The Endorsement Exchange Program

This is an idea that has evolved over discussions with Eluvatar and mcmasterdonia during the past few weeks.

You may be aware of the in-game challenge I had issued and promoted to try to raise my endorsement count and endorsement rate. It was generally quite successful, allowing me to reach and maintain an endorsement rate of 83%, as well as break the previous endorsement record. At the same time, it has been useful for getting more of our nations to join the WA.

Now that that challenge is complete, I am planning to issue a new one. I was originally considering making it about the Security Council: try and raise the endorsement counts of SC members. However, after the discussions I mentioned with Elu and mcm, all three of us agreed that it would be better to use this challenge to increase endorsement counts of all nations in the region in general.

The idea is that, in the long term, strenthening the endorsement counts and influence of our mid-level layer of nations is more important for regional security, than if we do the same for the SC only. Of course, SC members are also going to benefit. We can additionally use this program to promote WA membership in the region, as well as recruit new SC members.

I would like first to get your feedback on this idea, and second to get the SC's sponsorship, so that I can run this as a Delegate+SC co-sponsored endeavor.

I am considering doing the following:

1) Having of course a dispatch, like the one above.
2) Setting a goal of attaining a 10% endorsement saturation level (number of total endorsements given in TNP / number of total possible endorsements in TNP) by the end of the term. We are currently at a little above 5%.
3) Giving people access to a daily-updating list of WA nations in the region, shorted by number of endorsements given and number of endorsements received.
4) Having (bi?)weekly telegrams to WA nations, remininding them of the challenge and telling them about the progress we've made.
5) Having a bit less regular telegrams to non-WA nations, inviting them to join the WA to help us beat the challenge.
6) Creating a series of awards and features to promote the best performers in the challenge. For instance, each week's top endorsement givers/endorsement risers/etc. get to be featured in the WFE. And top endorsers, top endorsement counts, etc. get nice badges.

I am also looking for a theme for the initiative. I was thinking we could make it like blood donations ("give the gift of influence, donate endorsements"), or maybe a monetary exchange ("TNP endorsement exchange", come up with some way to give each nation a "price" in the exchange market). What theme we pick will be used for imagery and for theming the material I described above. Your feedback on the theme in particular is really appreciated.

I like the idea. It gives nations in the region a 'common cause' to work for - that is, something that entices people to actually participate in the region. If we could tie it into regional security in terms of playing up on the goal of making us the strongest region in NS (more so than you are already doing), we could be onto something.

Exactly, the common cause aspect, and the fact that everyone can increase their endorsement, is the key. I expect that, with proper promotion, we will see very large participation and strong long-term benefits for regional security and activity.

Obviously I support this.

One of the key reasons being that a Delegate can ban a hell of a lot of nations. Especially now that influence decay is a factor. We need to be thinking about the influence of other nations outside of the Security Council.

I am also looking for a theme for the initiative. I was thinking we could make it like blood donations ("give the gift of influence, donate endorsements"), or maybe a monetary exchange ("TNP endorsement exchange", come up with some way to give each nation a "price" in the exchange market). What theme we pick will be used for imagery and for theming the material I described above. Your feedback on the theme in particular is really appreciated.

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I love both of these ideas.

Any other thoughts on this?

Overall I like it, not sure about the frequency of the telegrams mind, but thats a minor knitpick from an old fuddy duddy, beyond that though I can see no reason to not want to follow through with this.

Yeah, I think a telegram once every three weeks or once a month should be enough.

I usually send TGs every couple of weeks, but to different subsets of nations with little overlap. So, it shouldn't be an issue.

I'll leave this open for one more day before I proceed. Unless there are any objections by then, I take it it is fine to present this as sponsored by the SC?

This is brilliant! I love TNP. Other feeders have had endo caps less than 80 with an automatic banhammer for any hapless nation who runs afoul of the oppressive laws. This program is genius, and should be very attractive to nations who enjoy playing the actual game.

The idea that nations can increase their influence while helping the region makes it a patriotic thing to do, like buying war bonds in 1940s era US.

The number of TGs seems absurd and offputting. And at what point do you have to tell people they *can't* go any higher and we start to worry about nations deciding to go full bore and gather as many endos as they can?

I think if we establish in the initial telegram what the purpose of this campaign is we should be fine. We would need to establish clear boundaries and make it about *influence* gain rather than simply an extremely high level of endorsements.

The new law surrounding our powers is better for this type of situation. We can play it by ear and if necessary advise a ban if a nation doesn't respond to our requests or is clearly attempting to exceed the Vice Delegate's endorsement buffer/count.

We have excellent tools to continually monitor endorsement activity. I'm not worried about the occasional tarter. Usually a friendly email is enough to rein them in. For the wider community. communication is key. The era of mass TGs has brought about the ability to develop a more informed populace. If needed, an unendo campaign to curb an overenthusiastic endorser is going to be much more efficient than it was previously.

I think this program is one of the best things we can do to grow a more vibrant region. The idea is so good, I wish I had thought of it myself.

Eluvatar has requested permission to share some of the information he has amassed about this idea when he initially thought of it. I believe he has messaged the Vice Delegate and is awaiting a response before he posts here.

If I understand the gist of this correctly, then, the idea is to strengthen the security of The North Pacific by encouraging World Assembly members in the region to endorse each other a bit more rigorously. In doing so, it creates a much larger mass of nations with significant levels of endorsement so that a rogue or otherwise illegitimate delegate will have to expend a considerable amount of influence to banject the lot.

The corollary, of course, would seem to be that the Security Council, due to influence decay, is not a sufficiently large body of influential nations to deter as effectively any such delegate. That is, the new scheme seems better than the present.

One question I have is, Can the increased cross-endorsement scheme have staying power? My gut feeling is that with attrition, retention and turnover, there comes to be a natural level of cross-endorsement without a sustained campaign to boost it. Our current levels across the North Pacific should be considered a baseline against which to measure the success or failure of this program. It should also be considered the default in the event that this new campaign should cease, whether intentionally or through neglect. What are the implications for regional security if this new effort is not sustained?

Let us suppose that this is tried and proves to be easily sustainable and successful. My opinion is that this (relatively) uninhibited freedom to endorse is attractive to some players (such as myself.) This is a market niche that the other GCRs seem reluctant to exploit, and I personally think it has made The North Pacific a far superior alternative to the other GCRs -- a point worth noting when recruiting from each other is not permitted.

And if this does prove very feasible, it raises another question: What of the Security Council? Many of you are long-time members of The North Pacific who do band together from time to time to regulate matters with norms both published and unpublished. I would posit that, regardless of what I am about to suggest, that this would continue anyway.

I would suggest that if this scheme proves to be workable, that the Security Council be disbanded. Its function is not clear to new players, and our proceedings here are behind a firewall to many others, so it seems secretive as well. Whether intended or not, it gives the appearance of being a cabal, of a nature antithetical to the principles of democracy and transparency. If we find that The North Pacific is all the more secure by entrusting the general membership to more vigorously cross-endorse, then the Security Council becomes redundant. Although it may be tempting to retain it just in case, I would submit that perceptions about it, especially in the ever-ongoing innuendo about cabals, would do more harm than good.

That said, the Security Council should be retained until this campaign is tried, some metrics obtained, and further discussion ensues. But it is something that should be considered.

>^,,^<
Alunya

mcmasterdonia:

Eluvatar has requested permission to share some of the information he has amassed about this idea when he initially thought of it. I believe he has messaged the Vice Delegate and is awaiting a response before he posts here.

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Elu has indeed messaged me requesting to speak to the council.

Considering Elu's relationship with the Council and the tools of which it uses I'm going to invite Elu to this thread to speak.

I am *not* comfortable entertaining the idea of disbanding the Security Council. Aside from maintaining a high endo count, the whole point is that anyone of us would be trusted with the delegacy if it was necessary. And present a truly significant obstacle to a random delegate, even to a rogue delegate who doesn't want to give up their accumulated influence. While this scheme would help make it even harder for a rogue delegate, there still needs to be a group of people that are counted on to maintain the high endo counts.

Thank you, Abacathea.

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Note: I suggested and will provide supporting information to this plan on a regional security basis. While I agree with Great Bight Mum and I think Alunya about the desirability of the social implications of such a plan, they are outside the scope of my expertise.

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Historically, any effort to resist a rogue delegate needs two essential parts:

1. The presence of at least one active high influence highly endorsed trusted native.
2. The support of a large number of middle-to-high influence nations.

Both of these are harder with the new influence system.

The North Pacific Security Council is prepared to supply the first part quite well these days, from what I can tell. Given that any rogue delegate can be assumed able to banject at least any two other nations, and the need for a buffer for people's varying activity levels at different times, the fairly large membership is by no means excessive, however.

The second has become significantly more problematic. I found it desirable to suggest this program after spontaneously deciding to investigate how many nations, in fact, r3n could expel.

Here are my calculations from November 10th:

1. HMS Unicorn had the capacity to eject between 4207 and 4247 TNP nations.
2. HMS Unicorn had the capacity to eject between 365 and 370 TNP WA nations.

Perhaps most importantly, HMS Unicorn had the capacity to banject approximately 320 TNP WA nations.

From a purely strategic standpoint, we want the region to be in a situation where the Delegate cannot overpower the rest of the region, regardless of how well we trust the Delegate. Our current situation is somewhat iffy, mainly due to the influence change.

Recalculating today (as I've somehow lost my spreadsheet from November 10th...) using data from yesterday morning[note]I have excluded Spadanera and their 665 mostly non-TNP influence score. There are probably others in the data I have not excluded, but they should not skew it much.[/note] (EST), this is what I see now:

1. HMS Unicorn has the capacity to eject between 4215 and 4256 TNP nations.
2. HMS Unicorn has the capacity to banject between 4047 and 4128 TNP nations.
3. HMS Unicorn has the capacity to eject between 365 and 369 TNP WA nations.
4. HMS Unicorn has the capacity to banject between 312 and 317 TNP WA nations.

(Keep in mind that the game has a ban limit of 200).

This isn't as bad as it might sound: given the number of TNP WA nations and their ability to return to TNP if unbanned (as many would have to be), a few hundred TNP WAs safe from expulsion should probably be enough to overthrow an outright dictator, even if that dictator were to receive a couple hundred pilers supporting them from the outside. (Assuming that native TNP WAs would indeed overwhelmingly unendorse such a dictator). However, I do think we can do better, at least in terms of WAs.

Here is a logarithmic[note]I couldn't wrangle it to have the x-axis be influence points scaled logarithmically, so it's SPDR (which is the square root of real influence). Please pay attention to the labels on the axes. Without logarithmic scaling, the 1000+ nations with 2 SPDR would make the graph unreadable.[/note] histogram[note]SPDR greater than 250 excluded from the histogram as there's only a handful of you and it would really stretch out the graph. Also, no effort has been made to exclude nations which have non-TNP influence counted in their SPDR. The distortion from them should be minimal, however.[/note] of the same influence data:

[note]You might have noticed a spike in the SPDR histogram for all nations at 63. That seems to be the cutoff for retaining influence older than 6 months: 4000 influence points. We have 38 nations with this SPDR, and can ask the NPA to make more as backup puppets. Given that the apparent threshold limit past which it would be inefficient for a tyrant with HMS Unicorn's influence level to banject is about 59 SPDR or 3500 influence points, this is probably a very sensible plan. However, the NPA alone is unlikely to ever be sufficient to stop a couper.

Note further that said threshold is among all TNP WAs. It's likely that some of the lowest influence TNP WA nations endorse no one and would not be targeted, so it's probably a bit higher. Note also that in practice, a tyrant would use ejection rather than banjection as much as possible. However, maxed out non-WA nations can still be useful, if only as cannon fodder. I will work on more sophisticated analysis tools at some point that capture this information.[/note]

So, I've explained why we care about the overall influence distribution, and shown how to track it in two ways. But Influence takes a while to accumulate, so how do we know how well we're doing at improving the situation in the short run?

The simplest stat we can track, in terms of how much we're spreading influence around, is something I term "endorsement saturation". It's simply the fraction of all possible endorsements that have been given.

That is to say, it is the total endorsement count of all nations in the region, divided by the number of WA nations in the region multiplied by the number of endorsements they could possibly receive (one less than the number of WA nations).

On November 10th, these were the endorsement saturation figures:

The North Pacific: 28 788 / (671 * 670) = 6.4%
The Pacific: 1205 / (319 * 318) = 1.2%
the South Pacific: 7316 / (321 * 320) = 7.1%
The West Pacific: 3899 / (324 * 323) = 3.7%
The East Pacific: 6668 / (316 * 315) = 6.7%

Lazarus: 1676 / (202 * 201) = 4.1%
Balder: 1003 / (139 * 138) = 5.2%
Osiris: 779 / (123 * 122) = 5.2%

We're currently in the middle of the pacific pack here, where I seem to remember that we used to lead. r3n believes it may be due to the increase in WA nations not being followed by a proportionate increase in SC tarting. (Particularly, I would note, as we haven't increased the number of SC-level tarters ) A modest target, in my opinion, would be 7.5%. If we could reach 10% I would be very happy.

One last piece of good news: we have over 100 Citizens (counting RA members) on this forum with a WA nation in TNP. Hopefully their participation would be easier to get and more effective in the long run than the rest of the WA population's.

It is within our means to generate lists of TNP WA nations, possibly with citizens listed first, to provide as part of this project for nations to endorse. It would not be unreasonably difficult to add filtering out nations one has already endorsed, particularly for forum members.

I not sure about opening up access to the script I wrote for your use which generates endorsement buttons (or equivalent). NationStates++ offers such an interface to any user (though it may not be as up-to-date all the time as it could be), so there may not be much value to keeping ours locked down, and more value to opening it up.

Interesting analysis, Elu.

I've been experimenting with the rate at which I endotart but cannot find a reasonable correlation to influence decay (or rather stemming influence decay). However, I have found that either of the two methods I use seem to be causing me to gain influence in either sudden jumps or slow and constant increments.

My SPDR has gone from about 386 to 412 in about three weeks and all I have been doing is alternating between weekly tarting sprees and daily tarting sprees. I see no difference between the two, but it have intuited that it is indeed related to how much other tarting is going on. More tarting going on in general seems to result in an increase in SPDR, while less tarting seems to slow it down regardless of how much I endotart.

Is there a way we can look at the 'turnover' of nations in TNP? By that, I mean, is there a possible correlation between how many new nations depart the region (particularly how many nations 'born' in the region depart soon after their 'birth') and how many of those new nations stay? (Convoluted reasoning here).

Your influence changes will depend on your endorsement count today and your endorsement count 6 months ago. Feel free to use the records to keep tabs on your endorsement count of 6 months ago.

Former English Colony:

I am *not* comfortable entertaining the idea of disbanding the Security Council. Aside from maintaining a high endo count, the whole point is that anyone of us would be trusted with the delegacy if it was necessary. And present a truly significant obstacle to a random delegate, even to a rogue delegate who doesn't want to give up their accumulated influence. While this scheme would help make it even harder for a rogue delegate, there still needs to be a group of people that are counted on to maintain the high endo counts.

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Oh good heavens, no! I am not entertaining that at all either. I fully agree with your assessment.

We should still aim to keep nations under a reasonable limit with the Security Council making up the top ten or so most endorsed nations in the region. But the reality is that we need to account for the fact that a Delegate can ban 3000+ nations now thanks to the influence decay, but we also need to have a strong body to coordinate efforts and to provide regional leadership in the case of a crisis.

If we could get a majority of WA nations with an endorsement count of say 200 - that would be a very significant improvement on where we are at now. We would still have the SC in a strong position, but the nations at the ground level will also be strengthened to help in the event of a rogue delegacy.

If I may, the Regional Security law provides a threshold of 50 endorsements below the Vice Delegate, above which one could be considered reckless. Given that the Vice Delegate has 474 endorsements, I would imagine we should be okay with nations getting as high as 375, or even 400.

Regarding perception problems The North Pacific Security Council has had, they definitely exist/existed. I think that direct and positive contact with TNPSC members should help combat them, as could moving some matters out of the War Room if they do not need to be classified.

Thank you Elu for the great proposal, wise council, technical reporting, and insightful analysis.


I agree with the proposal.
I do however share FEC's concern about needing to warn Nations about reaching the legal limit; it is a challenge of politics to encourage people to gain endorsements but not too many.

TG'ing weekly is a reasonable frequency.

I feel that providing some sort of reporting, tabular or graphical, of status would be incentive for Nations to participate.

As far as awards go, # of endo's given is not hard to do; a Nation could simply drop WA status, then gain it back and endorse all of the Nations in the Region. Perhaps a better award would be # of endo's received, and perhaps endo ratio (received / given)

The fact that R3n could eject 80% of TNP is amazing and scary!

Eluvatar:

If I may, the Regional Security law provides a threshold of 50 endorsements below the Vice Delegate, above which one could be considered reckless. Given that the Vice Delegate has 474 endorsements, I would imagine we should be okay with nations getting as high as 375, or even 400.

Regarding perception problems The North Pacific Security Council has had, they definitely exist/existed. I think that direct and positive contact with TNPSC members should help combat them, as could moving some matters out of the War Room if they do not need to be classified.

Click to expand...

Personally speaking, I would not be okay with an unknown nation achieving endorsements at such a level. The 50 endorsements threshold should be considered an absolute last chance in my opinion. We generally speak to nations well before the reach that point. I still want the Security Council to have an appropriate buffer for their own endorsements and for their own influence level.

That said, I think it is relatively unlikely that many nations would achieve such a level.

To address some of the concerns:

Former English Colony:

The number of TGs seems absurd and offputting. And at what point do you have to tell people they *can't* go any higher and we start to worry about nations deciding to go full bore and gather as many endos as they can?

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As I already said about the telegramming, it won't be twice a week for everyone. Trust me on the telegramming side. I have been sending several mass-telegrams during the term without complaints.

For your other point, there are a few ameliorating factors, some of which have already been mentioned:

First, there are the legal limits - the hard limit set by the Vice Delegate's endorsement count, and the soft limit of 50 endorsements below that.

Second, there is the fact that very few nations will have the commitment to reach such high endorsement counts.

Third, there is the fact that promotion in the WFE and official telegrams remains one of the major determining factors in achieving a high endorsement count. Our promotion is heavily biased towards the Delegate, Vice Delegate and the Security Council, and will remain so. In fact, even for this campaign, I intend to provide "convenient endorsement lists" to consist of the SC first, and forum citizens second. So, a lot of the endotarting will remain centered on the SC.

Fourth, obviously the campaign dispatch and telegrams are going to make it clear that it is both undesirable and unnecessary for people to reach very high endorsement counts (though it will do so in a diplomatic way).

And fifth and last, as already said above, if someone does reach a very high endorsement count, we can telegram them in private.

Alunya:

If I understand the gist of this correctly, then, the idea is to strengthen the security of The North Pacific by encouraging World Assembly members in the region to endorse each other a bit more rigorously. In doing so, it creates a much larger mass of nations with significant levels of endorsement so that a rogue or otherwise illegitimate delegate will have to expend a considerable amount of influence to banject the lot.

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That's the main objective, yes. Secondary objectives are recruitment- and publicity-related. By advertising our liberal endorsement rules, we want to keep more WA nations in TNP, get more non-WA nations to join TNP, and get more nations overall to join the forum. Furthermore, we want to improve the visibility and perception of the Security Council in the region.

Alunya:

One question I have is, Can the increased cross-endorsement scheme have staying power? My gut feeling is that with attrition, retention and turnover, there comes to be a natural level of cross-endorsement without a sustained campaign to boost it. Our current levels across the North Pacific should be considered a baseline against which to measure the success or failure of this program. It should also be considered the default in the event that this new campaign should cease, whether intentionally or through neglect. What are the implications for regional security if this new effort is not sustained?

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We already have a lot of cross-endorsing in TNP (a new WA easily reaches 20-30 endorsements). We want to increase this so that by default nations receive a higher-level of endorsements. The campaign aims to create the boost, until such point when the increased cross-endorsing becomes self-sustainable.

If it does not become self-sustainable and the increased cross-endorsing deflates, we will just return to our current state. So, I do not believe there is any downside (besides lost potential).

Alunya:

Let us suppose that this is tried and proves to be easily sustainable and successful. My opinion is that this (relatively) uninhibited freedom to endorse is attractive to some players (such as myself.) This is a market niche that the other GCRs seem reluctant to exploit, and I personally think it has made The North Pacific a far superior alternative to the other GCRs -- a point worth noting when recruiting from each other is not permitted.

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Indeed, as I said in the OP and above, we want to use this for recruitment (we already do, but to a much more limited extent).

Alunya:

And if this does prove very feasible, it raises another question: What of the Security Council? Many of you are long-time members of The North Pacific who do band together from time to time to regulate matters with norms both published and unpublished. I would posit that, regardless of what I am about to suggest, that this would continue anyway.

I would suggest that if this scheme proves to be workable, that the Security Council be disbanded. Its function is not clear to new players, and our proceedings here are behind a firewall to many others, so it seems secretive as well. Whether intended or not, it gives the appearance of being a cabal, of a nature antithetical to the principles of democracy and transparency. If we find that The North Pacific is all the more secure by entrusting the general membership to more vigorously cross-endorse, then the Security Council becomes redundant. Although it may be tempting to retain it just in case, I would submit that perceptions about it, especially in the ever-ongoing innuendo about cabals, would do more harm than good.

That said, the Security Council should be retained until this campaign is tried, some metrics obtained, and further discussion ensues. But it is something that should be considered.

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I would be strongly opposed to a proposal to remove the Security Council. The Security Council has a distinct role from the mid-level influence layer of nations we are seeking to create here. The Security Council are there to consistently maintain endorsements and influence near those of the delegate, with a prospect of a very long-term horizon. This is not a commitment we can expect from or trust uninvolved nations to do on their own. In addition, the members of the Security Council have the role of "delegate presumptive", so to say, in case the in-game delegate goes rogue, or the delegacy is under external attacks, or during periods of transition. This is a necessary role that legally requires a special framework, and in practice requires a group of trusted and high-influence nations to be feasible. Both of these are provided by the SC.

Eras:

I am *not* comfortable entertaining the idea of disbanding the Security Council. Aside from maintaining a high endo count, the whole point is that anyone of us would be trusted with the delegacy if it was necessary. And present a truly significant obstacle to a random delegate, even to a rogue delegate who doesn't want to give up their accumulated influence. While this scheme would help make it even harder for a rogue delegate, there still needs to be a group of people that are counted on to maintain the high endo counts.

Click to expand...

Indeed, as I said above, I do not consider this as a replacement to the SC.

Lord Byron:

I feel that providing some sort of reporting, tabular or graphical, of status would be incentive for Nations to participate.

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Indeed, I am going to provide weekly updates in the form of statistics (mean, median, std, and over-time graphs of endorsement count and endotart count, as well as similar statistics and graphs of the saturation measure Elu mentioned.

As far as awards go, # of endo's given is not hard to do; a Nation could simply drop WA status, then gain it back and endorse all of the Nations in the Region. Perhaps a better award would be # of endo's received, and perhaps endo ratio (received / given)

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I intend to do, in addition to # of endos given, awards based on percentage change. This is meant to reward people joining in the effort late (e.g., if someone decides to join the program and goes ahead and sends 200 endorsements, their effort will be rewarded even if they don't make it to the top place).

I would like to launch this before the end of the week if possible, and as I said in the OP I would like it to be sponsored by the SC. Should we vote to decide sponsorship?

Yeah, I agree. Let us vote.

Roman?

I don't particularly care, but I am lazy busy so hopefully I'm not expected to actually *do* anything.

That's fine. I plan to handle most of the manual labor on this myself, so at least until the end of my term you're good. No promises after that .

I think this is a great idea.

Alright, seeing that a large majority seems to be in agreement with this, I will start working on it tomorrow and hopefully launch this over the weekend.

Are we waiting for a new Vice Delegate?

No, just me. RL visitors meant I didn't have the time to finalize this, though I'll try to announce it before the weekend.

I don't see a need for a vote on this - I think everyone's in favor of SC sponsorship. And I personally think this is a great idea.

Apologies this took so long. Please take a look at this dispatch:

The North Pacific WA Development Program

We will be using this set of dispatches to actively promote WA membership and endotarting activity, though telegram campaigns, RMB posts, and awards, along the lines of what we discussed. The dispatch will remain pinned in the top-3 spots until the end of the term.

You can also use this icon to promote the program in your signatures:



I am hoping to announce this along with the Security Council week (see other thread in the War Room), so please let me know of your thoughts as soon as possible.

I like the idea. Should work very well.

Any comments on the dispatch, Roman?

Overall it is a very nice dispatch. I will note that you linked to "Democratic Donkeys" on the SC endorsement list.

Edit: In the progress report tab you have images displayed of graphs, but the graphs are all the same "Endorsements received".

Aye, the graphs are placeholders.

And that damned "r", always messing with me .

Also, I intend to post the final version of this (as well as other "infrastructure" dispatches) from our semi-official regional nation, the northern light. I will be passing on this nation to the next Delegate and VD, so that they can keep editing it as appropriate.