Users browsing this thread:

Jebediah · 02-04-2022, 07:56 PM

VOTE JEB FOR MoE!

Jeb/Conflict of Interest

I'm Jebediah, also known as Johngi, and I've been a legislator of The South Pacific intermittently for nearly 4 years now, and in that time I have gotten to know the Ministry of Engagement and its predecessor, the Integration Department of the Ministry of Regional Affairs (I was one of the last leaders of that department before the split).

I have also been a member of the SPSF, and I was involved in the activities of several of the other branches of the former Ministry of Regional Affairs. I have never been involved in the activities of any other region other than through SPSF missions.

I am now, as you can see, planning to run as the Minister of Engagement. I believe that the Ministry of Engagement has essentially reached almost completion on several key projects and that they are ready to enter into a state of active, untampered service. These are the dispatch project (which has brilliantly covered all of the topics it set out to) and the outreach project (a small but successful project). On top of that, all the other regular functions of the Ministry, such as graphics and the regular recruitment stuff (telegrams, advertisements in the dispatches and front page, etc.) are being served satisfactorily. This leaves the Ministry to focus outside of its walls - on advertisements and recruitment outside the normal, on a more ambitious wiki project to go into far more detail than the dispatches, and on collaborating with other ministries with whatever possible. This is what the Ministry should be focusing on: keeping up engagement by expanding past successful activities and fostering new ones. In that order - if keeping up engagement and expanding past successful activities means doing something for another Minister or the Prime Minister, that is what we will do, since almost every single project in the MoE is focused on supporting other branches of the government (graphics, writing, outreach, recruitment...).

TL;DR
Here is how each project is going to be supported:

Graphic design: I am going to let it continue doing its thing, but considering proactively making advertisements and/or other infographics.
SPACE (Card Exchange Program): I am going to make sure that this is continued to be worked on. We will focus on finishing guides and announcements, possibly involving the writing team, and then make an announcement as soon as it is ready.
The Writing Team: Much like the graphic design team, I am going to let it continue doing its thing (with some further advertising to the rest of the government who I am sure would love free writers). When no one wants anything, the writing team can always help with the wiki.
- The Dispatch Service: I (and others) have noticed that the dispatch service itself contains too much information to be useful to new players, and it is often confusing to navigate. I am going to focus on making it more concise and easy to understand and move some of the more niche and less important topics to the wiki.
The Wiki: As has probably become clear, this is going to be one of my focuses. I am going to standardise navigational templates, make an editor's homepage to make it easier to handle the project, and then instruct the leader of the wiki project to continually focus the writers' efforts on certain themes each week/fortnight/month.
Outreach project: Just make sure it gives out accurate and up-to-date information. I am open to hearing suggestions on how to expand it or make it better.

I do not want the other projects to be neglected just because of the rapid development of the wiki, however. For all of these projects, I am going to ensure that there is an active leader and deputy who can support the project, and continually check in on their progress.

I am also of the opinion that the Prime Minister's words are more important than mine in these situations, which is why I am focusing on making these projects easier to access and work on for newer players (especially the wiki). If there is ever anything that is needed by the PM, or indeed another member of the cabinet, I will make sure to make it a priority task for the relevant projects, over the current ones we have.

Public Infrastructure

The Ministry of Engagement is going to, under my leadership, focus on the continued growth and improvement of TSP's public infrastructure- which means dispatches and the wiki project. These projects have always been the natural focus of the Ministry and I believe we should further focus on this aspect. By further increasing our informational content we make it easier for people in TSP to read about itself and the outside world, as well as the roleplay worlds - and the more people can read about the history, politics, incidents, and events of TSP and other regions, the more engaged people will be in the continuation of its legacy, and the easier it'll be for people writing about TSP to get relevant information.

Those last two points are the most important. We must grow our public information repositories beyond mere guides for new members and into a state where it can be useful for all members of TSP (and for those outside it) as an informational resource. In doing so, we will help support new players' understanding of the game and the region, and we will help support all those who are thinking of doing anything - be it propose a new law, make a new news organization, join a ministry or anything else. An encyclopedia is far more useful to people for initial research and general reading than a collection of guides or the archives of a newspaper.

That's why it's vitally important to ensure that this content is kept maintained and continues expanding. We will be continuing the trend of bringing articles and guides from the various ministries and giving them a centralised home within the dispatches and the wiki, where they can be easily updated if the need arises and can be easily accessed by anyone.

To fulfil these objectives, I am planning the following short-term actions:

Making it easier for people to edit the wiki. This both means possibly relaxing permissions (although currently you just require a forum account) and expanding the writing guides we have beyond formatting.
Cleaning up all the wiki policy and help pages into one wiki editor's homepage, with extra articles added specifying how to make pages fit a consistent style. This isn't going to be a holy untouchable bible of style, but instead guidelines on what we generally want our pages to look like.
Cleaning up the navigational templates and the categories to be consistent and to look nice. Currently, we have a very spotty group of these which don't seem to follow any consistent order - the worst example of this may be the laws category which includes only four laws, and the Charter is not one of them (despite it having a wiki page - although that is also a stub, so do with that what you will). We also don't have many navigational templates, which are essential in making large groups of articles accessible - and the one we do have needs some reformatting.
Focusing on, section by section, completing groups of articles that have been left unfinished in a unified style. For example, we may spend one or two weeks fixing up all the articles on laws and adding in all the relevant history and amendments. We would also take the time to make sure that each article followed a similar format to each other - we would not want one article on a law to include all the amendments and the text in the same article while another article on a different law includes the text and amendments on a separate page.
Imagine Theme Thursday but writing and it's week-long. Writing Weekly?

Long-term, these should cover all the existing topics that the dispatch service covers (in a more neutral, detailed, well-referenced way that covers history and such) and ideally expand to other regions in much the same way. We'd also make articles focusing on other parts of nationstates gameplay, such as the military side of the game.

As for the dispatch service, we will look through every dispatch and see if we can make it more concise and cut out less important information to put in the wiki. As previously mentioned, guides are great for new players in moderation. Too many guides are too many options and things for someone new to read, and after reading and understanding several points the guides become less and less useful compared to an encyclopedia.

Currently, I have been speaking about this all from the gameside of the wiki, which is what the MoE focuses on in general. While some of these changes would apply to both sides (one and two come to mind) the rest would be entirely up to the roleplay side to decide if they want to implement or ignore entirely. Since the roleplay side of the wiki has met pretty reasonable success (especially in A1-0, there's a shit ton of stuff there), I will ensure that the roleplay side of the wiki stays reasonably independent with their own project page, and I will engage in discussion with the MoC and the roleplay community to see how we can increase participation, with the aim of establishing someone or some group to be able to talk with about wiki changes and who may do their own activities increasing activity within the roleplay side of the wiki.

Collaborations with other ministries

The Ministry of Engagement is perhaps the Ministry that is most expected to help maintain and work with other ministries - it creates graphics for all ministries, it creates and organizes public information from all ministries, and it helps recruit members for all the ministries.

Thus, here are the various plans for how I plan to collaborate with other ministries:

MoFA & MoD: The Ministry of Engagement is going to engage in discussions with these Ministries on the possible effects of the upcoming Frontiers update on join counts for both the region at large and the various branches of TSP government. For MoFA specifically, we will be continually talking to their ambassadors for information regarding other regions to develop the wiki.
MoC: The Ministry of Engagement will engage in discussions regarding better promotion of events inside and outside The South Pacific. The Ministry will be considering advertising these events through the dispatch service and perhaps other ways to try to attract a larger audience. The Ministry will also engage in discussions about developing the roleplay side of the wiki, as previously mentioned.
MoM: The Ministry of Engagement, if Bel (or another candidate campaigning for abolition) is elected, will be happy to invite any members of MoM to write for the dispatch service and the wiki from all positions. Your skills would be most helpful in writing wiki articles about current and past events, editing and proofreading all parts of the Ministry's activities, or recording statistics about previous elections. If another candidate who does not advocate abolition is elected (none have declared themselves as of writing this), we will be considering finding further ways to advertise The Southern Journal outside of the forum and fully willing to help with other services.
And across all ministries, we are going to be looking at making advertising campaigns and generally increasing recruitment.

Recruitment & Outreach

Integrating new members is perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the Ministry - it is, after all, the first duty that is mentioned in the Charter for this Ministry. As Minister, I will continue to improve and ensure the constant activity of these functions of the Ministry. Past simply keeping up the welcome telegrams, keeping the dispatch service up to date and talking directly to new people in our discord; we will consider using more creative ways of advertising our region, community and vacancies, perhaps through advertisements made by our graphics team.

With the upcoming implementation of the Frontiers/Stronghold updates, The South Pacific is going to see its member join count cut in half, with the other half being distributed among UCRs which have designated themselves Frontier regions. This not only means fewer people joining the region, thus more effort required and more recruitment posts required to keep the membership counts dwindling, but likely a much higher demand for people in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the SPSF due to the strength raider regions can get from this new system. The specifics of this are not clear at the moment, and what strategies we could use to solve these problems would be decided as it came closer to the time of the change and the specifics were formalised, but it will likely involve further increasing our recruitment campaigns for all branches of government.

Other Stuff

Card exchange exists. We'll finish it... soon™. At least it'll be finished before Crossra- oh.

Also oh god I'm writing this 5 minutes before midnight right when the deadline is and I'm pretty sure I'm going to get immediately cancelled for something. God help me.

Edits
2022-02-05 16:14Z: Added TL;DR and some more stuff about dispatches

[Image: st,small,507x507-pad,600x600,f8f8f8.u5.jpg]

(This post was last modified: 02-05-2022, 12:15 PM by Jebediah.)

Wizard Ferret · 02-05-2022, 03:05 AM

(02-04-2022, 07:56 PM)Jebediah Wrote: If another candidate who does not advocate abolition is elected (none have declared themselves as of writing this)

Sad face

That aside looks to be a good campaign, I especially agree with your focus on standardizing the wiki. You do mention relaxing permissions for editing, I know that's immediately attenuated by the followup in brackets but could you expand on what that means?

Jebediah · 02-05-2022, 09:43 AM

(02-05-2022, 03:05 AM)Wizard Ferret Wrote: Sad face

I wrote that bit two or three days ago, forgot to update it Tounge

(02-05-2022, 03:05 AM)Wizard Ferret Wrote: That aside looks to be a good campaign, I especially agree with your focus on standardizing the wiki. You do mention relaxing permissions for editing, I know that's immediately attenuated by the followup in brackets but could you expand on what that means?

I was considering allowing unregistered users to edit pages - excluding important pages and perhaps making it so the edits have to be approved by a registered user.

Otherwise I want to make it very clear how to make an account - currently there's no indication on how to register an account, and there's no real central place to get all the information for editors (which is the second short-term goal). You have to ask someone in the discord to realize you have to make a forum account and log in with the same details - there's no other way to do it.