CCP has released a white paper outlining the latest incarnation of the Council of Stellar Management, which went through some changes recently on account of feedback from Fanfest.  The most notable change is that the CSM is no longer being billed as democracy of EVE's virtual society.  Does this change represent a loss of idealism or is it simply a change in terminology to more accurately represent CCP's vision?  You'll have to read more to find out.

Ever since our CEO, Hilmar Pétursson, announced the re-emergence of the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) last spring we have been working feverishly at trying to make it bigger and better than the earlier version. When it was implemented last time players could volunteer for the CSM and they were then handpicked by us.

What we wish to do is to take this to a new level and let you the players elect representatives to the CSM. The CSM will then act as an official conduit for your comments and requests, as a community, enhancing greatly your ability to express your concerns and prioritize the matters you believe are most important at the time. The white paper presented here is by no means a finished paper, changes and updates will be made to it when more feedback gets in. We have already changed our ideas on some key fronts based on the feedback we got at Fanfest this year, the biggest change being that this is no longer considered an implementation of ‘Democracy’, as that word has so many and different meanings to different people that it would be the cause of a lot of misunderstandings.

You can download the white paper here in .pdf format. We look forward to reading your feedback, ideas and thoughts on the new CSM and we will be as active as possible in the discussion thread.

Read more here.