I'm not completely opposed to creating the MoRA again, but I wouldn't support it if we kept the already-bloated parts of our current portfolios.

Earlier this year, I made the case that the "public infrastructure" area of MoE responsibility — graphics, the wiki, and the cards project, primarily — made for a bloated portfolio that causes stagnation in these areas. I think there was some discomfort at the time with how these projects would fare without the official backing of a government ministry. But I think that the more pertinent question, looking back now, is how they really fared with that backing.

Let's start with graphics. Here's an example of the current activity level in the graphics team: in preparation for the Aegis announcement, Jay asked the graphics team if anyone had any designs to submit. How many submissions do you think we got? One. And that's being generous, because it looked like this — although I did get a good chuckle out of this joke, thanks Comfed. Or, another example: earlier this year, I noticed that in certain image formats, some of our graphics weren't being displayed properly. I sent in fixed versions of those graphics on May 9, but it took until July 3 for anyone with access to our image repository to accept those changes. Could I have bumped earlier and more often? Yeah, and that's my bad. But this is just one example of many requests, some of which have received no response at all.

Or, let's consider the wiki. I'm a bit biased here, because I am technically the director of the wiki project. It may seem strange for me to come out here bemoaning the lack of activity on the wiki project. But, at the end of the day, a wiki should be treated like a wiki. TSPedia isn't just an encyclopedia of TSP — if it was, we might as well host it as a big Google Doc — but rather an encyclopedia of TSP that anyone can edit. That's the whole point of running a wiki! So yes, there currently is not an active team of wiki editors or anything of that sort, and I also don't see that as an issue. There are members of the community who grow the content of the wiki, for both the gameplay and roleplay, and they do so out of their own interest, the way a wiki usually works. What's the role of MoE here? What does government 'supervision' or 'involvement' actually accomplish here?

And finally, the cards project. As far as I can tell, this remains almost entirely Viet's solo project. I don't want to downplay that — I've never personally farmed cards, but I have no doubt that it's quite a challenge to build a card program. But has keeping the project under MoE given any more livelihood to this project? Has it allowed other South Pacificans to get involved with card farming and trading? Or has it just remained largely a solo project because few others currently active in our region have the time, expertise, and interest in developing the program?

These programs, one might argue, aren't critical to our government operations — I'm not trying to portray this as some kind of big scandal — but it's precisely for that reason that they also don't seem like critical government functions that we must have a ministry in charge of. As Glen noted back in March:

(03-04-2022, 03:09 PM)sandaoguo Wrote: 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.

Projects like the Southern Journal are cool. But just because something is cool doesn't mean it must be shoved into the portfolio of one of our ministries. We're already trying that out, and the results show that it doesn't work. MoM was abolished because it was plagued by persistent inactivity, which putting media under culture isn't going to magically solve. And in a similar vein, there's an import distinction between a MoRA with a specific focus around a particular definition of "regional affairs," and a MoRA created because we just want to shove cool stuff into some ministry, even if it doesn't quite fit, just to say we have it in our government.