Greetings, South Pacificans!
It has been a while since I’ve been in the cabinet. Some of y’all may remember my days as Minister of Defence a year ago. It was quite the experience, but this is something completely new, at least if we compare both positions. For a long time I thought that “Integration” is a really complex topic to deal with, even reaching a point in which I thought it was unfixable.
But don’t get me wrong… nothing is unfixable. Everything is at least worth a try. It’s not totally unknown to all of us that integration, as well as recruitment, has consistently been seen as a high priority for Administration after Administration. I’m not making it up, we’ve got countless polls, and polls… It’s in everyone’s mind! And it’s not shocking, simply put: if The South Pacific doesn’t get new members, or more people involved, it will cease to exist, but this shouldn’t be – isn’t – inevitable.
At this point, it could be said that everyone has their own way of defining what “Integration” really means. To be completely honest, it’s difficult to imagine what a Minister of Integration should do, considering we haven’t seen one in a while that has brought visible results. Is “Integration” even measurable? Attracting new members may not be a simple task; it’s not just recruitment, or publishing dispatches. It would be a crime to say that TSP is not an active or interesting community.
Would it even be fair to say that TSP is just one community? Take this MoI agenda post of mine, for instance. I would love it if the South Pacificans who exclusively reside on the RMB and the TSP Discord server also gave this a read, to learn about who is campaigning for MoI and also to give their opinions.
MoI’s Main Goal:
As MoI, I think the main priority should be to somehow find (mainly) RMBers who may be interested in participating further (e.g. joining the forums, becoming a citizen, joining the Discord Server) but haven’t done so. Clearly, this is not an easy feat, as people may have priorities and interests that others do not have. However, some things could still be done. Some of the things I’ve thought about are:
-
Advertising activities that TSP offers but may be difficult to discover at first, such as the forum-side roleplays.
-
Promoting participation in TSP politics by showing the benefits of citizenship, as well as showing how interesting participation in the Assembly can be.
-
Publicizing TSP’s military, the SPSF, in order to recruit new members into the military gameplay side of TSP.
For this, I will send out regular messages to those who are new in TSP, in order to help them discover these parts of the community. This effort will be done through RMB posts, regional telegrams, as well as posts on the forum and discord server when possible.
Recruitment:
Almost one year ago, the South Pacific International Recruitment Initiative (SPIRIT) was launched. Made possible thanks to Europeia’s Asperta recruitment bot, it was supposed to attract and recruit countless new nations who weren’t founded in TSP. I’ll be straightforward with it: it hasn’t worked.
At the time SPIRIT was launched, TSP had around 4,500 nations. Now, however, TSP has 4,390. Then again, that seems like too simple an analysis. When SPIRIT started, TSP had more nations, but it was the region with the 10th most nations on the site. Now, with fewer nations, we’re 8th. Does NationStates overall have fewer nations now? Could be.
A major problem with SPIRIT was that it didn’t measure and track several different variables that are important to recruitment. Perhaps our views on integration and recruitment would be different if we knew:
-
How many nations actually joined TSP due to SPIRIT’s recruitment telegrams?
-
How many of these nations stayed for a reasonable amount of time?
-
How many of these nations were actually integrated into the community, instead of just joining the region?
-
How many nations is TSP losing per day (CTEs/emigration)?
-
How does the number of nations in NationStates vary over time?
Clearly, tracking this manually will be quite a challenge. Ideally, we would have our own recruitment bot and program to track these, but alas, I don’t know how to code. It will have to be manual for now.
Why do I even care so much about tracking how effective SPIRIT has been? I did say it didn’t work, and it’s for a reason. If a program doesn’t have any results to show, I think that it’s pretty safe to say that it didn’t function at all.
Another big issue with the SPIRIT program is the lack of active recruiters. It’s quite evident that recruitment cannot be magically solved by one single person and a dream. Preferably, the Minister of Integration should be a coordinator of a Ministry of Integration comprised of several members who are active recruiters for the region and who also advertise other TSP activities. It’s not hard to see that the more recruitment and promotion we do, the more members we’ll attract.
This is why I plan to recruit recruiters, if you forgive the repetition. If the assembly, or the SPSF, or TSP roleplays can be small communities of their own, why can’t TSP have a community dedicated to recruitment?
I will admit, this is not completely new, and could be seen like a new attempt to SPIRIT, but some of the things I would love to introduce are:
-
Recruitment competitions. Inspired by my previous experience as MoD, there could be something similar to the SPSF service awards, which could be earned by the most prolific recruiters.
-
Writing competitions. Recruiters would write different recruitment telegrams, and then a vote could be held to see what the “best” recruitment telegram is.
-
Hold events in the discord server, advertised in the other places, whenever TSP hits specific recruitment milestones.
Final Words:
I’ve always thought I was quite an idealist. It’s true that integration has always been on our minds, and it’s something that’s not easy to tackle; or else we would probably have moved on from it already, happy with some results.
I have decided to stick with plans that I honestly believe could be possible to do. Advertising our community to those who may not know about it, and giving SPIRIT a second real chance to function is something I’d be content with. Of course, I would love to hear your opinions and suggestions. A stubborn MoI that doesn’t listen to any ideas and thoughts from the community itself may be even worse than not having a MoI.
Please, I beg you, integration is not an issue that can be effectively solved by one single person. I’m here to coordinate, give the first ideas, and have the initiative, but if any of you want to collaborate in any of the efforts, I’d love to have you as a recruiter.
Conflict of Interest Statement:
I’m pretty sure many of you know me already. I’ve been a member of TSP since 2021, and I have been a citizen of TSP, as well as a Legislator for a while now. I’m also a SPSF Lieutenant, and I previously was Minister of Defence under PM Penguin as well as a Junior Commander in Libcord. I have been on NationStates since 2015, and I was a resident of TNP for 5 years, as well as a TNP Citizen in 2016 for a brief period. I also am one of the founders and publisher of the independent TSP newspaper, The South Seas Gazette. Finally, my NS-related activities are mainly SPSF or RP-related (on the TSP forum).
I hope to be a reliable and efficient MoI for the term, and will begin my work on the ideas I suggested for integration as soon as possible.