[2334.CN] Cabinet Appointments

Assembly
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22

I want to commend the Prime Minister on nominating a Cabinet which, if confirmed, will have more first-time Cabinet Ministers than old timers. I think that’s something we haven’t had for a while and goes to show the benefits of giving the PM a bit of room to work to match legislators to roles.

@Shibuya-Kanon:

I want to admit that the current General Corps (including me) has been pretty crap at providing a sustainable and clear pathway for training and I’m hopeful that your fresh energy will help with that. Do you have any specific proposals for training besides “we need to remember to do it”? (Which is a great proposal.)

Would you be willing/able to also post reports in Dispatch form and on our forum? I believe in cross-platform coverage, which is something we (including me) have been missing with past reports.

I’m excited to see what you’ll bring to the position.

@EmC (actually, kinda more a question for @ProfessorHenn tbh):

Em talked about this in her campaign and it was one of the things I most definitely agreed with. The current World Assembly Act is outdated and just doesn’t match our current model of government.

Will you be proposing the legislation to the Assembly to get this task done? Will you be delegating that task to Em as OWL Director?

@Pronoun: Your plans for the term outline good principles, but they leave me with one enormous question. What are you going to do?

Specifically, what is the one integration project you will get launched this term if you get nothing else done? Why?

We often have pie in the sky ideas in this area especially that never come to fruition. They take the form of big proposals and threads for public input and then projects that stall out and don’t get implemented before the end of a term. It’s been almost 2 years at this point, and Luca’s resignation from the old Ministry of Engagement is pretty much still spot-on to our way of doing business. Especially given your emphasis on diverse and streamlined pathways without actually naming something to accomplish, I have concerns we’ll continue in our old pattern of “promise miraculous perfect fixed streamlined system, never accomplish the change, term ends and new Minister appears with as little direction as the previous”.

Please assuage my concerns.

@Legend : I’m actually pretty excited by your nomination. I don’t think we have always (or often) agreed, but I think you’re active and invested in the region’s success, and that alone merits both recognition and an opportunity to prove yourself, which I’m glad the Prime Minister is giving you. That said, your platform is big on aspirations and low on plans.

Can you please give an example of an event that you will run?

What is an example of an activity you will do in order to accomplish this goal?

How will you accomplish this?

@Maverick: No questions. You’re going to do great. You’ve always been a capable and dedicated advocate of the RP community, and I don’t doubt your ability to grow and expand your community.

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23

As far as I’m concerned, I never bring legislation forward as the Prime Minister, only as a Legislator. I’ll have the conversation, Legislator to Legislator, with a few people that I would like to see draft a proposal and get more involved, but if those don’t pan out then I do intend on bringing those changes forward myself. That’ll come a bit further down the pipeline, once the government has finished moving into their offices and we’ve settled into a routine enough that I can pull back and work on it.

24

If Maverick was tapped to lead the Cabinet’s roleplay affairs force, any issue or policy concerning the roleplay community and our government kind of falls under their jurisdiction, right? Even though it has nothing to do with politics, it’s still some sort of headline when discussing roleplay and recent/upcoming changes to the community.

25

So, obviously from my campaign, a lot of it will be continuing old events and helping people make new ones, but there are a couple of my own that I want to do. First of all, I’d like to make a themed monthly art gallery so our more artistic members can more easily show off their skills, and also so people can just have fun. I’d also like to see if I can have game days/nights where we try to play games like werewolf and such (although that one might be too complicated for ns and myself), and if it has enough support, I’d like to try out D&D-style events.

A lot of this will come down to making the on-site more appealing to off-site members, which my main strategy for doing will be increasing events. Additionally, I’m also willing to talk with people on the rmb and discord to see if there’s some way to make it more desirable without sacrificing the on-site TSPers. Another thing I’ve touched on with events is having collaborative ones, and with that I’d like to match off-site users with on-site users (they can communicate on the forums or on-site) so they can get to know each other and hopefully keep talking afterwards. Getting On-Siters to the forum should be relatively easy since they’re pretty similar, and the roleplays and assembly should be good pulls.

Like I said in my response to Maluhia, it’s going to be a mix of advertising, getting some government members to do a “meet and greet” on the rmb to take and answer some questions, and running my Model-UN idea as an intro into the Assembly.

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Do you have any specific proposals for training besides “we need to remember to do it”? (Which is a great proposal.) - HumanSanity

My proposal for this would be to include it to some of our own op updates! I want to have some time training the new peeps specifically at update to do things! One update would be practice detag, and another update would be practice chasing for example! Of course I’m open to other ideas/proposals about this, but that’s the gist of my idea!!

Would you be willing/able to also post reports in Dispatch form and on our forum? I believe in cross-platform coverage, which is something we (including me) have been missing with past reports. - HumanSanity

Of course!! I’ll be cross-posting it for dispatch and on our own forums, and not just the NS forum!!

27

Kind of on the money, but the server merge doesn’t involve the government as “the government”. It’s a case of me, a person in the community, bringing forward the idea.

Maverick’s position as Minister is on my behalf, so to speak, so they can carry out my RP policy. I’d both still be responsible for the RP side of things, and need to make sure that the members of my Cabinet act according to how I direct them to with regards to the same.

28

I don’t think it’s a pie-in-the-sky idea to canvas our integration suite as a whole — our dispatches, our telegrams, our WFE, our mentorship, our forum wizards, our recruitment*, and so on — and work to streamline the connections between them. I think it is a pie-in-the-sky idea to do all that, and promise to turn it into a ‘miraculous perfect fixed streamlined system.’ That’s a promise I’m deliberately avoiding; in fact, I’m promising the opposite. There’s no point soliciting feedback or embracing iteration if we have a perfect system in place; there’s plenty of benefit to doing so in order to improve our system.

Look, I get where you’re coming from. In my time as Minister of Engagement, I had a big proposal and a thread for public input. The project, I’ll admit, did stall out. But I did get it implemented before my term ended, and the result is our current welcome dispatch. Did I produce a miraculous perfect fixed streamlined welcome dispatch? Of course not! Did I accomplish a change? I’d say I did.

You’re right to point out that it feels like I’m low on specific plans; reading back, I’d actually agree with you. Turns out, pushing that post out at five in the morning (no, I did not wake up early :eyes:) wasn’t the best idea — a lot of it is unintentionally vague, and hopefully I can clear up what I meant.

If I were to pick one integration project to launch this term if I get nothing else done, it would be an API telegrams project. I say if, because that strays easily into the technical ream outside of IC governance. I know I want to get it launched, but I also want to be transparent about what I can and can’t promise — and when OOC factors like real-life hosting costs can be a blocking factor, I don’t feel I can responsibly promise to launch the project at (literally) any cost, even if I can honestly say it would be a high priority as Minister of Engagement.

(I do want to make it extra clear that I’m not asking for money in any way, shape, or form — it’s just a recent example, and a lot of it comes down to me being a cheapskate. Feel free to judge me as a person based on that, but I think a reluctance to spend real-life money a silly way to judge an IC position like Minister of Integration, just as it’d be silly to judge someone based on their coding, graphic design, or other technical skills.)

I do want to elaborate on is ‘integrating integration with culture.’ Our integration shouldn’t just be about explanations. The things that we do as a community — our cultural events, legislative debates, roleplay storylines, and so on — are also great opportunities to show, not tell, new players what our community has to offer and encourage them to join in on the fun. This might look like putting out RMB posts about an upcoming movie stream, or pinning a dispatch listing events in the next week, or linking to the latest resident spotlight from the WFE. It doesn’t have to be something revolutionary, but I think it’s worth iterating on and seeing where it takes us.

I also think that iterating on and improving existing projects is just as important as launching new ones. We have a WFE, a welcome telegram, a whole bunch of dispatches, a mentorship program, a couple forum wizards… I think there’s more to a term than adding a new project to the mix. I do plan on revisiting these. I can tell you that my gut says our systems are more complex than they need to be, but when it comes to what I plan to do, it’s more accurate to say that I want to revise them to get people from point A to point B, than it is to say I just want to go in with the red ink.

29

I suppose this is primarily a question for @Pronoun and @Legend, but I would be curious to hear any of the nominees’ thoughts.

I was struck earlier today when I saw that over 75 votes have already been cast in the on-site Delegate vote. With four days of voting left, plus SPSF votes, it seems that we could break 100, which would be close to triple the number cast in the forum Delegate election. Maybe that’s typical, but as someone with no frame of reference I was fairly surprised. The 50+ additional, non-forum voters clearly care about TSP; they took time to vote, and they keep their WA nation in the region. Yet they aren’t heavily involved off-site.

Which brings me to my question: why not, and what can be done about it? In other words, what do you see as the primary barriers that are currently keeping these active on-site folks from being more closely integrated into our off-site community, and how do you plan to break down those barriers?

I realize you have both outlined your outreach plans / proposals in some detail already, so I’m sorry if this question is a bit repetitive. Seeing the vote totals today just drove home to me how big this group is and left me wondering what is keeping them from taking the next step in getting involved off-site.

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30

Yeah, the numbers are on the low side if anything, though that’s not entirely unexpected following the introduction of frontiers. We had 160 votes in the January 2023 poll, for example.

With respect to integration, I’d say it’s a testament to visibility and to streamlining. The visibility advantage is clear: the Delegate position highly visible on the region page, the poll is right on the region page, and Kris also put out a regional telegram. The experience is also more streamlined — casting a vote is literally just two clicks away from that telegram, which we simply can’t replicate with other elections where we might want things like anonymous ballots or security checks (or voting rights for non-WA members :stuck_out_tongue:).

As for what we can do about it, it’s also a testament to showing, not telling. We have a dispatch about the Delegate, including a section on Delegate elections, that’s received 110 reads and 3 upvotes over 4 years and 113 days. Kris’ dispatch about this election has already received 92 reads and 3 upvotes over 1 day and 16 hours. Certainly, one aspect of this is that one of those dispatches is much more easily visible and accessible than the other; but another aspect of this is that telling people about our elections doesn’t encourage participation our community in the way that showing people what our elections look like in action does. And that’s especially true if we’re creating systems to tell people all there is to know about our community, instead of looking at the bigger picture and asking what the ‘starting points’ are for learning about our community and what the ‘ending points’ should be for joining it.

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I suppose you need to keep in mind that fact that the vast majority of TSP is on the On-Site. However, it’s also important to realize that not all of them are actually active in TSP, and at best we might get a couple hundred actually participating in the region.

As to why they’re not on the forums, they might not feel that they need to be. To them, just talking on the rmb and creating lore for their nation might be all they want from NationStates. Some of them have probably already joined the off-site and just aren’t as interested/involved in it. Speaking from experience, being active on all three sites is very time-intensive, and some people are going to have to prioritize one site over the others.

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While this is technically true, I do have my own thoughts on whether that should be visible/maintained at all, but we can have that conversation elsewhere.

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I don't think it's safe to affirm that just because someone voted in the poll, that they care about TSP. It's all too easy to receive a telegram, click a link to the poll, and cast a vote. We don't know if all those voters took the time to read Griffindor's campaign or if they even understand what the election involves, or if they're just voting the same way they would vote in any other poll.

I think one conclusion that we could safely draw from the election is that telegrams reach people, and another conclusion that we could perhaps draw as well is that people are more likely to read telegrams that are short and to the point, so maybe there is merit in sending our periodic telegrams (without devolving into spam) to invite people to sign up as legislators/voters?

34

I move that the appointments of Legend, Maverick, Shibuya-Kanon, HumanSanity, and Pronoun be brought to individual votes.

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35

Leg only or gameside too? (Id assume leg only)

36

I’ll second it

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37

Fair enough. “Care” was probably too strong a word, or at least asserted too broadly / with too much certainty.

I guess what I meant is that these are folks who seem to have potential to be engaged; they read their telegrams and act on them, even if that act is relatively easy. Which I think leads naturally to your second point, that periodic, brief telegrams with straightforward updates / invitations could have the potential to engage at least some of this group.

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[OOC]If the issue is hosting, don’t worry about that part - the TSP server (that we pay for anyway) has more than enough space and resources to accommodate TSP projects such as this.[/OOC]

39

I move the appointment of EmC to a vote.

40

I’ll second it again!