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
