It is with great joy that I support the McMasterdonia campaign. The dedication, hard work, and general ability for McM to lead the region is unquestionable. I am very excited about the proposal of the RA committees as I have been pushing for a way to allow more communication between the Executive and Legislative branches of the region, and this is a fine way to accomplish that. Most importantly, McM is an honorable public servant who knows how to put region before self, and I know that this term would be no different if he were to run. I happily endorse McMasterdonia for the delegacy.
Thank you, Wonderess. I really appreciate your endorsement and support.
1. Regarding your plans for Culture and Comms to bring authors in for seminars at TNP's university, do you have any plans to work with university administrators to reincorporate the university into a fully-fledged government program? If so, how would you rectify university sponsored non-NS content with the ongoing NS-content only NBS policy?
At this time, I don't intend to bring it back under government control. So I would work with Marcus if need be. Essentially the main purpose would be for us to use the lecture hall.
I do have concerns though that if Marcus has activity issues or needs to step down in future then there is nobody there at the moment really steering the ship at the University. It's a lot for one guy.
2. You mentioned waiting for the first week or so of office for determining TNL themes for the term. Do you have any preliminary ideas for what these might be?
I think we'd need to map out our past editions to make sure I wasn't reusing old themes.
I think we could do one that offered different analysis on the competing NS ideologies available today (as in political and governmental ideologies, beyond simply R/D).
We could also do one on what I'd call NS 2030. Where people would like to see the game develop and change in the next 10 years. Thinking of those big initiatives that the NS Mods have proposed and put on hold for years and years. I'm sure we could get a lot of great authors for that.
Otherwise I'm not sure. I'm sure the Comms staff will have ideas they'd like to contribute too.
3. In response to r3n's question earlier, you mentioned not having any specific plans for NS trading cards. Your personal impression of cards aside, do you think having our NS Card programs expanded to the NPA would be helpful to encourage membership and participation?
My impression (perhaps incorrect) was that NS cards had already been expanded to the NPA in some form. I'm not really sure on this. I think a better first step to increase membership and participation would be to focus more on publicising the ops and celebrating the achievements of the NPA in-game.
4. Do you have any thoughts for how Home Affairs can maximize the effectiveness of recruitment lists? Do you propose any changes to how these recruitment telegrams are written?
The main issue I see is that there wasn't a lot of recruitment lists happening in the last term initially. However once they started happening it was very easy to see that HA staff were enthusiastic and interested in working through the lists. We also see noticeable increases in our citizenship applications whenever they do occur. So I am a strong advocate for them.
I think there sometimes needs to be more care not to target people who are obviously experienced TNPers. But even if the more experienced TNPers do get the odd telegram, it is basically harmless in the long run.
I do think it is wise to regularly review the telegram templates and make sure they are working. I'm a big fan of either doing short and sweet telegrams, or something more fun (i.e. like my song endorsement telegram). But ultimately I don't have specific plans in terms of what edits are required at this point.
5. Following up on the previous question, do you have any plans to expand or standardize our current mentorship program? Would it reside within Home Affairs, or be shared with Gameside Affairs?
I would first like to know from the current mentors how they'd rate the success of the mentor program. In my experience, these programs often don't work very well as the mentor relationships generally aren't required or taken up on that much. So that is my initial thoughts on the subject.
If it is deemed to be effective by the staff involved, I would imagine it would sit within Home Affairs.
I would add that I've not made a final decision about whether or not a separate GA Ministry is required.