's been more active or able to do the case quickly. So anyway, to implement this I have an ordered list of judges. Whenever I assign a case I move the assignee to the bottom of the list (that's a given). When selecting a judge, I start at the top of the list, but look at the first few judges on the list to see who's a good fit based on everything above, while making sure I don't pass over any person on the top for very long. I prefer to batch assign, so I have N CFJs and take the top N persons on the list, which gives me the flexibility to match up within that group to take all the factors above into account. Finally, if there's a few good choices, a coin/flip die roll helps keep the list from staying in the same order. If anything in the above seems confusing/unfair, lmk... -G.
