On Tue, 2024-08-13 at 03:34 +0100, Katherina Walshe-Grey via agora-
official wrote:
> I recuse nix from CFJ 4083 on grounds of lateness.
>
> I assign ais523 to CFJ 4083.
>
> CFJ 4083 was called by Murphy and reads: "In the message quoted in
> evidence, 4st deputised as Geologist to publish the Geologist's
> report."
>
> Original CFJ and caller's arguments:
>
> https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora-business/2024-May/053050.html
I judge CFJ 4083 FALSE. Deputising for an office to publish a late
report is currently broken, and there is no mechanism to do so even if
the message is worded correctly.
Rule 2160 starts as follows:
{{{
A player acting as emself (the deputy) CAN perform an action
ordinarily reserved for an office-holder
}}}
Publishing the information that is generally required in a report is
not an action "reserved for an office-holder" because it is something
that any player can legally do regardless of whether or not e holds the
office. As such, it isn't a valid option for deputisation. (Rule 2143
requires officers to publish all the information in eir report, but
does not actually require the officer to publish the report itself;
just a message that contains the same information.)
The action that *is* reserved to the officer is to purport that the
document is part of the office's report. This is something that is
legal only if holding the office (rule 2471), and (in the case of the
Geologist) has a rules effect because it affects whether the report is
self-ratifying (rules 2162 and 2166).
Unfortunately, it is not possible to deputise for this action either,
because there is no requirement on an officer to correctly label eir
report. As far as I can tell, it would be legal to fulfil the
Geologist's weekly duties via publishing a list of all crystals and
their owners, together with the values of all their relevant switches,
but without labelling the list in any way as a Geologist's report. In
this situation, the office's duties would be fulfilled, but the report
would not self-ratify, due to not purporting to be a report.
(I recently published a list of Stones and their owners, while not the
Stonemason, and not purporting it to be part of the Stonemason's
report; I don't think anyone would have expected the list in question
to self-ratify or to be an official report – but if I had in fact been
the Stonemason at the time, it would have been sufficient to fulfil my
hypothetical Stone-recordkeeping duties!)
So the basic problem here is that officers are *required* to publish
information, but any player can legally publish the information; and
officers are *able* to label their reports as official reports, but
have no requirement to do so. As such, there is no requirement on the
officer to do something report-related that could only be done by
virtue of holding the office; and that means there is no appropriate
action for the deputisation rule.
(A red herring: rule 2143 requires an officer to publish eir report in
plain text, but does not put any time limit on this obligation, so the
obligation should be read as "when an officer publishes eir report, it
should be in plain text". Due to the lack of time limit, it is not
possible to violate this obligation in a way that creates a deputisable
requirement.)
--
ais523
Judge, CFJ 4083
