I agree. TNP has, as far as I'm aware, always had issues with the fact that our vast bureaucracy can be incredibly daunting for newcomers. My government has been committed to giving new people a shot and introducing them to the region at a normal pace. Perhaps we aren't doing enough to mitigate this. What are your suggestions, Wolf and Owen, if you have any?
Having had a little think about it, I think there are a couple of things that could be helpful for newcomers to make it feel a little less daunting, but also easier to understand more about each area of the forum and the sort of things they could do:
1) When first joining, the first area that most new people see is the Dock, and so, I think the goal should be to keep this subforum as simple and clean as possible, so as to not scare people thinking there is so much, just to begin. Partly to help with this, I would personally look at refreshing the FAQs subforum in the Dock to 1) bring it up to date with where things are, but also turn it more generally into a welcome area for new citizens and residents to the region and have a thread potentially discussing each area of the forum (RA, Govt, RP, Card, Court etc.) in as simple ways as possible to allow people to begin to understand what they are without trying to read who subforums of information. This welcome area could also have things like an anonymous questions section where people could fill out an anonymous form (say google form for example) with any questions they have, and then people from the Ministry of Integration can answer those questions in this thread as if 1 person has the question, chances are, other would have the same question too but might be too scared to actually ask someone and feel that they might look silly. I would also have something like a thread for people to talk about their newcomer stories about joining TNP for the first time and maybe tips that they found useful to get more involved or find out more about the region.
2) While giving new people a shot in Government is great and is something that needs to be done, Activity and transparency at the top of Ministries is also so vital both in terms of ministry recruitment, but also to enthuse and encourage people to get involved. A bit part of this needs to be forum side activity for the ministries. The fact that 3 Ministry subforums haven't had a public post in a month isn't great, and one not having anything public in nearly 3 months, really isn't a great advert for getting involved. Thinking back to old things, but even something as simple as monthly updates from Ministers is such an easy thing to have to keep people involved in what is going on behind the scenes but to also advertise fun things coming up to get people excited and want to get involved.
3) Another thing that Ministers should be trying to do as much as possible is spread the workload. Say there are a couple of tasks that need doing, instead of just asking the same people over again, try and open it up to more people and give others the chance to get involved and have a go. Take MoFA for example, if a big event has happened, it would be a good chance to try and provoke a discussion with more members of the ministry and encourage them to express their views on the events and the impact it could have, rather than same people just bringing up events and moving on. Just by the Minister actively trying to open conversations, it is going to (hopefully) encourage more people to say what they think and also teach new people almost through osmosis about events and how they impact other regions. I used MoFA as an example here as it is Ministry that interests me most, but the same would go for events and activities in all of the Ministries.
