How do I become a WA Resolution Author?

r3naissanc3r

TNPer
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Annotation​

Original title: How do I become a WA Resolution Author?
Date: Jun 22, 2016.
Comments: Originally by World Assembly Improvement Foundation; reproduced with author's permission.
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The World Assembly is, I admit, pretty confusing. It has a complicated process that often leaves new players deciding that maybe just arguing in General is best.

So, as a long time World Assembly member and author at least 3 resolutions, and you'll have to take my word for it because I won't tell you who I am, I'm here to help you out.

What is the WA?

The World Assembly is an international organization tasked with making the multiverse a better place by bossily telling member nations what to do.

The World Assembly does this by having authors write resolutions in specific categories of international legislation, submitting their completed proposals to a proposal queue, getting the proposals to quorum, and then voting on them, before they finally get on the books and alter the laws of all member nations.

Okay, so how do I get a resolution passed?

Woah, hold on there... you're getting ahead of yourself. Most of the successful authors didn't get a resolution passed until they had participated in the WA for a long time. You need to familiarize yourself with the process first. Starting with...

The Rules!

Is reading the rules really necessary?

Yes. If you don't know the rules, you may end up submitting an illegal proposal. And if you submit three illegal proposals, you get kicked out of the World Assembly. Permanently.

So I strongly suggest you read them. All of them.

And then read passed resolutions too.

Passed Resolutions too?

Yep, I'm not kidding. Remember the rule violation for Duplication or Contradiction? If you duplicate a passed resolution, or contradict it, that's a strike on your record. And we don't want that.

And of course, the best way to avoid such mistakes is knowing what passed resolutions say.

That doesn't mean you have to read all if them, though. Just go to the helpful thread for passed resolutions. You can ignore all of them that are repealed or are themselves repeals, as they aren't active legislation. You can then narrow things down to about 150 resolutions, and you can search the thread for key words in your selected area of legislation to check for possible conflict.

Okay, so I know the rules, I read the stuff. Wat do?

You could go ahead and submit a proposal you just wrote, but even veteran writers failed to catch some rule violations or potential problems.

Go to the GA Forums and post a draft of your proposal there as its own thread. Leave it there for at least a week, checking to see what people say about it. Make changes as necessary.

If you don't have an idea of what to write, think about problems facing the world today (or in the near future), and check to see if the WA needs to address these problems.

My Proposal Draft is legal, and has been debated on.

You might now be ready to submit. Go to the World Assembly page, to proposals, and then click Submit a Proposal. Fill out the required forms. Don't forget to double check for errors.

Okay, but how do I get it to vote?

That's complicated, I'm tired, I'll edit this dispatch tomorrow.

Okay, so maybe several weeks later.

Once your resolution is ready to submit, you can go ahead and submit it. The only problem is that to get it to vote, 6% of all regional delegates (there are usually between 1500 and 2000 of them) must approve your proposal. And they don't do that on a whim (except Vancouvia).

In order to convince delegates to approve, you'll need to write a campaign telegram, a short message explaining what you want to do and why people should approve your proposal, and including a link to the proposal to give a quick way for delegates to go approve (the link should be near the top of your proposal). Be sure to mark your telegram as a campaign telegram by clicking the little triangle underneath the recipient field, and then changing "recruitment" to "campaign". This is because some people choose to filter out campaign telegrams and not marking your telegram correctly could get you warned by the mods.

After you've written up a good campaign telegram, you need to get it out to the delegates. There are three ways to do this:
  • A Stamp campaign: The simplest way to mount a campaign is to use telegram stamps. Yes, those things you have to pay real money for (1 USD gets you 1000 stamps). This is the most expensive method, but is really easy. Just buy the stamps, and after making your campaign telegram, put tag:delegates in the recipient field. NationStates will tell you how many stamps you have and how many it will use to send your campaign. Then just click send. Simple, right?
  • A Manual campaign: Okay, so you don't have the money to spend $2 every time you want a proposal to go to vote. So, you can send the telegrams out one at time to delegates, by hand. This is easier than it sounds. First, save your telegram as a template. You do that by putting tag:template in the recipient field. Make sure that it is marked as a campaign telegram, because you won't be able to change it after you save the template. Simply send the telegram to tag:template to save it, NationStates will give you a link to the template and a template ID (this should look like % TEMPLATE= some number %. Copy the template ID completely. Simply pasting the ID into a telegram and clicking send will send the telegram you saved. The best way to go about sending to all the delegates is to bring up the list of all delegate nations and send them telegrams from their nation page, but I can't seem to find the list of delegates page anymore. Going to the page for all regions marked "Democratic" and sorting by number of nations gives you good list, but it isn't complete. Remember that you'll need 6% of delegates to approve, so you'll need to send out several hundred telegrams.
  • An API campaign: So, you've no money to spend and don't want to send out telegrams by hand. Good news, there is another way! You can have a program do it automagically for you! First things first though, you'll need an API key. These are only given out to regions, so unless you found your own region, you'll need to ask your region's leader for the API key. After you have an API key, you have most of what you need. You'll need a working API program next. There are a couple autotelegram APIs floating around NS, and I don't know how to use any if them, but I've heard that Communiqué by Imperium Anglorum works swell. To send a telegram via API, you'll first need to make the telegram, mark it, and then send it to tag:api and save the link NationStates gives you. The link contains two keys in it: a "secret key" and the telegram ID. Your secret key is unique to your nation, it lets NS know who is sending the API. For that reason, it isn't recommended that you send it or the telegram url to anyone else. Using the API key you got earlier, your secret key, and the telegram ID, you can do something with the API program. I'm not exactly sure what. Read the user's guide.

Once your proposal goes to vote, you'll need to make sure that it passes. Don't forget to regularly check back on your discussion thread and respond to questions, criticisms, or congratulations. You might also want to check to see how the delegates are voting by clicking "delegate votes" on the voting page. Sometimes it helps to register on the off-site regional forums of those delegates, and after following the proper steps, to post in the discussion thread there on your resolution. These debate threads are more likely to influence the delegate's vote than the thread on NationStates.

Good luck!
 
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