Heliseum Cabinet Nominations

Assembly
7

Thank you to Prime Minister-elect Heliseum for the nomination and to the Assembly for the chance to present my plans if confirmed as Director of Technology.

Who am I?

Hi, I’m Pronoun. I’ve served in various roles here in the South Pacific, including terms as Prime Minister or otherwise in the Cabinet. One thing you might not know about me, however, is that I’ve also worked on various personal software projects during my time on NationStates. Depending on what you do in the South Pacific, some projects that you may have seen or used before are:

  • Purée, a military tool for identifying regions that may have been tagged;
  • discourse-fancy-lists, a Discourse plugin that enables a Markdown extension supporting additional list types, like the lettered lists in our laws; and
  • Founding Rates (I haven’t really named it), a website showing how many nations are (re)founded, and which regions they’re (re)founded in.

My goal is not to be the South Pacifican who writes the best software, but rather to combine my governmental and technical experience to bridge the gap between our government and our tech.

Why have a Director of Technology?

My experience, when I was in the Cabinet, was that our technical efforts and expertise often lacked coordination. To give some concrete examples:

  • We have a regional graphics repository, which is sometimes passed down like tribal knowledge, but it hasn’t been changed in two years, in part because knowledge of how to actually update or use it is limited.[1]
  • We have a system for dispatches — in Viet’s words, they “just volunteer” — but it can feel like an opaque system and that results in some friction in updating them. (For instance, this past term, the Cabinet announced a new Getting Involved wizard but our welcome dispatch still links to the old one.)
  • We sort of have a system for managing regional nations, but also not really. I know there’s a couple of stragglers on my personal autologin.

I don’t blame anyone for these challenges — most players sign up for a government simulation, not a software engineering simulation — but I hope to leverage my personal experience with technical matters to improve them. Where ministers have specific technical questions or needs, I’m happy to assist; where they don’t, I hope to spend my time building the foundations for easier on-ramps in the future. My goal as Director of Technology is not to mandate the use of specific tech or to lead government-backed software development, but rather to undertake a birds-eye comparison of the tech we have versus the tech we want and map out the status and feasibility of different ideas for future improvement.

I realize that ‘Director of Technology’ is a new title — the Prime Minister and I discussed the matter, and ultimately we wanted to let the Assembly have a chance to discuss and vote — but I expect that, if confirmed, I would spend more time ‘between’ ministries than ‘in’ a ministry. I’ve outlined some of my own experiences and ideas above, but my goal is to listen to the experiences of others in government and support our technical needs across different areas of government, meeting folks where they’re at, rather than pursuing an agenda of my own specific tech ideas.

What are my goals for the term?

Some examples of projects I’m considering are:

That said, these ideas largely come from the technical gaps I perceived during my time in Cabinet, and I don’t want to presume that those are the same gaps that others will feel during the upcoming term. These are some of the ideas I’ll bring to the table, but I also want to meet ministers where they’re at. Thus, my more general goals are to:

  • Increase accessibility. It’s not always clear how to use our tech. As Director of Technology, I will write documentation to make these technologies more accessible for members of our government, including those without prior technical experience, to support them in more efficiently and effectively fulfilling their responsibilities and implementing their agendas.
  • Improve visibility. There’s no point making our tech easy to use if nobody knows it exists. As Director of Technology, I will proactively coordinate with ministers on where our tech may be useful for their needs, including sharing updates on technical developments as they progress and also identifying areas of friction where tech could grease the gears.
  • Plan future improvements. From my experience, we have more tech than we tend to think, but there is also certainly tech that could be useful which we don’t currently have. As Director of Technology, I will cooperate with ministers to identify where those gaps lie and build a list of future areas of software development that could help fill those gaps.
  • Support South Pacificans writing software. At present, there isn’t a clear pathway for South Pacificans who’d like to work on tech to know what projects or needs exist. As Director of Technology, I will scope out plans for future improvements in terms of their feasibility, with the aim of producing not just a list of ideas for projects but rather concrete ideas so even newer coders can have somewhere to start.[4]

  1. A brief aside: I think “copy the Imgur link from another dispatch” is currently easier than using the graphics repository, but using the graphics repository, we could also do cool things like animated SVGs. I think Europeia uses this well in their dispatch banner. ↩︎

  2. To the best of my knowledge, we had one years ago, but I don’t know the specific features it had. (Try searching “OWL bot” on Discord and you’ll find just some scattered mentions over the years — of which there are more questions than answers.) I know Em listed some feature requests back in 2023. ↩︎

  3. I think we’ve manually posted some this past term, but this is also something that can be and has been automated, such as by The Pacific, Europeia, The East Pacific, and probably others as well. ↩︎

  4. To be honest, NationStates is how I got my start! ↩︎

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