Anjo for Chair! (again)

*emerges from the shadows of the Chair's Private Chambers* Why hello, it's me again, your friendly neighbourhood bureaucrat, and I'm running for re-election as Chair of the Assembly (on relatively short notice, admittedly )! Sadly, my brain did not grace me with some innovative motto this time round, so a boring standard campaign title it is.

First of all, a short introduction for those who don't know me
Hi, I'm anjo, professional introvert & lurker. I joined NS in December '19 and moved to TSP a month after. For the best part of my stay here, I was mainly involved in the Office of WA Legislation, writing voting recommendations and even programming a Discord bot for some tasks (although it's currently not in use); I served as OWL Director for about 9 months until October this year. I'm a member of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Engagement, serving as ambassador to the Free Nations Region and Dispatch proofreader/up-to-date-keeper respectively. In the Assembly, besides being a legislator, I was a Deputy Chair under my predecessor Purple Hyacinth for three terms and succeeded her as Chair in August.

I've greatly enjoyed serving as your Chair of the Assembly for the past four months, and I hope that I could live up to my campaign promises for the term: Although the evil, evil electorate cold-heartedly ripped my poor Deputy Chairs from my office to stuff them in a Cabinet a few weeks into my term (so I couldn't do as much together with them as I'd liked), the new Chair Guide will hopefully do the part of helping educate people who are interested in the office a bit more, and the auto-formatter tools for the Chair have also been completed (granted, they're a bit bare-bones right now since I went 100% functionality over any styling, but I will definitely try and make them less of an eyesore in any case, regardless of this election's outcome!) to reduce the time and mental capacity strain on future Chairs. I did take some weeks getting the Weekly Assembly Updates for the RMB out regularly, but they've consistently been published for the last months.

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But, I should get to the point ‒ why should you re-elect me as Chair, and what have I planned for the coming term if you do so? First of all, I know the office well: Over my tenure as deputy and now my term as actual Chair, I've learned our legislative procedure pretty much by heart and can act quickly and correctly when it comes to official Assembly business. Also, I love the job ‒ administrative, procedure-focused positions is just what I enjoy, and if there's spreadsheets involved, that's the icing on top for me ! Regarding projects, honestly, I'm relatively content with the state of the office of Chair right now and don't have anything too massive that I'd like to see implemented, so I don't have any shiny-sparkly mega-project I can buy your vote with present to you. However, there's still a few things that I'd like to do:

Assembly Infrastructure, Outreach & Integration After I had posted the Chair Guide, I reviewed the other parts that were listed to be included in the info thread revamp, and I'd like to continue filling them in if elected, so that we have one central location for all the forumside Assembly informational stuff (after the old thread's parts partly got swept into the archives, where the Chair can't edit them to keep them up to date). I'd also like to revisit the idea of an Assembly Mentorship Program revamp that was planned in the Chair's office under Hya, especially now that people have started posting applications for it again, showing that there's interest in such a program. The Weekly Assembly Updates on the RMB will also be continued if I am re-elected, and I recently had a vague idea to start something like an "Assembly Gazette" in the form of a gameside dispatch to accompany them: Basically, when a new vote or something else important is started, an entry is made there and it gets posted to the RMB, sort-of like the "This is now at vote" post in bill debate threads, but with the additional records to put it into context (as I'd imagine not everybody on the RMB would know what's going on from just a standalone post) and possibly wake interest in the Assembly in more people.

Law Cleanup I'd also like to do another cleanup of our laws ‒ Hya mainly did the formatting, and I'll focus on the text here. I remember that when I thoroughly read a number of them when working for the Commission on Laws back in… January, I think?, there were still some inconsistencies between a couple of them, or some sections just didn't read that well. If elected, I will systematically go through all of our laws and work out any improvements that could be made and present them to the Assembly for discretionary edits (or of course as regular bills, if there is ambiguity in the intent of the respective law or it's a more extensive rephrasing). I might do this even if I'm not returned to the Chair, but a clean slate of discretionary edits would certainly be more organized and efficient than a bunch of separate amendments

Deputy Involvement If elected, I'll naturally seek to appoint a number of Deputy Chairs again. For this, I will again be publicly asking for interested people to apply, and I'll strive to provide them the opportunity to become accustomed to Chair duties if they'd like to perhaps run in the future, letting them open/close votes themselves every now and then and of course also involving them in the other tasks of the Chair. If they want, I'd also let them handle parts of the projects this term themselves, but in any case I will always be consulting with them regarding the projects so we can achieve the best results with joint brainpower. Admittedly, there was a bit of a rocky start to my attempt at this last term and my deputies and I didn't have much time together, but with this experience I am confident I'll be able to handle it better now!

The Usual Stuff Lastly, I will of course continue faithfully fulfilling all the duties of the Chair if you entrust me with the office again: I will remain impartial in the execution of the office, open and close votes in a timely manner (including all the quality-of-life steps for fellow legislators, like Discord and gameside pings), publish States of the Assembly on time (perhaps even with graphs too in the future?), and keep the Legislative Activity spreadsheet uniform and up to date with LoAs, individual votes and the like.

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That's basically it: Quickly summarized, in addition to the usual Chair pledge of working dutifully, I'm promising to continue filling in the new Assembly info thread, work with my deputies to revive the AMP, continue and expand the RMB outreach of the Assembly, conduct a complete consistency check of our laws, and involve interested legislators in the office as Deputy Chairs. I hope I could convince you to approve of me on your ballot when the voting period starts ‒ if you have any questions for me, please do post them below!

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Conflicts of Interest

I am currently serving as Chair of the Assembly, MoFA Ambassador, and MoE staff member in the South Pacific. I am not involved in any other regions besides my service as Ambassador to the Free Nations Region and being the Founder of my puppet storage region.

I have access to the following nations: Tepertopia, Socialist Tepertopia, Free Tepertopia, The Class Council, and Anjo (primarily for Issues); Office of WA Legislation (OWL staff duties); all nations in United Protectorate of Tepertopia (puppet storage for nations I once created as factbook props).

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anjo our resident underground machine, the hidden oil that keeps many of the region's gears turning. excited to see you running again.

I'm glad that you're looking to appoint some deputy chairs again as well as delegate some tasks to them. You note that your deputy chairs last term were elected to Cabinet and you didn't get much time with them. What's one thing you think could be done to ensure that Assembly mentorship can continue and won't be interrupted/reset in case a deputy is elected or appointed to some mutually exclusive office?

Likewise, what do you think is the biggest challenge facing the Assembly right now?

 
Witchcraft and Sorcery

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Former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. Formerly many things in other regions. Defender. Ideologue. he/they.

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Thanks for the questions!

What's one thing you think could be done to ensure that Assembly mentorship can continue and won't be interrupted/reset in case a deputy is elected or appointed to some mutually exclusive office?

Regarding your first question, one obvious solution would be to just appoint more deputies. After all, it was just an incredible event that all three of my deputies last term (@Tishers [Nyxonia], @Floptop, and @im_a_waffle1) were elected to serve in Cabinet in a single swift strike. But, considering that possible deputies are likely active people who consequently are also likely to seek an elected office themselves, where they can enact their own ideas freely, this might not be a universal solution. It might be an interesting idea to instead have deputy application permanently open, so that anyone who's interested can join in the office of the Chair at any time. The Legislative Procedure Act luckily enables the Chair to explicitly define what each deputy is empowered to do, so I could imagine a scenario where I have my "primary" deputies and interested legislators could join in in an "observer"-like deputy role, where they can still learn about the office and do tasks but some sort of safeguard against applications in bad faith exists.

Likewise, what do you think is the biggest challenge facing the Assembly right now?

Hm, that's a tough one. The Assembly was relatively quiet during my term, and other than the recent controversies about ballot typos and LegComm response times, there isn't really any big legislative drama that directly comes to my mind, and those two seem to have been or are in the process of being addressed by the primarily responsible institutions. One thing I did notice was that voting turnout in Assembly votes during the last few months has consistently been dropping (even falling under 60% in the last vote), but that might just be because the voting requirement didn't apply to November and people have been gradually going inactive over time? In any case, boosting our efforts in not just recruiting but also retaining new legislators and preparing them to run for public office ‒ which I would attempt to do via my continued and improved gameside outreach program and the restart of the AMP respectively ‒ are definitely something I consider important challenges for the Assembly and the office of Chair right now.

(This post was last modified: 12-19-2021, 07:50 AM by anjo.)

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administrative, procedure-focused positions is just what I enjoy

I like the way you think.

and if there's spreadsheets involved, that's the icing on top for me !

I really like the way you think.

Former Delegate of the South Pacific
Posts outside High Court venues should be taken as those of any other legislator.
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