USoVietnam for yet another full-term of Minister of Engagement!

Greeting citizens of the South Pacific! I am running this campaign for the hope of being elected for another term of the ministry. This campaign will focus on addressing institutional issues that have plagued MoE under the recent transition of the ministry from an infrastructure to an actual "engagement" ministry and finishing remaining projects with my best efforts. I have served the first two MoE terms (October 2020-June 2021) of this ministry and oversaw the construction of the dispatch project and started the work on our card program. This campaign post will not be long because I don’t have a lot of ideas at the moment since the RON was unexpected. Anyway, let’s get started!

Embrace the fact most of what we do are pet projects

As many of you may have heard, most of what MoE does is technical-intensive projects that only a handful of people are capable to work on. MoE has unfortunately treated them as standard mandatory projects which led to a slew of minister resignations lately as they don’t know how to approach these projects. My approach to this problem is for MoE to officially treat technical-intensive projects such as the card program as “pet” projects. This means each project coordinator is granted complete autonomy by default. The minister will normally not be in charge of any project and is just responsible for establishing and executing recruitment strategies (e.g. what mass telegrams should we send when there are yet another new wave of nations, how to assist SPSF in recruiting members,…) and not micro-managing any project. I will also clearly specify that any member of MoE may join any of these projects without any restriction (not that there is any restriction now but people are not well aware of the fact and end up locked themselves in a particular team) and can propose projects of themselves.

Establish guidelines on outreach operations

The ministry currently doesn't have any standard guideline to work with when it comes to outreaching. A guideline are necessary so that we have a standard operation procedure during normal times as well as special times such as a sudden wave of new nations. Establishing such a guideline will be one of my main objectives of the next term. The minister will manage and execute this guideline as their standard responsibility rather than managing projects like before. I don't have any specific thing to talk about the guideline now but it will simply be a list of steps we have to take and what we should do in specific scenarios (E.g. send telegram with content X if we have a wave of new nations,...). To sum things up, I will try to make the minister's main job as managing and executing recruitment policies rather than managing infrastructure work which should be done by project coordinators most of the time with no intervention from the minister.

Make the outreach team official

MoE is currently experimenting with approaching newbies via Discord using a small team of people known as the Outreach Team. This is expected to be our long-term activity driver as anyone can participate in this. I plan to make this team official and work with the current project coordinator to finalize the team's targets and methods and create a detailed easy-to-access guide on what members should do in many scenarios. The team should also expand to manual gameside telegramming. We will also work on ways to reward members with cards.

Do my best to finish the card program

The card program is currently on hold since any active player who knows enough about card trading is busy. I cannot promise this will be finished “soon” but it will eventually be done. A guide to card farming and setting up a few forum posts and dispatches are the remaining work which I will hopefully finish in this term. We will launch each part of the program instead of everything at once and continually change the program as we learn new stuff. Granted, this makes the thing unstable for participants but we have no experience doing something like this before so some trial-and-errors are needed for a successful program.

In case you forget, the program will allow members to farm cards on some puppets that they dedicated for the region. Issue count of each member is recorded and ranked at the end of the month. A member with n^th most issues answered will receive a card reward with the n^th highest value among cards we farmed in the current month. Aside from this, they can request cards from each other dedicated puppets, and participate in giveaway events. (Rip pull events and TCALS).

Provide frequent public updates again

This is pretty self-explanatory. I will provide public updates on what the ministry has done at least every month again. This will help keep the public, especially the Assembly, in touch with what we do

Conclusion

As you may have noticed, this campaign was made in a hurry as I did not expect RON to win so some details are lacking. I will try my best with the time I had to accomplish these promises and serve a full term. If you have any question, please ask! Thanks!


Conflict of Interests
- Current roles: Senior staff in the Ministry of Engagement, Commander in the South Pacific Special Forces, Technical Admin
- Past roles: Minister of Military Affairs in 2017 and OWL Secretary in 2020. None foreign aside from residency in TNP.

- Main nation: United States of Vietnam
- Puppet nation: Esterio and R/D puppets in Artificial Solar System

Chief Supervising Armchair

(This post was last modified: 03-08-2022, 02:35 AM by USoVietnam.)

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Three questions:

1. Beyond what you've already voiced, do you have any further thoughts on @Pronoun's proposal to cut down on MoE responsibilities? More specifically, should Pronoun's MoE reform pass during your term as Minister, how will that change your platform, priorities, scope of operations, etc.? If another MoE reform were to pass during your term as Minister, how would you respond to that?

2. What will you do to help ensure we don't end up in the same position again 4 months from now, struggling for MoE candidates?

3. In the past, I've found MoE work can be needlessly bureaucratic and formulaic. We have guides upon guides and plans upon plans for a cards program, but have never come close to actually launching a cards program. We have a set of on site Dispatches so long I complex I couldn't point a new nation to just one to start with. When you talk about needing ever more expansive guides for our outreach work and the need to "make official" the outreach team, how does this actually benefit outreach work as opposed to creating additional bureaucracy and documentation that players will rarely use?

Minister of Foreign Affairs
General of the South Pacific Special Forces
Ambassador to Balder
Former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense

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Out of curiosity, and I mean that as a genuine question with no "gotcha" intent, do you actually want to run or are you running simply because someone has to be the minister?

Former Delegate of the South Pacific
Posts outside High Court venues should be taken as those of any other legislator.
I do not participate in the regional server, but I am happy to talk through instant messaging or on the forum.

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Out of curiosity, and I mean that as a genuine question with no "gotcha" intent, do you actually want to run or are you running simply because someone has to be the minister?

It is both. I have always wanted to take the driver seat again but I prefer to sit out if someone else wants to run. Now that no one wants the role, I have decided to run for another term.

Chief Supervising Armchair

(This post was last modified: 03-08-2022, 02:35 AM by USoVietnam.)

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Three questions:

1. Beyond what you've already voiced, do you have any further thoughts on @Pronoun's proposal to cut down on MoE responsibilities? More specifically, should Pronoun's MoE reform pass during your term as Minister, how will that change your platform, priorities, scope of operations, etc.? If another MoE reform were to pass during your term as Minister, how would you respond to that?

2. What will you do to help ensure we don't end up in the same position again 4 months from now, struggling for MoE candidates?

3. In the past, I've found MoE work can be needlessly bureaucratic and formulaic. We have guides upon guides and plans upon plans for a cards program, but have never come close to actually launching a cards program. We have a set of on site Dispatches so long I complex I couldn't point a new nation to just one to start with. When you talk about needing ever more expansive guides for our outreach work and the need to "make official" the outreach team, how does this actually benefit outreach work as opposed to creating additional bureaucracy and documentation that players will rarely use?

1. If the reform passed with its current form, I would spinoff card program and graphics design into an independent body as it clearly mandated that we only need to maintain information and outreach, not the entirety of public infrastructure. There is no more significant change aside from that.

2. The only thing I can do as a minister is to train already experienced folk for it. This is obviously way easier to say than do as it is not just skills but about whether they actually want the role or not. Our tasks seem hopelessly boring. As a legislator however, I can contribute to any legislative effort to address the problem like the debate we have now in the Assembly. 

3. The only guide we have now is the dispatch editing guide and the card plan forum post though, I don’t think that is a lot and the latter is more like a note than a plan. Do you have a concrete example for excessive procedure because to me it is the opposite, we lack material to train newer members and any sort of guideline to give a base on what to do so all ministers after me basically don’t know how to carry out their work at all. Bureaucracy seems like the least problem to me. Getting people and myself to actually work seem harder (the task of writing up guides and threads seem daunting which is what setting up a card program is mostly about and I am not that confident as a card trader). The dispatch and card projects require already skilled members which is why I want the more beginner-friendly outreach team to be “official” as in we finalized how it works and makes it a permanent program. I ran out of hope training people to maintain the more complicated area of the dispatch project as it requires some familiarity to our laws (thankfully, they don’t need much maintenance however) and setting up the card program requires skilled traders which we don’t have a lot offsite.


Not something you asked but I need to vent it out here. The worst mistake I have made as a MoE minister is the fact that I was pushing too much stuff at the same time at too high of an effort and not taking long-term human resources capability into account. We currently lack people who are both interested and skilled enough to do what we have to do. My greatest doubt is if people are genuinely interested in the job here. MoE was honestly born way too soon in an attempt to rapidly modernizing gameside infrastructure while disregarding long-term practicality and now we face with the dilemma of lackluster operational experience and low head count. Its early functions should have been carried out in the already existing media and culture ministry so we could gradually accumulate personnel for a future MoE. Looking back, we should be thankful both OWL and SWAN which are quite “new” and require skilled personnel are independent bodies because if those posts are elected now, they may face the same problem as MoE now.

Chief Supervising Armchair

(This post was last modified: 03-08-2022, 02:36 AM by USoVietnam.)

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