New government registry and updated government page

[r3naissanc3r]

You may have noticed recently that the forum now has several links to a new google spreadsheet, the Government Registry.

This is meant to serve as a centralized, authoritative listing of the current government officials and their contact details. In a sense, it is the analogous of the Citizen Registry, but for our government.

The new registry automatically pulls information like nation and forum name from the citizen registry. This greatly reduces maintenance effort, since all of that information is automatically updated as soon as the citizen registry itself is updated (which is very often).

Additionally, the spreadsheet is now used by several other services as a source from which lists of officials can be pulled. One example is the WADP dispatches, which are now updated once per day to reflect Delegate, VD, and SC changes. All this is completely automatic and there is zero need for manual maintenance. We're slowly looking to add similar auto-updating features for other official regional dispatches, e.g., the gameside FAQs.

If you build some kind of service that needs to reference TNP officials and their contact details, we encourage you to make use of the government registry.

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In line with the above, we have also updated the Government page, which now works by getting all of the information from the registry.

 

[r3naissanc3r]

All feedback regarding the above is welcome.

One thing in particular that we're looking for opinions on:

The new government page has been augmented to include links to officials' nations. This was something that was removed from the old government page, because it was very tedious to maintain manually; that's no longer an issue given that all that information is fetched automatically.

However, there is not consensus among the admin team about whether: 1) the nation links should be included in the nation page; and 2) the current format, with the superscripted "[NS]", is adequate.

Opinions on both 1 and 2 are welcome.

 

[plembobria]

What the actual purpose of having a registry separate from the govt page?

 

[r3naissanc3r]

The three primary advantages in having the registry be in a spreadsheet are:

1) It is much easier and safer for admins to update. Updating the old government page was a notoriously error-prone procedure.
2) It is linked to the citizen registry, which means that information about nations, forum names, etc. gets updated automatically when the citizen registry is updated.
3) It can be used as a source for government information for other scripts, like the dispatch updater I mentioned above.

While 2 and 3 could theoretically also be done by having the government page itself serve as the registry, from a coding perspective it would be much harder to implement them. So, instead, we moved the registry to the much easier to use spreadsheet, and we linked everything else (the government page included) to that.

You could argue that the government page is now redundant. It's basically the same information formatted in a different way, and available without having to leave the forum and open google spreadsheets. I think this last point makes it worth having both, especially given that the government page no longer needs any separate maintenance - every time one changes the spreadsheet, the page auto-updates as well.