[IDEA] A Guide to Citizenship

To strike a compromise between those who wish to see clearer legislation and those who wish to remember that reductions to our law can have grave consequences, I propose it becomes a bit of a project of the RA, to write and design a guide to citizenship or membership.

I'm not sure if any other feeder is doing this at the present, but the guide would simply be a readable, 800-1000 word synopsis at most which tries to cover all the things about being a citizen that citizens ought to know. It's not meant to be a replacement for the totality of our law, but an assembly sanctioned summary of a citizen's responsibilities and the most important details of how our region's government works. Also the guide could even mention our region's culture, since it's not emphasized enough to new entries (IMO). Often-times, I find regions with big bodies of law just let in any member on the assumption they've read their laws, then happily try these same members for breaking these laws, with lack-of-reading-the-laws being negligence for which the region has no sympathy. I wouldn't like to see the North Pacific follow this behaviour, since I don't think our laws should be here to 'screw' people, but protect them -- providing a non-binding summary would go a long way to furthering these sentiments.

Perhaps, citizenship and membership requests could require answers to a brief quiz of this guide (you probably shouldn't need to take the test more than once -- even for RA re-entries). Obviously, players can simply read the guide for the answers -- but this is exactly the point.

Yeah...no. We already have a horrible law which excludes people from the RA if they have not posted for 15 days, even if their main TNP nation is active (like mine was and is) so I feel no need to further exclude members for our already severely diminished RA ranks to satisfy the worries of, lets be honest here, Grosse.

I think that if you are not around here for 15 days or don't participate in any RA votes for two consecutive times then you are either not interest in RA's affair or just don't care. Whatever the reasons, I don't see why you should get to retain membership.

Oh, and I don't think we should complicated citizenship application as new member should be allow to slowly integrate into TNP instead of forcing to, but the guide could be useful to new member.

They should retain membership because if they applied, they are clearly interested and 15 days without posting doesn't equal 15 days of inactivity. The sorry state which the RA is currently in is testimony enough as to how poorly the "activity" laws are working and how much inactivity they are in fact causing.

It's rather strange for someone that had not actually post anything for 15 days to be considered active member of this community. I would be interest to understand what would be categorize as inactive in your opinion.

I logged into my nation in TNP quite often and answered quite a lot of issues. I felt I was being very active, actually.

And there have been times I've logged onto TNP forums and there was nothing interesting posted at all for weeks other than spam forums, and I hate spam forums. If they logged in to look at the forums, they shouldn't be forced to post spam to prove they are active.

I did prefer when the activity law was by activity rather than posts.

It is easy to login once and post nothing, but it takes at least partially some attention to the forum to post something. This is the main point the law is trying to create, to encourage Regional Assembly member to paid attention to the matters before the RA and the region.

Also, I must said that there had been plenty to do on the RA during the past month so it's not like there is nothing to post about. I think I almost always have at least one law discussion on either formal discussion or preliminary discussion so it shouldn't be that hard.

There is only plenty to do because of the lead up to elections. Give it about two weeks after the elections are over and watch as the RA descends into almost total and complete silence.

Well, I would have to disagree.

Looking back on the past 4 months, I have not seen a week past by without ongoing discussion on legislation in the Regional Assembly. If you take time to go back and check it, you will notice that there is usually always at least one agenda before the RA .(Either Preliminary Discussion, Formal Discussion, or Voting) It is just a question of whether the member is actually interest or not.

Discussions also tend to fester in the RA forums for months, so I don't look upon that as a good indication of activity. A better indication of activity would be that of the 12 RA members who do not hold an elected office 10 of them joined in August. The oldest member of the RA is Pasargad, join October 17, 2010, and he's slated to be purged from the RA for inactivity. Everyone else, with the exception of Unibot, has been purged in the time between the last elections and this current one. That doesn't seem to enforce the idea of between election activity.

Perhaps this suggests that semantic alterations to the constitution are not the end-all source and optimum focus of an active community -- that to keep ourselves active, the community needs to find more to do than nit-pick its laws.

If I were a conservative in RL and the North Pacifican sources of activity was the 'Job Market', I'd be talking about stimulating the economy and 'creating jobs'. Perhaps we need some make-work-projects around the region beyond legislative efforts.

I'm think of a Public Works department that would do fun development projects around the region like start RMB games and run them, organize a tg circulated newspaper amongst its members or a text'd 'radio' show done on the RMB, or simply a silly game-esque thing like: we need so many puppets to enter a region named as a 'bridge' between TNP and some cooperating feeder. Using an honour system we would ask no one to send more than one puppet -- for the bridge to be 'officially' constructed we'd need to fill a quota of puppets in the region and those from TNP could fly the TNP flag and those from the other participating feeder could fly their flag and the region with the most 'construction workers' would get to name the bridge. It would just be a game to see who could contact the most natives about a silly make work project, but still something offbeat to do that would incorporate the region. I'm just spit-balling here late at night, but you get the idea, I'm talking about digging holes and filling them back in again for activity's sake.

Please take a look at the Welcome subforum and see what needs to be updated in the threads providing information to newly arrived residents and forum users.

That's basically the same thing as you are asking, and there is a framework in place to post the updated material. It just needs someone to actually do the updating and post it.

unibot are you at all interested in clearing up and update the material in th Welcome area of the forums> If so PM [me].