| Cutting Down the Ministry of Engagement |
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Today, the Ministry of Engagement is littered with various different projects. I'll place these in three general categories:
 ). I'll explain my argument function by function.Integration Currently, the Charter states that "[t]he Minister of Engagement will be responsible for recruiting and integrating new players into the Coalition's government and community," among other duties. Many, but not all, of the Ministry's existing projects can be placed in this category. Indeed, engaging with new players and encouraging/helping them to become more involved in the regional government is an important aspect of any feeder. Furthermore, the dispatch, wiki, and outreach projects are directly related to each other. All share a common purpose of providing information to citizens, and as such, I believe a more narrowly defined mandate could produce a ministry with more focused progress. Public Infrastructure To be blunt, I would say the 'public infrastructure' maintained by the MoE is mostly just personal projects. The cards project and graphics team are limited by having a small number of players with the right knowledge and experience. Not everyone knows how to farm cards effectively. Not everyone knows how to use vector graphics software. It's unrealistic to expect any minister, regardless of what campaign promises are repeated in every election, to produce meaningful progress in fields where such progress depends on a small subset of players happening to have the time, energy, and motivation. It's equally unrealistic to expect, or just to hope, that small number of players maintains their interest in these areas. People tend to have interests that shift over time — it's not as if that's something we can control, nor is it right to blame anyone for that. However, shoving these areas under the banner of a government ministry has not made them any more accessible for the average citizen to become involved in. Instead, it has only led to a bloated MoE portfolio where stagnation in some of these areas is simply the status quo. Promotion I believe the functions performed by the promotion project should be shifted to the Ministry of Culture. Why? Culture doesn't have to just be about fun, games, and festivals. If Culture is meant to be about bringing people together and building community, then we should start by acknowledging that our culture is political, has always been political, and always will be political. People who decide to participate in an online democratic government don't just walk in through the door with no interest in politics. With this in mind, the MoC should be expanded beyond the "regional cultural activities, events, and exchanges" that the Charter tasks it with organizing. It should be tasked with, for lack of a better word, engaging with citizens of the region. You build a stronger and tighter-knit community by hosting events, yes, but also by involving people in our regional politics. With this in mind, the MoC can and should take a more active role in engaging with existing citizens, as opposed to the new citizens that the MoE should focus on. The MoC already does this with games and events for citizens and thus I'd argue that expanding that to include communication about opportunities for government involvement is a natural step. To those wondering what kind of amendment I actually have in mind, a rough draft is included below. I don't exactly have much experience writing or amending laws, so please do point out any mistakes I make. If in doubt, everything I said above is probably a more accurate reflection of my intended meaning than anything down below.
I believe this is a wonderful start.
I had considered accepting my nomination for MoE in the last general election but did not do so, in particular, because of the Public Infrastructure aspect of the job. I do not have an interest in (nor a good understanding of) the mechanics and/or function of say, card farming, or making graphics. This change would make me, and I am sure many others, more likely to pursue this office. I would also be in support of renaming the office to "Ministry/Minister of Integration" to make it better in line with its new, refined, agenda. -Griffindor/Ebonhand
-Current Roles/Positions -Legislator 2/24/20- -High Court Justice 6/7/20- -South Pacific Coral Guard 11/17/20- -Minister of Engagement 6/17/22- -Past Roles/Positions -Legislator 7/3/16-4/10/18 -Secretary of State 4/3/20-2/24/21 -Chair of the APC 9/24/16-5/31/17 -Vice-Chair of the APC 6/1/17-4/10/18 -Local Council Member 7/1/17-11/17/17 -Citizen 5/2012-12/2014 and 2/26/16-7/3/2016
I support this for the addition to the culture ministry’s responsibilities and the narrower definition of the scope of MoE to information and recruitment. Saying it should do “public infrastructure” definitely freaked everyone out because how broad that is. The name should be changed to Ministry of Information, Ministry of Recruitment or Ministry of Outreach if the intended responsibility is recruiting people. Integration is the work of integrating recruited people into the community which is what Culture will do. Graphics still has to be worked on by someone though. The body is self-governing these days so there is no input from the ministry. We can keep it in MoE or move to MoM or make it independent like OWL (my preferred solution).
And fyi, it is not MoE’s responsibility to set up a card program. It is very much a pet project with no legal enforcement so I am hesitant to call it a burden on the minister. We put it under MoE because nobody else wanted and I happened to be in MoE. In the future when it is done it will become its own institution. (Or if the prime minister wants it to not be a pet project anymore he can make it led by an appointed position)
Chief Supervising Armchair
(02-28-2022, 07:14 PM)Griffindor Wrote: I believe this is a wonderful start. Ministry/Minister of the Interior? Ministry/Minister of Internal Affairs? Ministry/Minister of Home Affairs?
While I agree with the general premise, I don't think just throwing out all the public infrastructure parts of the ministry and not moving their responsibilities anywhere else is a good idea. Those projects, sometimes personal though they may be, do have an important place within the government:
I do realise that, however, some of these projects have been attached to a minister's agenda when perhaps they weren't suited to it - that's happened with a lot of things, especially in the MoC and MoE, and their common ancestor MoRA. I think, however, that the reason that happens is simply because it's just the best place to have a project in the first place. You say that you don't think that having these projects in a ministry has made them any more accessible to new people - but really, I'm quite sure it has. From a new player's perspective, by far the most important and accessible things to go join are the assembly and the government. It's plastered all over any new player advice, and the forum is almost entirely made up of it - in fact, the only real thing in this region that isn't the government (or roleplay) is SPINN - a moderately active newspaper which you probably only know about if you've heard someone else talk about it or seen the interviews on discord. That's not to say that it's just because SPINN is bad and any other independent organisation is even worse, but more so because everything about our region actively favours projects in our government, allows them to flourish there where they can be accessed by everyone, and all but completely hides anything else from public view unless they really try. If we want to tackle the problem of people setting up their projects in ministries and getting help with them from people who are there, then we need to make it much easier to have non-government projects, and in a way that it's much more publicly accessible. An easy way of doing this would be to create a new agency (like the OWL) solely dedicated to keeping track of all these personal projects and giving them discord channels for them to be in, and then moving over all the personal projects over to it (depends on who you ask, but I'd imagine it'd include cards, TSJ, (big maybe) wiki, and anything new). The director would be solely responsible for making sure they are active and deserve to keep their channels, but other than that the projects and the people who work on them would be perfectly free to do whatever they want, and these channels & projects could be promoted similarly to how we promote other ministries and the assembly. This is obviously a very rough idea, which I might develop after I get some sleep, but at the very least I want to get my point out that even if we really want to keep projects like these out of government agendas then we need to make it easier for them to go somewhere else - not just write them out of law and hope they survive on their own, when very clearly that rarely happens. ![[Image: st,small,507x507-pad,600x600,f8f8f8.u5.jpg]](https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.703640759.6162/st,small,507x507-pad,600x600,f8f8f8.u5.jpg)
Thanks to everyone for the feedback!
With respect to graphics, I can see how it can be helpful to have it somewhere under the government. While I still somewhat question how many players in our community have significant experience with and (current) interest in graphics, I it is true that among the MoE's current responsibilities of "providing graphics to the government and citizens," the focus has been on the 'government' so it makes sense to keep a link there. I do agree with Viet that creating a department like OWL would probably be the neatest way of going about this. My understanding is that the wiki is currently hosted and maintained by the admin team, and I'm not sure why that would change as a result of reducing MoE responsibilities. The MoFA has already been adding information about other regions, and I'm sure it can continue to do so. Similarly, the MoE can add content to help new players, the MoC can add content helpful to retain existing players, and roleplayers can continue adding roleplay content. As for naming, my purely personal preference would be 'Ministry of Outreach.' I think it conveys the purpose of a recruitment-focused ministry succinctly and clearly, but this is probably a relatively minor point. (03-01-2022, 09:36 PM)Jebediah Wrote: You don't need to know how these things work precisely to be the minister - it's perfectly fine to be (and indeed many ministers across many ministries have been) completely incapable of working on one specific project yourself, so long as there are others to work on it who are specialized in that. No one ever stopped anyone from being prime minister because they had never written an article in the ministry of media or organized a cultural exchange - what matters is overall ability, not specific ability in each and every area.I largely agree with this — but a wide-ranging and disconnected portfolio can still discourage potential candidates from running. There's an important distinction between being capable of fulfilling an office, and being interested enough to run for it. (03-01-2022, 09:36 PM)Jebediah Wrote: even if we really want to keep projects like these out of government agendas then we need to make it easier for them to go somewhere else - not just write them out of law and hope they survive on their own, when very clearly that rarely happens.The only project that I envision would be spun out of the government would be the cards project. Even that is loose, because it's not currently in our laws anywhere to begin with and hence not being written out of our laws either. There's nothing that requires the MoE (or any other minister) to oversee or 'host' the project, but there's nothing prohibiting it either. And as Viet pointed out, once it's ready, there's nothing that would prevent the Assembly from making it its own institution, nor is there anything preventing the Cabinet from appointing someone to lead it more formally if there's interest. (03-02-2022, 03:38 AM)Pronoun Wrote: snip Thanks for clarifying the points to me - I more or less agree with most of them, but at the same time I want to know what the projects would (or should) look like after this change. In my opinion, they'd look roughly like this:
And, of course, I don't really see why promotion should be moved to MoC. Promoting opportunities in the government goes hand in hand with orienting and guiding new players to the region - set aside the issue that it'd be a completely different thing from everything else the MoC does. There's no reason why these should be apart from each other. Because of that, I have a slightly different proposal:
I don't see any real reason to change the name - "engagement" describes the ministry's role as both integrating new citizens and informing/keeping existing ones just fine, and any other name I've seen only focuses on one part of that (usually the integration part) or isn't really related to any role of the ministry. Although real life is not much better, the US Department of Energy spends the majority of its funds on managing the US's nuclear weapons program. Also, MoE is literally spelt the same as moe which I'm surprised no one has joked about yet. PS: In any case, "maintaining public sources of information" is already qualified by the statement "The Minister of Engagement will be responsible for recruiting and integrating new players into the Coalition's government and community...". That would also mean, according to your bill, that both the MoC and the MoE would be responsible for recruitment and promotion...
While there will inevitably be overlap between what the MoE and MoC does, not everything has to be under one roof. The MoFA is adding information about other regions to the wiki. The MoC (and LC) are working together on RMB pings for culture events. The MoM, needless to say, is doing plenty of writing. Much of this could be considered to be information for existing players, but a less centralized system enables those most familiar with each area to work with it. If someone just loves to write dispatches, they can always join multiple. Our ministries can always communicate and collaborate with each other. We have a Prime Minister for whom "coordination of executive activities" is part of the job description. I think we have the means by which we can facilitate these connections between different governmental functions, without preventing our ministries from serving clear, focused purposes.
Instead of building a ministry around a skill like writing, we should build it around an area of interest. A ministry focusing on informing new players has a clear purpose. A ministry focusing on informing new players, but also writing existing players because people were doing that anyway, but maybe not the writing that other ministries are already doing, is much less clear. On this front, I can sympathize with your concerns about how strongly promotion is related to the MoC. It's something that I considered as well, but ultimately, I'd argue that we should look beyond the MoC's current responsibilities. Hosting regional events only goes so far — if the ultimate goal is to foster regional culture and community, the MoC needs the tools with which to retain players, and hosting regional events is only one of them. Much of what's currently lumped into 'promotion' in the current MoE can be connected to this. We're a fun-loving region because we find plenty of games and opportunities to bond over, but our regional culture is also, for example, defender because our military deploys in defense of innocent regions, and democratic because we hold free and open elections. Some of these areas might fall under 'promotion' but are ultimately linked to our regional culture. (03-04-2022, 12:28 AM)Pronoun Wrote: A ministry focusing on informing new players, but also writing existing players because people were doing that anyway, but maybe not the writing that other ministries are already doing, is much less clear. It's not just because people were doing that already - it's because you cannot make a resource for new people and then simply leave it at that. This is half because it's common nature to refer back to the first resource you were given, and half because introducing new players to the region is not a one-stop process where afterwards a player becomes an existing player and can be handed off to another place. Because of that, it just makes sense to have guides and information for new players and existing players handled by one body, because they aren't separate things. In fact this is exactly why the projects were handled by the MoE in the first place. In any case my proposal doesn't really change this. As I've said before, the law still says "The Minister of Engagement will be responsible for recruiting and integrating new players into the Coalition's government and community, including by sending welcome messages and maintaining public sources of information." These sources of information will still be primarily focused at new players and at integrating them into the region, but not to the exclusion of everything else. (03-04-2022, 12:28 AM)Pronoun Wrote: Hosting regional events only goes so far — if the ultimate goal is to foster regional culture and community, the MoC needs the tools with which to retain players, and hosting regional events is only one of them. Much of what's currently lumped into 'promotion' in the current MoE can be connected to this. We're a fun-loving region because we find plenty of games and opportunities to bond over, but our regional culture is also, for example, defender because our military deploys in defense of innocent regions, and democratic because we hold free and open elections Neither of these, or anything else you think the MoC should also do, fall under the banner of what the MoE does as promotion. This would be fine if you wrote it as promoting regional ideology or events, but your bill specifically states the MoC would be need to "raise awareness of and promote government opportunities or messages." while simultaneously the MoE would be responsible for "recruiting and integrating new players into the Coalition's government and community" or, in other words, they'd both be promoting government positions and both would be promoting some kind of message from the government. This responsibility of promoting government jobs and official messages has no relation to fostering other parts of our culture - and hence there is no reason for it to be part of the Ministry of Culture's portfolio. Promoting government jobs is something that is done as part of the Ministry of Engagement's responsibilities because it is a natural part of recruiting and integrating new members - indeed, that's one of the main goals of integrating members in the first place. And promoting government messages (which usually means things like telegrams asking for delegate endorsements) is a very small extra responsibility which is done on the side and was never part of either ministry's responsibilities. Usually things like that are left for whomever needs to publish those messages in the first place, but sometimes they ask the MoE to do it as they are the most experienced with publishing guides and such - although the MoM would probably be better suited at this. tl;dr: Under my proposal, the MoE would still be responsible for recruiting and integrating new members through maintaining public sources of information, it just removes a bit of redundant wording and also doesn't restrict the MoE to an overly narrow definition of "new members" Promoting government jobs is kept as part of the MoE's responsibilities as it is an inseparable part of reaching out to new members. Promoting government messages wasn't part of any ministry's responsibilities and will remain that way - it is not part of fostering culture specifically, and is also something that all ministries are responsible for and have a stake in. While it was something the MoE did on request, it was clumped under general "promotion" the vast majority of which related to recruiting for government positions. If you do wish to have the MoC promote regional ideology and politics, you should specifically refer to that and not something else (and my next question would be what this does to the Ministry of Media, whose entire purpose is to publish news content and hence inform people about ideology and politics)
Regarding things like graphics, cards, and other things that require some level of technical skills, these shouldn’t be ministries. We’re not always going to have a good graphic designer in the region, or someone who can maintain a complex set of scripts.
Not everything needs to come with a political office. We could easily splinter all cultural things into non-political offices if we didn’t insist on rewarding being able to host an event with a Cabinet ministry as mostly a status symbol tbh. |
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