The Speaker's Desk

Robespierre:

If elected, I'd like to publish two "State of the Regional Assembly" reports at bi-monthly intervals in an effort to make more information accessible to North Pacificans about what their Speaker's Office is doing for them. These reports would also serve as a great way for incoming citizens to get up to speed about what's happened previously in the Regional Assembly and having them come directly from the Speaker and their staff at the midterm mark and at the end of term mark means that we could include certain data that the RA Highlights in TNS currently doesn't.

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- Me, literally twelve days ago.

Well, this... didn't age well :/ Why? Because we can do you one better, that's why.

That's right! Starting today, I am very pleased to announce the beginning of a new initiative on the part of the Speaker's Office to record actions taken by the Office on a publicly viewable Google spreadsheet that will be available for reference at any point during the term. Much like how the Citizen/Resident registry spreadsheet is currently maintained, members of the Speaker's Office have all been given editing access to enter information into the sheet while the sheet itself can be seen and avoid being tampered with by opening a sharable link that makes use of viewing access.

Everything from processing citizenship applications, to performing daily residency and forum/RMB activity checks, to viewing the aftermath of future audits, to observing changes in the number of nations lost or gained for reasons that are specified on the right hand side of the sheet, will be tracked in what I hope you'll all find to be a comprehensive, complete insight into the day-to-day activities of my staff and I as we look to monitor the health of our region from month to month.

In my campaign, I said that I would be giving a pair of "State of the Regional Assembly" reports from the Speaker's desk at bi-monthly intervals. This will still be the case even with this announcement, as those reports will include compilations and overviews of all Regional Assembly activities during a given timespan (two months prior to the report being given). Having said that, what's better than bi-monthly data dumps and summaries of activity? Real time data entry that can be observed by anyone, for any purpose (Yes, even if just to satisfy curiosity!)

Not only does this sheet aim to promote transparency in governance, but by collecting records of the Speaker's Office's actions, we can eliminate the need for us to scrounge around the application thread for citizenship and in various other places on the forums when the time comes to release a report. When I ran, I assured you all of an active and engaged office in the legislature. Full disclosure: This will require some extra work on our part while fulfilling our various duties. But ultimately, we aren't really too concerned by that, especially not when doing so carries the potential for this data to be usefully applied to other regional projects should the overseers of those projects wish to leverage the cold, hard numerical analytics that we can provide.

As we begin doing this, I will be reminding my Deputy Speakers (and myself) to keep up to date on this sheet and to consistently enter actions as they're carried out by us. If this seems like a terrible burden to have to carry, it's not, as this kind of manual entry is already required at the time of action when we seek to keep the "Pending Citizenship Applications" tab of the registry updated.

Credit where credit is due, @Dreadton has been nice enough to create this spreadsheet for use by the Speaker's Office. He's incorporated formulas that will automaticallhy calculate the totals for the various statistics over any period of time and he's said that the sheet will be tweaked and prettied as we get more use out of it. In other words, it automatically updates upon entry of actions!

A very special thank you to him for working on this with me and we hope that this is an effort that most all of you can appreciate. As always, any questions are welcomed.

Yours,

Robespierre (Francois Isidore)
Speaker of the Regional Assembly

How exciting! Are you planning to integrate this with the main citizen sheet in the future?

Cretox State:

How exciting! Are you planning to integrate this with the main citizen sheet in the future?

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Yes, I am.

Since the spreadsheet linked in my post above was created earlier today by Dreadton, the formulas he put into it were added on a separate sheet as a way to test them and make sure that it worked as it was intended to

Should this go well, as planned, for the next couple weeks or so, I’d love to see it integrated into the Citizen/Resident registry spreadsheet as it’s own tab. This will be the end goal so that everything is in one place and where people are already used to it being, as that spreadsheet is much more established than this new one.

I’ll be speaking with Dreadton when it’s not 1AM in our timezone and see if integrating the two is a possibility.

Very interesting!

I dont see why it could not be added to the exsiting Workbook. But I do believe that the Workbook used for citizenship is under the master control of the Admin team? So I would think we would need to get their ok to add it.

Me:

Should this go well, as planned, for the next couple weeks or so, I’d love to see it integrated into the Citizen/Resident registry spreadsheet as it’s own tab. This will be the end goal so that everything is in one place and where people are already used to it being, as that spreadsheet is much more established than this new one.

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Just as a note: The citizen stats spreadsheet has been integrated into the Citizen/Resident registry spreadsheet. As I said would be the case in response to the question that was asked to me by @Cretox State after one of my earlier updates in this thread, a tab labeled "Citizen Stats" has now been added to the registry sheet and features the same data that could be found previously in the spreadsheet that was, for a brief few weeks, entirely separate. For those of you who attended the fireside chat that I gave at the beginning of this month (Sorry. It was live NBS broadcast only, so no recording is available), I said that spreadsheet integration would be taking place within the next fifteen days.

Seeing as to how it's currently the tenth of February as I'm writing this, I'm happy to report that my Office has been able to deliver on that timetable slightly ahead of schedule -- as was expected. Anyhow, there's nothing that requires me to go into too much detail here. As always, a thank you goes out to my Deputies for remaining persistent and being willing to do what's asked of them even if it requires a few extra efforts on their part. This'll go a long way towards making everything a bit more cohesive

As was the case originally, everything remains publicly viewable and available for the convenience of citizens and/or anyone who's interested in knowing what the Speaker's Office is doing on a day-to-day basis. If anyone has any questions, feel free to reach out.

Thank you,

Robespierre (Francois Isidore)
Speaker of the Regional Assembly

Afternoon, all:

Yesterday, the Speaker's Office performed an internal audit in an effort to remedy some of the discrepancies that had been making themselves known on the registered residents tab of the Citizen/Resident registry spreadsheet. Of the fourteen inconsistencies that were found, a list of each, as well as a changelog of fixes performed by my Office to resolve them, can be found below:


I will note: The last audit that was announced in this thread and performed by my predecessor was completed on 1 January 2021. At the time of the previous audit, twenty-seven inconsistencies were found, and before that -- in September of 2020 -- there were forty-seven found. We are making progress, even still, and it is my hope that going forward we can reaffirm our commitment to not only maintaining the citizens sheet, the pending applications sheet, and the statistics sheet, but the registered residents sheet as well.

A special thank you to @Kastonvia, who's been an excellent member of my team, for showing the initiative to undertake this task. If you have any questions, or wish to know more about what the Speaker's Office is doing for you, then please feel free to reach out to me or to view the aptly named "Citizens Stats" tab of the spreadsheet to see records of our every action.

In service,

Robespierre (Francois Isidore)
Speaker of the Regional Assembly

very informative, thank you

Good day, all:

I am pleased to announce that @East Isles will be joining my team as a Deputy Speaker.

As I did with my appointments at the beginning of the term, I will now provide you all with a bit of background as for why I've made this selection:


Please take your oath at your earliest convenience.

In light of this appointment, the weekly schedule that the Speaker's Office operates off of will be changed to the following:



The rest of the schedule will remain the same, with minimal changes as logged above, and the Deputies indicated above will remain as your primary points of contact for the Speaker's Office on their assigned days -- along with myself.

Lastly, a reminder: As I promised during my campaign (and as I reiterated in a previous update from this desk), my first "State of the Regional Assembly" report will be released on 11 March 2021. I ask that you all stay tuned for this, as I will be giving the aforementioned report exactly two months from the day of my term beginning and it, along with all of its contents, will be readily available in this thread come a week and a day from now.

Thank you,

Robespierre (Francois Isidore)
Speaker of the Regional Assembly

Good evening, everyone:

Last night, the Speaker's Office performed its second internal audit of the term. Much like the one that was completed back in late-February, we did so in an effort to locate discrepancies that could have previously been found on the registered residents tab of the Citizen/Resident registry spreadsheet and resolve them in as swift a fashion as possible. Ten inconsistencies were found, which is down from the previous finding of fourteen during our last audit, and an 100% matchup was confirmed between the citizenship sheet and the citizens joinable group without issue.

A list of each incontinency as it relates to residents, as well as a changelog of fixes performed by my Office to resolve them, can be found below:



As an added note: Eight of the ten inconsistencies found stem from one scenario in particular. That scenario being that a former citizen loses citizenship, a Deputy Speaker of myself goes to perform our daily check on them, rightly removes their citizenship, adds resident status if they're still in the region (for nations that fail the posting requirement but don't fail the residency requirement), yet fail to add a row for them on the residents tab of the spreadsheet when they're given the proper masking for it on the forums.

The good news is, this audit found fewer discrepancies than any past audit by either myself or my predecessor in Office. Nonetheless, as we aim to finish out the term strong, the goal is now to eliminate the aforementioned scenario from occurring entirely and simply phase out the need for these audits altogether. Past audits in past terms have been a step in the right direction, as was this one, but going forward we hope to keep things spotless, orderly, and eliminate any possible chances for mistakes.

Working for you,

Robespierre (Francois Isidore)
Speaker of the Regional Assembly

Robespierre:

yet fail to add a row for them on the residents tab of the spreadsheet when they're given the proper masking for it on the forums.

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This can be avoided by adding the row for them on the residents tab before you remove them from the citizens one.

Excellent work on the audit though!

Good evening, all:

Pertinent to Section 3 Clause 1 of the Regional Assembly Rules, I hereby remove @Bobberino as a Deputy Speaker in light of his informing me of his intent to resign.

1. The Speaker may, at their discretion, appoint a citizen as Deputy Speaker. The Speaker may, at their discretion, remove an existing Deputy Speaker.​

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This announcement comes after a conversation between Bob and I in which we mutually agreed that his resignation would be accepted. We thank him for his many months of service in the role and wish him the best going forward.

With this removal, the weekly schedule that the Speaker's Office operates off of will be changed to the following:



As a note: Bobberino offered to make their own resignation post in this thread, but has instead deferred to me to make it official.

Thank you,

Robespierre (Francois Isidore)
Speaker of the Regional Assembly

Citizens,

It brings me no great pleasure to announce that, pertinent to Section 3 Clause 1 of the Regional Assembly Rules, I hereby remove @lol2639 as a Deputy Speaker.

1. The Speaker may, at their discretion, appoint a citizen as Deputy Speaker. The Speaker may, at their discretion, remove an existing Deputy Speaker.​

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This decision comes after the numerous attempts that have been made by both my team and I to establish contact with lol2639; attempts that were made to no avail. After a period of inactivity for over two weeks now, including a stint that nearly saw them vacate office, I feel that they've been given ample opportunities to respond to the messages that my deputies and I have sent them in the Speaker's channel and through DMs.

Although their absence was unprompted, lol2639 showed great promise early on in the term. I wish them the best of luck going forward and would be happy to have them join the Office once more in the future should their presumably busy RL schedule allow for it.

As a result of this change, the Speaker's Office must alter the schedule that it operates off of. Hereafter, our weekly schedule is as follows:



Thank you,

Robespierre (Francois Isidore)
Speaker of the Regional Assembly

Will you be considering appointing another deputy or is that perhaps a conversation to have after the election?

St George:

Will you be considering appointing another deputy or is that perhaps a conversation to have after the election?

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At this point in time, I have no concrete plans to appoint another deputy. However, should someone be interested in fulfilling a role within the Office, I highly encourage them to speak with me privately and inquire.

As promised. the results of our April 2021 Performance Review poll are now being made available for public viewing.

You can find the results, as well as any comments from those polled, below:

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With one month left in the term, is there anything that you'd like the Speaker's Office to focus on especially?

6 responses

• Stop using so many words to tell us so little.
• I want them to speak about the flood of trolls
• Not every term needs a big project to do
• N/A
• Make memes
• No

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Comments? Criticisms? Praise?

10 responses

• The Speaker's Office must be hard to run, but so far, I have seen a good management. I want to congratulate the team for their efforts and time they put into this important part of our region's government. A big hug to y'all and keep going!
• Please be more concise.
• Seamless operations this term. Nice work!
• They haven't been doing that much lately so I don't have much to criticise about the speaker's office
• My only criticism is that the path to becoming a deputy speaker is not completely transparent. How do you become a deputy? Some citizens don't know. Maybe you should have a public thread to apply to the Speaker's office, like that for the executive staff or the Security Council.
• There should be consequences for failing to meet regularly scheduled duties
• Bob is the best and should be speaker. You and Dreadton should abdicate.
• Be more danke next time lol.
• Casc here, just want to say hi and say that you've been doing a pretty good job.
• Speaker coup when?

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Lastly, a huge thank you to our Gameside Advocates; who did tremendous work promoting this poll on the RMB! A considerable amount of respondants said that the GAs were there to promote the poll, so I’d like to properly recognize those who brought attention to this.

Serving dutifully,

Robespierre (Francois Isidore)
Speaker of the Regional Assembly

Hello all! I'm honored to have been elected as your Speaker. I'm excited to get started and serve the region. I want to congratulate @Robespierre and @Cretox State on their election victories. I look forward to the coming term, and whatever may lie ahead. With that, I will move into appointing my deputies.

First things first, I reappoint @Dreadton, @Sir Kasto, and @Peeps as Deputy Speakers. I served alongside the three of them during Robes' term. They have demonstrated a willingness to serve and a knowledge of the duties of the office. I have full confidence that they will be a helpful presence while I learn the ropes of the office. I will also be appointing some new faces to the office. I hereby appoint @Dyl, @Skaraborg, @Arc, and @Venicea as Deputy Speakers. Dyl is the former Speaker of the Assembly in the Rejected Realms, and I am excited to have them on my staff. Skaraborg and Arc ran for Speaker in the previous election and expressed interest in gaining experience in the Speaker's Office. Venicea has shown an interest in the operation of the Speaker's Office and a willingness to get involved in a new and exciting role. I am excited to have them on board, as cultivating new talent is key to the health of the Office and the region as a whole. Congrats to all of you! Please take your oaths in the order your names appear above.

Finally, I plan to publish a weekly schedule for the Office, similar to the ones seen in Robespierre's and @St George's terms. This will be published in the coming days once the dates are worked out.

Once again, I am honored to be entrusted to serve the region as Speaker. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or want to talk, please contact me by TG, Forum DM, Discord, or posting in this thread.

Humbly yours,

East Isles
Speaker of the Regional Assembly

Do I really have to take it after Dreadton?

Here's to a new term!

Sorry for my outburst

Yesterday, the Speaker's Office discovered an issue with the Citizenship spreadsheet. An issue with the way the Office has been formatting new citizens' entries on the sheet prevented the scripts from properly running posting checks on those citizens. As a result, 35 citizens that should have lost citizenship were missed. The sheet has now been fixed, and the checks are now returning correctly.

The following 35 citizens do not meet the posting requirements and will be remasked as residents:

I apologize for this error. Moving forward, my Office will ensure that entries are being formatted properly to prevent this issue from arising again.

Yours in Service,

East Isles
Speaker of the Regional Assembly

Well this has been a little while coming. I am writing this to officialize my resignation from the position of Deputy Speaker. My junior year of high school - which is already promising to be the most work-intensive year for me thus far - has begun and I need all the time I can to focus on assignments. I therefore no longer consider myself capable to execute my duties as a Deputy Speaker and am hereby stepping down. Thank you.

Evening/Morning all! I will be posting an opening statement soon. But to ensure that this office is staffed with another body to assist with running the Regional Assembly, I am appointing @Bobberino as Deputy Speaker. I am excited to be working with Bob, who is a former Deputy Speaker and has served in this region in multiple roles. I look forward to working with him again. I am also looking to appoint more Deputy Speakers over the coming days to assist with running this office. If you are interested in serving in the Speaker’s Office, experienced or not, please feel free to reach out to me.

Further Appointments:
I hereby appoint @Dyl, @Fregerson, and @Skaraborg as Deputy Speakers. I look forward to working with you all this term. Now go take your oaths.

In the interest of record-keeping, I will be archiving a plethora of threads that are over 1 year of age as of the end of August. The archived threads are below:

• Clarifying Vagueness in Peace Terms Amendment​
• Election Commission Confirmation of Crushing Our Enemies and Siwale​
• Marcus Antonius' Security Council Application​
• Protecting our Government from Foreign Nationals Act​
• Term Limit Removal Bill​
• An Act for Committee Codification​
• [Passed] Military Modernisation Bill​
• Mass Thread Archival​
• Citizenship Reports​
• The AGORA Act​
• The R.O.D (Right of Defense) Bill.​
• Confirmation of Fregerson as Election Commissioner​
• Confirmation of Wonderess as Election Commissioner​
• Loss of Citizenship Clarification Bill​
• On the Proposition of Recalling Robespierre from the Office of Vice Delegate​
• Information of Recourse Act​
• Minor Nitpick Election Bill​
• Notice of Absence - Activation of Speakers Office Continuity Protocols​
• Court Rule Amendments Consultation​
• Censureship​
• Confirmation of Holdac as Election Commissioner​
• Confirmation of Siwale as Election Commissioner​
• Confirmation of Artemis as Election Commissioner​
• Confirmation of Sil Dorsett and Dreadton as Election Commissioners​
• Statement Regarding Rocketdogs Security Council Application​
• Wonderess's Security Council Application​
• Confirmation of Dreadton as Prosecutor in The North Pacific v. Pigeonstan​
• Amendment to Section 3.3 of the Legal Code​
• RA Designate Act​
• Campaign to End state controlled church/religion​
• Ban Evasion Prohibition​
• Lessening Repeating Work (L.R.W.) Bill​
• Speaker's Staff Applications​
• LRW-Compliant Chief Justice Selection Fix​
• Delegate's Report Bill​
• Confirmation of Eluvatar as Election Commissioner​
• Court Amendment Act​
• The Hero Act​
• Confirmation of Fregerson as Election Commissioner​
• Proposed amendment​
• Ease of Prosecution Act (EPA)​
• Lessening Undue Burden on Elections Act​
• Proposed amendment​
• The Government Officials Achieving Transparency Act​

Further Appointments:
I hereby appoint @Veltvalen as Deputy Speaker. Looking forward to working with you this term. Now go take your oath.

Notice of Resignation
Following my appointment as Minister of Home Affairs I, by law, will have to resign as Deputy Speaker. I would like to thank both East Isles and Oracle for the opportunity to serve as Deputy Speaker. Thank you.

Due to personal mental health and real life reasons. I will be resigning as Speaker of the Regional Assembly with immediate effect. It’s been a pleasure serving in office again but I do the region a disservice by not providing my full attention to this position as the region deserves and demands. @Bobberino will continue on as Acting Speaker till such a time a special election is held.

~Oracle

I wish you the best of luck with your RL endeavors and hope things clear up on the mental health front. Be assured there is always a place here in the Speaker's Office for you.

Thank you oracle and Bob! You both are awesome

I wish you the best of luck in all your endeavors. This is an incredibly difficult job, I would know. Real life must always take precedence over NS, so don't feel bad putting your needs first. If you ever need advice or support or whatever it is, remember that we're all here for you.

I hereby appoint @bootsie and @Dalimbar as Deputy Speakers.

I reiterate my offer: to all who wish to join the office, my DMs on Discord are open.

I will write something proper up later, but to ensure things continue to work as per normal, I will first re-appoint @Bobberino
@bootsie, @Dalimbar and @Dyl as Deputies. Anyone who has the time to devote to working as a Deputy Speaker, and interested in learning the ropes can PM me forumside, or DM me on Discord (preferrably have discord for coordination purposes)

I am 2 weeks late on this opening address, but things have started to go back to normal. Or almost back to normal (will explain some issues in the post later). As promised during my campaign, the main focus will be to ensure that the current processes are back to normal, with citizenship checks being held consistently, and the vote schedules to be on the suitable pace.

Since the start of my term, a total of 2 votes have been closed and counted, with a further 2 more underway. Citizenship checks have generally gone back to schedule, and we have generally agreed on a check schedule together with my deputies. Currently, however, I only have 3 deputies, with @Dalimbar confirming that he will not be taking up the Deputy Speakership as agreed upon previously, due to increase in RL commitments. We wish them all the best and hope they can rejoin us at a later date. As such, we will only have a total of 4 members in the Office, and we have agreed on a schedule as follows:


I will continue to extend an invitation for any interested members of our community to join us as a Deputy Speaker. If you are interested, you can drop me a DM (on discord/gameside/forumside) to indicate your interest or ask any questions about the role of being a Speaker/Deputy Speaker. More hands on deck will definitely be helpful, especially if we encounter an increase in number of citizenship applications.

As mentioned during my campaign, I will also be going forward with the initiative of establishing a set of guides for aspiring Speakers/Deputy Speakers. These self-help guides would hopefully ease newcomers into the role and allow them to start work sooner, rather than having to wait for an experienced person to guide them through the process (which will take some time, owing to RL commitments and timezone differences).

For the purposes of transparency, the Office has noted that there are some issues with the automated checks, especially on the point of checking the forum posting requirements. The Office has reached out to the relevant admins to clarify on the issue, and to get a solution as soon as possible. As soon as the issue is resolved, we will conduct a full check on the current citizenship rolls to make sure that all on the list are currently following the activity requirements per the citizenship law.

Welcome to your newfound job!

Addendum to my post above:

I have mentioned, in my note above, that the script checking for the forum posting requirements is not working. For a temporary fix, I have briefly looked through the list of members who have not been meeting the RMB posting requirements (per the working script), and picked out a few who do not have activity record on the forums. In order to meet the forum posting requirements, a member would be required to have been active on the forums in the first place. 6 members, however, have not been active on the forums for the past 30 days. As such, I have made the discretion to consider them as not having met the forum posting requirements (on top of the RMB posting requirements) and removed them as per this post. Going forward, until the admins fix the issue with the forum-posting checking script, this will be the way the Office will check for forum posting requirements. Should there be any discrepancies, these members can raise the issue to me personally. Thanks!

I wanted to do this at the start of the month, but turns out I became slightly busy with IRL stuff. However, I guess I have time for some quick updates heading into the festive season!

1) Update on Office Processes
After a review of the office processes, the Office will make it official that we no longer will be tracking citizenship statistics. The Office has decided that this has been extra work with little substantial benefits to the region, given the difficulties of tracking things such as the WA status of each citizen. Some of the work are also duplicated by the citizenship applications and removal logs, the former maintained on the sheet, and the latter maintained forum-side through the loss of citizenship forum thread. Given the amount of work required, we will not be going on with this plan.

Going forward, the Office will also be clearing the RA, archiving older posts in the forums. This will be done to allow only current and recently-completed discussions to be left in the RA subforum, decluttering the place.

2) New Deputy Speaker
I have received an application from someone to join the Office, and given that I need more hands on deck, I will be accepting that application. Tree of Wisdom will now be joining as a deputy in the Office.

I appreciate this opportunity to be working in the Speaker’s office! I look forward to learning, and understanding how our regional assembly works along with serving to the best of my ability!

Happy New Year from the Speaker's Office! Towards the end of my current term as Speaker, I decided to do a quick check of the current citizens in the sheet and masked on the forums. Among them, I noticed that there has been a strange discrepancy - @The New Siberian islands has been masked on the forums and yet not found on the citizenship sheet. After my personal checks, and clarifying with the members of East Isles' speakership, where the said masking was made, it was realised that there was an error in the citizenship status of The New Siberian Islands. They had been correctly masked on the forums, but never tracked on the citizenship sheet - causing an error on this part. As such, we will be correcting this error by adding them to the citizenship sheet, with their citizenship effective date being 7th September 2021, where they were confirmed to become a citizen.

In other updates, the Speaker's Office has confirmed that the current scripts to check the forum activity is back working, and therefore, there may be a slightly more frequent cleaning up of the citizenship rolls for activity checking, especially as we head into the election season.