"Hi, I'm MoRA now" statement

Hello all,

Thank you to the Prime Minister for their nomination and to the Assembly for their confidence in me to serve as Minister of Regional Affairs. It’s been far too long since I was able to go back to the basic bread and butter of NS community-building (events, integration, talking to new players, and keeping things fun and festive) which I’ve loved so much in the past. I’m excited to step into this job and get right to work.

With that, I’ll briefly elaborate on what I laid out in a post about my nomination.

I’m confirming that @Griffindor will stay on as Mentorship Coordinator. Getting this program off the ground has been a major “to do”, keeping it running and tweaking it are the next steps. I am going to be working with Griffindor closely on this. I also encourage anyone with thoughts on the program to visit this thread and share.

As I said previously, our Dispatches are in need of further consolidation, streamlining, and review. Minister Pronoun did an exceptional job of starting this effort, but more work and standardization needs to be done. Our Dispatches can’t unpack every nook and cranny of NationStates, that’s too overwhelming for a new player. We need to provide the core information that new nations need, when they need it, and then let them pick their journey from there. I’ve asked @KrisKringle to step up to this project as Dispatch Rewrite Coordinator, as I believe he has a strong vision for this project. Kris and I discussed and are hoping he will have meaningful progress to show and discuss on this in about 2 weeks. While I’m overseeing this, I’ll be a bit more hands off here, as I have great faith in Kris’ capabilities and he will be working directly with Prime Minister Henn, who has also expressed an interest in this project. If people have thoughts or input, feel free to contact Kris and Henn directly or post here.

In the coming days, I will be forming an RMB Task Force to handle promotion, events, and outreach on that platform. I expect the structure of this effort and the team’s composition will be a work in progress for several months as we transition away from the Local Council as the sole gameside government, and as a result this will be an effort I’m overseeing directly. I will start by reaching out to the old Local Council and increasing my own RMB activity in hopes of identifying promising event planners and thoughtful posters who may be interested in being involved with this effort. I think there are going to be quite a few false starts and growing pains in this process, but it’s important to start it with energy and intentionality so we can make the jump to this new mode of RMB governance as effective as possible.

Finally, you can expect to hear about TSPride plans soon. June is pride month, and too many of our recent TSPrides have felt unsupported and underdeveloped (largely through no fault of their coordinators). I’m hoping to put some more love into this one and hope that it will be an event I and the region can be proud of.

I’m not going to promise more than that. I have a few pie-in-the-sky ideas for integration/recruitment that I’ll probably prod along (as identified in my nomination post) but I’m not going to stake the term on it since those tasks are beyond my personal technical capacity. If there’s spare capacity, we may do some side events, but I’m going to prioritize my core projects and not let myself get distracted or lose sight of these core projects. I hope that I’ll be able to deliver.

If you want to help out with any of this, the way to get involved is to send me a forum PM or a Discord DM. Let me know what interested you and what you see yourself bringing to the project!

Cheers,
HS

It all sounds a bit more bureaucratic than I’d thought, but I’m hopeful for this term to bring a new spark to our regional affairs. Griffindor has done fine work in getting the mentorship program off the ground. Kris’ feedback on the welcome dispatch RFC was invaluable, and I’m glad to see the dispatch revamp get the continuation it deserves. Looking forward to further news on the RMB Task Force and TSPride as well!

Hello,

I’ve been in office about two weeks. I wanted to provide a (brief) update on what I’ve been up to and what’s coming next.

  • I’ve been running regular NS on-site polls and cross-promoting them to Discord to encourage participation. Prime Minister @ProfessorHenn appointed Evinea to help with this process as well.
  • I’ve designed an event to design the region’s llama through a series of on-site polls followed by a designing contest between two TSP artists. Full details will be released in the next 2 days.
  • Griffindor has continued to oversee the Mentorship program. After discussion with the mentors, the program has been moved to opt-in rather than opt-out, and Griffindor will post in the “welcome” thread for each new member mentioning the program. We’re still discussing if and how RP should be included.
  • I reached out to the RP mods to open communication for any future RP needs.
  • I have not yet had the chance to compose the “RMB task force”. However, some of the old LC have been helpful in identifying ongoing projects, and I will follow up on this shortly.
  • With advice and facilitation by the PM and MoFA, we’ll be doing TSPride jointly with another region in the second half of the month. More info on this will be forthcoming.
  • Prime Minister @ProfessorHenn will have some offerings for the 20th Coalition Day on June 2nd. Thanks to the boss for putting that together.
  • @KrisKringle has continued to work on the Dispatch revamp project, and we’ve been in regular communication. Kris and I will touch base again in a week.

As a note, I give this update now because I will be on a leave of absence from June 3-7. I will finish up the llama poll project planning before I leave, passing it off to Henn to conduct the initial polling while I’m away.

Let me know if anyone has any questions :tsp_heart:

Hi all,

I did not intend to let this topic fall into neglect for quite this long. RL has been demanding more of my attention, and I’ve had two long-weekend LOAs over the past month, one of which was unanticipated. As a result, there’s a bit less that’s “happened” than I’d like, but there’s still a few updates.

  • We wrapped up the Coalition Day Llama Design Polls event, which allows us to design the region’s ideal llama over time via a series of on-site NS polls. Thanks to @ProfessorHenn for carrying the weight on executing the plan for this in my absence. @acalex designed the llama that is currently seen as our regional flag and is shown at the bottom of this post. There’s also an emoji version on the Discord :eyes:
  • We started and wrapped up the SeasPride festival with Europeia. We held several long term events, including a spam and art contest, as well as a series of movie nights with films selected by @ProfessorHenn. Thanks to our allies in Europeia for doing this event with us!
  • Following the change to opt-in rather than opt-out, the Mentorship Program’s participation has decreased substantially. Currently, we don’t have any plans to change that, but I’m open to thoughts/insights.
  • The effort to revise our Dispatches has expanded to include a discussion of the Get Involved and Intro Wizards on the forum, as well as how best to include RP in the integration process.

Yours truly,
HS