Today I got totally lucky. I have a chance to attend working seminar on democracy, politics and to hear opinion from young people my age how they look at topic, what they would like to change and how they would like to change. We are not a huge group here, but outcomes are great so far. 

I would like to share a simulative game we played in the evening. If someone knows The Mafia then this is similar. Great thanks to Italina guys for transformation, was hard to recognize. 

Basic information and rules:

We were 17 people playing, 14 are simple parliament members (one of them are spy, who could open eyes during closed sessions) and 3 corrupted parliament members. And one of all 17 parliament members are elected to be The Chairperson with two votes. 

Games follows: 

In the beggining we deligate and vote for The Chair. Then Closed session (ehen everybody keeps eyes closed) follows, when corrupted members of parliament eliminate one simple member. During Open session (eyes are open) everyone can guess or propose the possible corrupted members and with public majority through open voting to eleminate him. So during each session each of parliament members get eliminated. 

Eliminated members of parliament becomes Public opinion or Voice. Can call it Media too. Can make demonstrations, posters, banners to show who is corrupted (as they can see during Closed session), but they can't say directly the name just give tipps. 

Outcomes:

Firstly, The Chair, (who was corrupted, but people trusted guy) was elected. I must say, he was really good. I was eliminated during 2nd Closed session by corrupted members, so I got a chance to do some nice Public opinion work. It was damn hard work, to point attention of people to small issues which are important. to achieve trust, to figure out how get auditory to listen to my posts and banners. Was funny. But suprising moment was we as Public opinion were trying to point, to make stories and question. Noone cared. 

At the end, when corrupted parliament members (who in the beggining were just 3 of 17) almost won. Isn't that interesting..? People just let that go till last moments when it came to last chances - win or loose, play smart or die. 

It reminds me somehow of society we live in, actions are parliaments are taking, voting and deciding for. 

This was small, but surprising. If we young people - fruture of tommorrow can't doit easily.. what are we asking for? 

I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

/Herbert Bayard Swope (1882 - 1958)

Picture credit: Ma Gali and Pierre Marcel via flickr.com