[2447.CN] Cabinet Formation & Appointments

Assembly
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Greetings to the Assembly.

The Coalition is old, and has seen many faces. Most keep their visit to a few hours, enjoying a drink at the Lampshade Bar before continuing on to their greener pastures. Others enjoy the hospitality for a few weeks, trekking out to where the llamas sing. Some lucky few decide that this home is their home, and join us in maintaining a proud democratic tradition that is one of the oldest in NationStates. But, their numbers have dwindled in recent times. Today, we must reverse that course.

This administration is wholly dedicated to that goal. I spoke of bringing SPIRIT online, and that will be our number one priority until the program is established and we can allow it to do its magic. To that end, I am appointing @HumanSanity as the Minister of Recruitment, charged with launching SPIRIT using Asperta and with a rewards program in tow. They will charge forward on getting South Pacifican recruitment started, for the first time in modern memory and potentially ever.

After recruitment, comes integration. No ministers will be appointed here, instead, we will be working with the Assembly and with the community on Pathways to Engagement and on softening the harsh swings that our political culture tends to feature. I would encourage all Legislators to ask their questions early, and often, to help build up a more consistent and reliable check on executive actions.

Another part of our political culture that needs work is consensus-building. We have, for the moment, lost the clear path forward here within the SPSF’s senior leadership, but it is nothing that we cannot correct internally. With that, I am appointing @Vrigny as the Minister of Defense to help myself and the Admirals build up our officer talent and leadership skills. He has my full faith and confidence in this task.

@lordnwahs will remain on as the Director of the Office of World Assembly Legislation. Little needs to be said on the work he’s been doing here and will continue to do. I know I am deeply appreciative of his efforts and am looking forward to the analyses his Office will produce.

Two final notes, as this is already heavily delayed and I owe it to the Assembly and to the Coalition.

I am only appointing two Ministers. This does not mean that I do not value the input from everyone else on all other topics. Rather, it reflects a different idea of how I’d like to run the Cabinet and the government in this term. To me, Ministers are given a wide latitude and whatever agenda is specifically delineated to them, and serve as a ‘Deputy’ in the particular role as a means of training them up and giving them the room to accomplish good things, and be able to handle any failures that may come. I have failed in the latter of these two in my past administrations, and I apologize to the Ministers that I was not able to give adequate mentorship and training.

Without a Minister of Culture, or of Regional Affairs, to accomplish the tasks that we the citizenry expect them to, it falls on me to be responsible for. To that end, I am seeking to establish a different politicla tradition, of citizen buy-in and citizens running more events that they would like to see happen. An appointment as a Minister to run one or two movie nights is a high bar, but a simply petition to get a ping and an event set up should be more common.

I will also be appointing @Welly as a Cabinet Advisor for Sunshine Act Compliance, with a focus on the forums first since we’re well past the due dates here. I offer my apologies and note that Welly is extremely excited to get to work, so I hope that the inner workings of the Cabinet is of interest to the Assembly and to the region.

As always, I am at your service.

Yours Truly,
@ProfessorHenn / Sporaltryus
Prime Minister of the Coalition

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Questions time:

  1. This means that you will be responsible for both Culture and Foreign Affairs, but that sounds a bit much to me, are you sure you’ll be able to do both?

What exactly does this mean? And how exactly will the Minister of War Defense help with this?

  1. I admit the lack of newcomers worries me (I don’t know if Welly was ever a Minister, though), does this also concern you or not? If so, what will you do to get around it? If not, why?
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Will you share at some point further details about what your culture and integration agenda looks like?

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Typical Welly :stuck_out_tongue:

I do wonder, though, if it’s sustainable or healthy to need to rely on particular folks for Sunshine Act compliance. Do you have any plans for the term (e.g. holding more discussions on the forum in the first place) to make Sunshine Act compliance easier?

How will these events promote regional culture?

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I already do most of the FA work, and I have no plans on reviving an ambassador corp or something similar. FAC’s folks (Pronoun, Vrigny as MoD, HS Drew and Slab as Admiral) will remain there to help coordinate defense/FA and to get more folks onboard with the long-term FA agenda, which remains Aegis cooperation, building up an FA network to get our WA resolutions passed, maintaining ties with non-GP regions, and festivals. As for Culture, and to answer the below questions simultaneous. . .

The culture agenda for this term is citizen engagement on the things folks want to do. I want to see more people doing more things, without the region collectively leaving it to the government to accomplish. I’m going to be regularly engaging with folks in lampshade-bar and on the forums to see if the things that folks talk about wanting to see happen will happen if they’re given the power to do it.

Absolutely. That and my schedule over the term will continue to see me pulled away from Discord, so forum usage will increase out of necessity as well.

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I’ll double post because editing it back in is for suckers, but it’s definitely not sustainable which is why it didn’t get done. Not a lot of people want to dedicate their time on a hobby game going through years old discussions, seeing if they contain info that needs classification/redaction, publishing it, and doing that for dozens, if not hundreds of threads. Nakari did it a few years back, Welly will help me do it now, but it’s just by fluke more than anything that we have folks who want to do it.

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It concerns me that this is a larger scale version of “we’ll let RA staffers decide which projects they want to work on”, which ended up being an all-around failure because there needs to be some semblance of government guidance and leadership when developing a cultural agenda.

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As Minister of Recruitment my goals are:

  • Work with the OOC admin team to ensure the Asperta bot can be set up in TSP’s server and oversee any relevant IC government functions for that
  • Develop the guides/materials necessary to ensure the bot can be more widely used (this includes: drafted recruitment TGs, guides to recruitment, guides to using Asperta)
  • “Recruit the recruiters” – i.e., post sign ups for people to become a recruiter, regularly handle “applications” for that, answer any questions that people have as they start being a recruiter, reach out to any specific people who I think might make strong additions to the recruiting team, etc. Ideally, I will also run a competition/promotion early in the process of launching SPIRIT to promote people sending recruiting TGs.

As a condition of my taking this role, I informed the PM that I would not handle any foreign affairs-related responsibilities from launching a recruiting program.

Feel free to ask any questions.

I agree with what Henn said, but wanted to add that this is a criticism of our Sunshine Act structure itself rather than Henn’s decision to ask Welly to assist with it. Henn delegating Sunshine Act compliance to an eager and willing individual is a smart way to run an administration, as the alternative is to do all of the work of governing themselves.

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Hi everyone, here are my aims for OWL this term, in brief:

  • More quality: We know it is possible to churn out analyses for every proposal that goes to vote (at least when I’m actually on top of these things…), and to promptly get threads up and running to ensure that the Delegate votes on WA resolutions at-vote as early as possible. This is a good thing and helps with showing gameside that TSP remains a formidable voice in the WA (as evidenced in our work during the Europeia-led effort to repeal TBH’s condemns), but I am going to try to encourage more quality in our analyses and discussions where possible. Sometimes this will happen organically, but I’ll make a concerted effort to engage with people who vote on the OWL threads on the Discord so that discussion and the eventual analyses can be of the highest-possible quality.
  • More mentorship: We have experience in our ranks - GA stalwart @Canineanimal has been a fairly long-term OWL volunteer, for example. I want members (new and old) interested in learning more about GA/SC proposals to join in and learn more about the WA with us.
  • Kickstart a proposal-drafting culture: We now have an area on the forum again where people can post NS-related topics. I want to encourage interested members to utilize this in the coming term to post their ideas for GA/SC proposals, which can potentially be polished. For starters, I’ll try my best to start drafting proposals on the forum myself.
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What concerns me is that it feels their isn’t enough ministers in my opinion, I feel that their should be at least a MOFA, it worrying to see that their is basically no ministers and a PM almost doing everything that is what I am seeing here, also I feel in my opinion not having a MOC is a bit of a risk, but I am new here, and don’t know as much so it could be different, I think what I am trying to say here is that the PM is doing a lot more work, without appointing ministers to help him do anything? However I do like the appointment of @Welly to the Cabinet Advisor for Sunshine Act Compliance, I think that is new and truly worth noting. I just can’t wait to see how this term goes, as this point and @Vrigny, welcome back to being MOD!

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The lack of ministers doesn’t concern me that much, other than the lack of MoC. I have full trust that you can do the job of MoFA. However, the lack of MoC makes me feel like culture and events will be entirely disregarded. “Citizen engagement” gives me the suspicion that you’re going to ignore culture and leave it to citizens to hold events, which will subsequently result in nothing happening on the culture front when no citizens create and organize events themselves.

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I have to agree.
Henn just mentioned the two night movies on Discord, but I’m skeptical about the uptake of these events and how impactful they’ll actually be in the region. There is a lot of criticism about MoC “only” holding events in NationStates itself, but the events themselves are not a problem. I think it should continue, and future Ministers of Culture should think of other ways to also promote regional culture. One thing does not exclude the other.

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More than the lack of a dedicated Minister of Culture (which still does concern me) is the lack of a comprehensive strategy or vision. Letting people hold the events that they want isn’t a strategy, comprehensive or otherwise. People won’t always know what they want, nor will they always have the know how for how to successfully hold events, nor will their wishes always contributed to the creation of a robust regional culture. We need leadership.

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When elected, was it the Prime Minister’s plan to appoint only two Ministers?

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I did not have a particular number of Ministers in mind to appoint. I wanted a MoFA, but for a particular agenda, and there are very few in the region who I trust to work with me on it. I asked one citizen and they refused, so I will handle it myself. I wanted someone to help me with the SPSF, and someone to help me with recruitment. To answer about culture, I’ll reply to Kringle’s post. . .

I don’t know that I can create, offer, and execute a very comprehensive strategy on culture, or that I am currently aware of anyone who might have one. As PM, I am more concerned about shifting our political culture slightly to soften the harsher aspects of TSP political life for future administrations, but I recognize this is an unsatisfactory answer. I can only offer an open mind and an open DM currently.

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What does this mean?

I hear you about keeping an open mind, but my concern is that if the Prime Minister cannot or will not offer leadership in culture, then who will? We can’t reasonably expect someone else to pick up the slack when we just held an election to select our head of government. That someone else should be you, if nothing else to determine who can be a minister with the vision to put forth a cultural agenda and the qualities to execute it.

In fact, what good is us having a recruitment ministry if we don’t have a vision for which regional culture we will welcome recruits into? Will we really recruit just to inflate our numbers?

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Still slightly shocked about somebody refusing to be the MOFA, and I can think of many reasons why, and I can think of many people that would be MoFA, if they ever get appointed

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I can think of many people who do roleplay, and are very passionate about it, that might have a plan, and execute it as MoC, also Kris is right, on what he said, if their is no MoC, Henn then you need to step up and find a way to execute Culture.

I have an idea, maybe if @HumanSanity is up to it, and as well as you @ProfessorHenn, and like you mentioned Kris, about the regional Culture, maybe we can make @HumanSanity being Minister of Recruitment, into more of a Minister of Culture / Minister of Recruitment hybrid? Like @HumanSanity can do both, or both incorporate recruitment and culture into the same ministry? Would love to hear thoughts to see if this can possibly work.

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I’m not sure it would be viable to the extent that culture isn’t necessarily the work for which HumanSanity signed up.

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Roleplay is not the same thing as culture.