Picairn for Delegate 3: Restoration

Picairn · Thursday at 8:05 PM

I’m back.

My campaign will likely come as a surprise to some of you, since four months ago I indicated a desire for retirement from TNP politics. You’re right. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have announced my return, at least not this early.

But these are not normal circumstances we are living in: The North is in a bad shape. Over the past four months, we have become weaker internally amidst a turbulent foreign environment. The PPO has been dissolved as a result of irreconcilable differences and a loss of trust with our allies over the Outback. The NPA has been left to wither with a shrinking High Command and continued inactivity among the ranks. Promises on transparency, major projects and revived government activity were not met. The hands-on approach promised by the Delegate never materialised. Worst of all is the severe manpower attrition within the executive staff: staffers are leaving at a faster pace than we can replace, a problem that has only exacerbated, not improved, during this term. Even the remaining staffers I have talked to are either bored as a result of inactivity or burned out. I believe the failure of this administration to address our urgent manpower problems will have terrible consequences for our government and region, particularly when the summer lull is approaching. What our region needs right now is a strong, proactive Delegate to revive our activity and rebuild our staff to weather the challenges of summer, and I once again offer myself as a candidate for your consideration.

For the sake of brevity and convenience, I have put my introduction in a spoiler so that those who know me well already can skip to the relevant parts. If you are new to TNP, you can open the spoiler to read more about who I am.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am Picairn, former Delegate and Minister of Defense, sitting Justice of the Court, member of the Committee on Foreign Relations and Colonel of the NPA. I have called The North Pacific my home since April 2020, but it was not until October 2023 that I began involving myself deeply in the region and government. Stirred by our invasion of Solidarity in response to TCB and BoM’s attack, motivated to serve and protect my home region, I quickly enlisted in the NPA and later the executive staff. Through months of hard work and dedicated service, I ascended to Deputy Speaker (three times), Deputy Minister of Defense, Deputy Minister of Home Affairs (three times), Deputy Minister of Communications (two times), Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Home Affairs, and Minister of Defense. As Deputy Minister of Communications, I wrote many articles for The North Star and helped modernise its design. As Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, I worked tirelessly to update and redesign our regional dispatches, a project that I’m proud to have finally completed this term. As Minister of Defense, I consistently organised update operations to keep up activity in the summer of 2024, and led the successful capture of the Confederation of Corrupt Dictators with our allies in July. Following my term as MoD, I was elected Delegate in September 2024, less than a year after my first participation in the executive—a record which I’m still proud of. My term as Delegate was quite an eventful one: some great achievements were made (such as the treaty with the Augustin Alliance and the revival of Home Affairs) and some hard lessons were learned, particularly the challenges of consistently managing a sluggish government at a time of vast changes in foreign affairs. Disillusioned and dissatisfied with how my term turned out, I lost the energy to campaign and accepted my election loss to the incumbent Delegate, who promised to be more active and hands-on than I was, a promise that—to our region’s detriment—he has not kept.

These past four months in semi-retirement have been an illuminating experience for me. Deciding that I needed to take a step back from TNP politics and find my old inspiration again, I travelled to Carcassonne and Vibonia and eventually came to serve in a wide variety of roles there, including Carcassonne’s Minister of Culture and Vibonia’s Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs & Foreign Affairs. Yet my eyes were never far from home. While working in TNP’s government as a staffer, I noticed that our manpower attrition problem has only gotten worse over time, and soon became convinced that change was necessary, not only in leadership but also in how we do things in the executive. My tenure as Carcassonne’s Minister of Culture has given me an idea of how to revive an inactive government, and I believe the lessons I have learned there will be useful for our region as well.

For those of you who are interested in knowing more about my success in Carcassonne, I have left a separate section below. After that is a brief overview of my new vision to rebuild our executive staff and restore our government activity, and a more detailed outline for those who wish to dig deeper. My top priorities next term would be to recruit more citizens into our Ministries through a region-wide campaign and ensure consistent government activity through methodical, attentive management.

Following my election loss in January 2025, I decided to semi-retire from TNP’s politics and sought to find my old inspiration elsewhere, in a more friendly and dynamic environment. Eventually, I settled in Carcassonne and Vibonia—the former because it is themed after my favourite historical period, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and the latter because it is the place where many former TNPers have gone to. I had quite an eventful adventure in Vibonia as well, but that’s a story for another day.

In Carcassonne, I applied to become a citizen and began involving myself deeply in the affairs of the region, just as the magnetism update was implemented. I was one of the voices strongly clamouring for the establishment of a formal Ministry responsible for recruitment and integration of new spawns, which was soon taken up by the government. When the February elections for Carcassonne’s Minister-President (essentially its head of government) and Citizen-Speaker opened, I made a gamble to run for MP and, despite losing, finished second in the race which is quite remarkable for a month-old citizen. The newly-elected Minister-President Funkadelia then entrusted me with the Ministry of Culture, which had been inactive for several months and only had three staffers left by that time.

Upon being appointed, I immediately got to work. I appointed two Deputies to assist me in my work, formed a list of priorities to tackle, and created an all-encompassing spreadsheet to account for the Ministry’s personnel and event schedule. From there, I started recruiting citizens into the Ministry by advertising projects that we were doing (such as Voice of the People - Carcassonne’s regional newspaper), which was fairly successful since more applications began to arrive. With the help of the spreadsheet to keep track of personnel and critical projects, I assigned staffers to work based on their stated preferences in their applications. Writers were pinged for article brainstorming and writing, event organisers were called for hosting game nights, polls and Questions of the Day staffers were summoned for ideas, and so on. If there were no ideas to be had, I would pre-fill the sheet with QoTD and poll ideas taken from Internet suggestions in advance so that I or other staffers could post them when the time came. I also made a point of checking in regularly with writers to ensure that they were making good progress in time for the publication schedule.

The results were swift and transformative. Productivity greatly improved compared to before. From a dormant Ministry, Culture transformed into a well-oiled machine that has so far organised a movie night and multiple game nights, ran weekly polls and daily Questions of the Day without interruption, hosted a flag contest and a season of the Hunger Games, and published the first revived edition of Voice of the People, with another one close to completion. We also successfully collaborated with Europeia during their FrontierFest event by hosting a game night for residents and visitors. All of this within just two months.

A Quick Overview of My Policies

A master spreadsheet to keep track of major projects
A region-wide campaign to recruit for the executive staff
Honouring our staffers with awards, titles, and the Lennarts
Biweekly executive reports
Culture: game/movie nights, regional contests, cultural collaboration with allies, events on special TNP holidays, publishing The North Star on a monthly schedule, using TNN for government reports, keeping Radio alive with more broadcasts, and eventual re-establishment of the Ministry of Communications
Home Affairs: recognising our recruiters, an emphasis on personalised, one-on-one recruitment for the executive staff recruitment campaign, return of the welcoming bot, updating our dispatches
Foreign Affairs: pragmatism & steadiness in our conduct, search for new allies and friends, return of the Ambassador Corps, ensuring the smooth publication of the FA Digest by cutting down on its length
Defense: joint raids with our allies, revival of the Call to Serve program
WA Affairs: ensuring consistent IFVs and voting threads, continuing the work of commending our TNPers, collaboration with WALL, a WA symposium
Cards: Collaboration with The Wellspring to revive the Cards Guild
The transition and WADP: Regular reminder telegrams, dispatch pings, WADP dispatches, non-WA pings

The Longer Textwall Version

General Administration

A methodical, attentive approach to management

My experience as Carcassonne’s Culture Minister has taught me two things: 1) maintaining a spreadsheet is incredibly useful to keep your projects on track, and 2) keeping a close contact with your staffers is key to ensuring their interest and engagement. Whenever I wanted to check how things were going in the Ministry, I opened my spreadsheet and inspected who was doing what and how much has been achieved. After that, I regularly pinged or messaged staffers to contribute their ideas, host an event, or give updates on their article writing progress. This methodical, attentive approach has resulted in more efficient management and higher productivity for the Ministry, and I want to replicate that success for our struggling government.

If elected, I would immediately work to establish a master spreadsheet of all major projects promised in my platform. The spreadsheet would serve my needs the most, but my Ministers can also use the sheet to keep track of the administration’s goals and priorities.

Armed with an all-encompassing spreadsheet to help me keep track of my goals, I would check in with the Cabinet regularly to ensure that projects are being planned and followed up. That doesn’t mean that I will micromanage my Ministers, however, and they will have my resolute support if they need my help on something. I will also keep a close touch with our staffers to assist them if needed and prevent them from feeling bored or burned out.

A region-wide campaign to recruit for the Executive Staff

The biggest challenge we have suffered this term is the ongoing manpower attrition within the Executive Staff, which has hampered our capabilities to execute regular government operations and complete major projects. To give you a glimpse into how bad our situation is, with regards to leadership alone the Ministries have lost the following to resignations, loss of citizenship, or exits from the executive server:

Culture: Lost 3 Ministers and 2 Deputies
Home Affairs: Lost 3 Deputies
WA Affairs: Lost 2 Deputies

Even the NPA is not safe: this term, High Command has lost 2 Generals to resignations, shrinking it further. I’ll also note that the Speaker’s Office, a separate branch of government, has lost 5 Deputy Speakers due to loss of citizenship, transfer to other government branches, or disinterest. The Office is down to Speaker Matzerati and 2 Deputy Speakers. Only Foreign Affairs has lost no Deputies.

Let me be clear: this is not sustainable. The Ministries’ activity is now mostly carried by the Ministers and the Chief of Staff, with one or two occasionally active staffers covering when called. The situation is critical, and solving this will be my top priority.

I intend to address our severe manpower problems by launching an active, region-wide campaign to recruit for the executive staff. A regional dispatch will be created to promote the campaign, and recruitment telegrams will be sent regularly to entice residents into applying for citizenship and joining the executive. My main focus, however, will be personalised recruitment: messaging our residents/citizens on Discord and attracting their interest in joining the Ministries to complete projects that they want to do. The Gameside Advocates will also be mobilised to promote the campaign and recruit on the RMB. The government can also put advertisements in our written publications like TNS and TNN to invite other TNPers into writing for the Culture Ministry.

Honouring our staffers: The Lennarts, awards, and public recognition

It is no secret that morale is low within the executive staff. One of our major challenges is keeping staffers from feeling burned out and leaving. I believe awards and recognition will go a long way towards solving that problem.

For instance, the Delegate’s Service Award, awarded for accomplishments in the executive staff, is presently under-utilised and can be awarded to our most hard-working staffers next term. Each Ministry can also organise and design its own “Best Employee” titles and honours, such as “Best Recruiter” and “Best Mentor” for HA, and award them to the most deserving nominees every month or at the end of the term. Additionally, we can organise the Lennarts Awards to honour those who deserve recognition. The Lennarts have a special place in my heart: my signature still proudly displays the titles I won from last year’s contests, and I want others who have made valuable contributions to our region to be recognised as well.

Biweekly Executive Reports

I understand and appreciate the value of transparency, and I agree that every citizen has the right to know what our government is doing. To my dismay, the incumbent Delegate has left our region in the dark with regard to government affairs despite explicitly promising to publish biweekly reports on the state of the executive in his January campaign platform. That will no longer be the case if I’m elected. I will publish reports every two weeks on the state of the government and progress on our major projects, as well as publicly honouring (or awarding) staffers who have dedicated the most to our government. In addition to increased transparency, our most deserving staffers will also get the recognition they deserve.

Internal Ministries

Our internal Ministries have suffered greatly over the past four months, with huge leadership and staff turnover. Since my top priority next term is to rebuild our staff and revive our activity, these Ministries will have my fullest attention.

Of all Ministries, Culture has suffered the most. Over this term, the Ministry has lost three Ministers and two Deputies, leaving it understaffed and struggling with activity. Music Monday and movie nights were never organised, while Theme Thursday only started to be hosted towards the end of the term. A positive achievement is that Culture has started to host more game nights regularly, which I will strive to continue.

In another field, the merge with Communications did not result in higher productivity or a concentration of manpower, but instead ended with the collapse of activity in Communications’ portfolio: One TNS issue was hastily published at the end of the term, and similarly only one NBS episode was produced. Those of you who have been around long enough will notice similarities with a previous merge in the past, which also killed Communications before it was brought back during Gorundu’s term. It is evident by this point that merging Communications into Culture does not work, particularly when Culture is going through a difficult time of high staff turnover and leadership turbulence.

Games and Festivals
In my view, cultural events are a big part of what makes a region fun to stay. They help create engagement and foster a sense of community with your fellow region-mates, which is incredibly valuable in fighting inactivity. Aside from hosting movie nights and game nights, the Culture Ministry under my direction will also create regional contests, such as flag/music/dispatch competitions or even the Hunger Games, with a goal to boost wider gameside engagement. When I first introduced it to Carcassonne, the Hunger Games was a huge hit and registrations had to be closed early because applications filled up faster than expected, and I’m convinced that it will generate a similarly high turnout in TNP once introduced.

I will also work with my Culture Minister to collaborate with other regions on cultural events. The recent FrontierFest with Europeia was a success and I want to continue our cultural cooperation with our allies. For example, the month of June is Pride Month, and we can collaborate with Europeia and The Wellspring for a big Pride festival. This will accomplish not only deeper relations with our allies but also increased activity for our region, since big festivals tend to drive a lot of engagement.

Summer also brings with it three special holidays in our region: Democracy Day (July 7th - our Constitution’s ratification), Manumission Day (May 26th - end of Pixiedance’s tyranny), and Liberation Day (July 28th - end of Great Bight’s coup). I will work with the Culture Ministry to organise events, if possible, to commemorate those special days in our region’s history.

Reviving The North Star
As an avid writer and consistent contributor to our publications, it hurts me deeply to see how publications of TNS have been dramatically curtailed since Communications’ merge into Culture as a result of neglect. I strongly opposed the merge for this exact reason, and was saddened to see how it turned out for the worse. As Delegate, my main priority would be to recruit more writers into Culture and bring TNS back to a monthly schedule once more.

TNN has been dormant as well, but I find it useful to keep on for short, breaking news. Another way to keep TNN alive would be to publish the government’s biweekly executive reports on it as a form of press releases.

Given the severe shortage in writers currently, I will focus on reviving TNS and TNN first. TNL, as much as I would love to see it alive again, will have to wait. My current plan is still to publish an edition by the end of next term, if possible, though it’s not a high priority.

Keeping Radio Alive
Culture has published only one NBS episode this term, which is deeply unfortunate. My intention is to keep the Radio department going with fresh ideas and regular production of shows, by working to establish concrete schedules and recruit more podcasters into the department. Radio topics can include anything from government reports, midterm discussions, roleplay highlights to broader gameplay discussions. We can also collaborate with our allies to produce a joint radio show together.

Bringing back the Ministry of Communications
Over the long term, once Culture’s activity and manpower has been restored to a stable level, and TNS successfully revived, I plan to re-establish the Ministry of Communications. It is patently clear that the merge has failed to induce more activity on our publications—if anything, it achieved the opposite effect—and that needs to be reversed. A centralised Ministry would work better to produce our publications than a neglected department.

I have written extensively about my region-wide recruitment campaign into the executive staff, and HA will serve as the spearhead of that campaign. We will work harder on the recruitment front by giving our recruiters and mentors more motivation to work through awards, titles, and public recognition.

However, on the subject of recruitment lists, I have observed that these recruitment runs produce little engagement, if any at all. Many telegrams were sent but very few replied. This suggests to me that recruitment lists are not very effective, and so HA’s main focus next term will be personalised recruitment through messaging newcomers and unengaged citizens on Discord, since that’s where I have found us to have the most success. To that end, the Welcome Wagon will be placed under HA’s management, while admins can still perform necessary checks. The Welcome Wagon and the Gameside Advocates will work in tandem to bring more TNPers into our government through direct, one-on-one messaging and advertising.

New spawns will also need to be welcomed from the RMB and integrated into our region. A welcoming bot was introduced under my Delegacy but it has become dormant this term, and I intend to bring it back.

Needless to say, I’m very pleased to have completed the Resource Review project (with Epico’s assistance) this term, and the only thing left to do in this area is to ensure all regional dispatches are up-to-date with the latest information if I’m elected.

External Ministries

Steadiness through troubled waters
We have witnessed monumental shifts in our alliances this term. The Pax Polaris Occidens was dissolved following irreconcilable differences and a loss of trust between us and our allies over the events of the Outback. While the dissolution of PPO was in my opinion inevitable following TWP’s departure, careless remarks by this administration’s officials contributed to that loss of trust among our allies. Having learned a great deal of diplomacy during my time serving on the Committee of Foreign Relations and advising Vibonia’s leadership on foreign affairs, I’m confident that I have learned from my past mistakes and will be able to largely avoid the recklessness of my past term and this administration if elected.

My focus now will be to deepen our existing relations and search for new friends and allies that will help us encircle and diminish the influence of our enemies. A pragmatic and steady hand is required for that purpose. Additionally, I will seek to enhance cultural collaboration with our allies as part of my vision to restore our regional activity.

Return of the Ambassadors
The abolition of the Ambassador Corps was another mistake of this administration that I believe needs to be rectified. It deprived our staffers of a chance to learn more about foreign affairs through service in other regions, which is contrary to the stated mission of educating our staffers and raising the next generation of diplomats. As a result, I plan to reintroduce the Ambassador Corps upon being elected. To prevent previous issues with the program from repeating, the Ambassador Corps will require staffers to make applications that will test their activity and ability. This helps ensure that they will be active and responsive in order to deliver news or make regular reports on their posted region’s happenings.

Educating our diplomats
The Analyst channel has largely failed to engage staffers into learning our FA, in part because there was little discussion to be had. Most of the main FA discussions, I have observed, are mainly concentrated in the Committee these days. If we want to engage and educate our staffers on FA, more discussions (that are not sensitive) need to be moved into the main Analyst channel and not the Committee one.

A volume of the FA Digest was recently published, extensively covering major events and treaties of last year to today. However, I have observed that one of the biggest challenges in completing the Digest was that it was initially far too ambitious in scope compared to existing Ministerial manpower and resources. The planned length of the full Digest was the equivalent of four TNS editions, while there were only four writers for the Digest. In the end, four complete articles were published alongside a list of treaties at the end of the term, a drawdown from initial plans. To ensure that the project is continued smoothly without major difficulties, I would cut down on the length of articles into shorter blurbs so that more topics can be covered.

This term, the NPA’s capabilities have further degraded as a result of High Command resignations and lack of activity. Cultural events for NPA soldiers was a novel concept that didn’t pan out due to a lack of interest and manpower, while our operations were largely stuck with lengthy piles, most notably in The Wellspring, with no update operations organised in-between. Even the proposed offensives against BoM targets didn’t happen at all. The loss of some of our capable Generals, lack of initiative among officers, and inactivity in the rank and file have all contributed to the slow and painful deterioration of our capabilities. To date, I’m unsure if there were any reliable updater left in our army outside of High Command. The only thing still going for the NPA is our respectable piler base in the Auxiliary.

I once remarked that the NPA is currently in a Catch-22 situation: We don’t have any grand victories or exciting operations to attract recruits, but we also don’t have the manpower and energy to make them happen. The most effective form of recruitment, from what I have seen, is big victories or huge wars driving enlistment up. Indeed, our enlistment numbers shot up significantly in the aftermath of our declaration of war and invasion of Solidarity. I myself was one of the Solidarity enlistees. But as the war dragged on and the liberations became more exhausting, the NPA’s activity gradually declined and its talent pool started to dry up. There were bright moments, like the CCD operation which generated a huge turnout from our soldiers, but other than that the NPA has been struggling heavily to come out for update operations. I can talk all day long about what methods the government can use to recruit harder, but without any victories or excitement only few will show up to the enlistment office.

It is painfully evident by now that 1) the NPA’s greatest strength remains in the Auxiliary, not the Special Forces, and 2) it is large raids (like Solidarity and fash bashes) that attract the biggest turnout from our army, not liberations. To that end, my goal for the NPA next term would be to participate in joint raids and other update operations organised by our allies, and slowly rebuild our updater capability through frequent victories in the field, which would serve as our primary form of recruitment. Broadcasting our victories is easy—it’s the “making them happen” part that’s difficult, but it can be done.

Another thing that I would like to see happen is a revival of the Call to Serve program, which comprises text or radio interviews of High Command members. I can readily do text interviews myself if required.

Ensuring consistent operations
Over this term, the WA Affairs has had its highs and lows, and one of the lows was the lateness in making voting threads and publishing IFVs due to a lack of available staffers. Thankfully this situation has improved towards the end of the term as more staffers joined in response to WAA’s call for help, but as the summer lull is upon us, I want to ensure that the Ministry will keep producing IFVs and voting threads on time. The broader recruitment campaign will go some way towards that goal by recruiting more staffers into the Ministry, and I’m prepared to do the tasks myself if it’s necessary. I have had experience writing IFVs for WA Affairs this term (and even authored an Injunction!), so I’m fully able to cover when needed.

Heroes of Valhalla and commending our TNPers
First of all, I want to commend Pallaith for his enormous efforts towards making three commendations this term for our deserving TNPers. It is an energy that I hope to see continuing via our cooperation in the Heroes of Valhalla program. As Delegate, I would work with allied leaders in the MGC to continue the momentum at commending our region-mates and allied members.

Collaboration with WALL
To date, I have not seen any moves by this administration to pursue deeper collaboration with WALL. Neither joint IFVs nor a WA symposium have happened. As Delegate, I will explore the possibility of organising joint IFVs and, if possible, a new WA symposium with our WALL allies.

As a final note, voting on WA resolutions early and often will not pose an issue for me, who lives in a good timezone. When the call comes, I’ll be there, ready and waiting.

Miscellaneous

The Cards Guild has been effectively defunct since Dreadton’s resignation of citizenship, leaving the Guild without any leadership. Not only that, all of its activities are also dead. At present, I plan to revive the Cards Guild by working with our ally, The Wellspring, to pool our resources together and restore the Guild’s activity once more. It won’t be a return to the glory days, but it’s a concrete step towards re-establishing a proper card organisation in TNP and rebuilding a stable card supply to replenish our stocks.

Thanks to a month of endotarting in advance, I have reached 520 endorsements, a huge improvement compared to my September run. With regular telegram reminders, dispatch pings, and the WADP, I believe I can finish the transition, if elected, within a month.

The summer lull will likely lead to a large drop in our endorsement and WA numbers, so we must be prepared to promote WADP efforts by any means necessary. Aside from telegrams to non-WAs advertising the benefits of joining the WA, I will also ping some of them in a dispatch daily and encourage them to join the WA and endorse.

Conclusion

This was an extraordinarily long textwall of a platform, but the purpose of my return to the Delegate race is simple: I want to save TNP from our severe manpower and activity issues, and guide us through the withering summer lull. If we want to find a way out before falling down a deep, dark chasm, we must come together as a region and solve this crisis before it’s too late. The task will be long and hard, but I have confidence that I can tackle it with your help, armed with newfound experience in reviving an inactive Ministry.

Thank you for reading, I remain available for further questions.

St George · Thursday at 8:28 PM

Picairn:
A regional dispatch will be created to promote the campaign, and recruitment telegrams will be sent regularly to entice residents into applying for citizenship and joining the executive.

I may have more comments later but I'd just like to say that this won't work. The RMB Community doesn't know the government. It also probably doesn't particularly like the government and it very much doesn't like the off-site.

If you're not giving the RMB anything where they are, how can you expect them to take on roles where they aren't?

Jinkies · Thursday at 8:32 PM

Hi, you know me, I'm the former MoWAA under your administration (you'll note that that applies to both of you I'm asking this question to, ha!). I have just one question, one that's been bearing on me as of recent as the General Assembly has evolved for the better because of the great citizens of The North Pacific over the past year:

What differentiates a good General Assembly resolution from a bad one, in your opinion?

Picairn · Thursday at 9:15 PM

St George:
I may have more comments later but I'd just like to say that this won't work. The RMB Community doesn't know the government. It also probably doesn't particularly like the government and it very much doesn't like the off-site.

If you're not giving the RMB anything where they are, how can you expect them to take on roles where they aren't?

One of the main pipelines through which we regularly recruit new talent is the gameside community. We have recruited our spawns with the telegram lists and the Gameside Advocates, and used regional dispatches as an assistance tool. Many of our newcomers (and myself) arrived from the RMB through recruitment or gathering information from our dispatches, so I think gameside campaigning is entirely a workable solution.

And the RMB community will be given a lot of attention if I'm elected. The regional contests (flag/music/dispatch design competitions), the Hunger Games, and the Lennarts will provide a lot of engagement within not just our Discord community but also our RMB one. We can also honour the contributions of those who are a part of the RMB community by giving them a spot on the WFE, a pinned dispatch, or a special RO position for a day, so that the RMB community will see that the government cares about them and inspires them to follow.

Jinkies:
Hi, you know me, I'm the former MoWAA under your administration (you'll note that that applies to both of you I'm asking this question to, ha!). I have just one question, one that's been bearing on me as of recent as the General Assembly has evolved for the better because of the great citizens of The North Pacific over the past year:

What differentiates a good General Assembly resolution from a bad one, in your opinion?

Hello Jinkies! You were a good Minister under my administration, and worked your hardest despite your own real life circumstances. I'm glad to see you here.

To answer your question, off the top of my head, a good GA resolution (that isn't a repeal) satisfies the following criteria:
- It is proofread and thoroughly cleared of any grammar mistakes (common sense but some of the defeated resolutions didn't do this, like the Improved Food Access one.)
- It does not attempt to excessively overreach into areas that aren't international issues (for instance, certain agricultural practices like bee-keeping and in-ovo sexing of chicks are better regulated by member states, not an international bureaucracy. I can see the value of a general prohibition on cruel animal farming practices, but not this level of micromanagement.)
- It considers all potential consequences of its mandates as practicably as possible. If a mandate carries more negative consequences than its benefits, it should be amended or removed. As an example, one of the mandates in the defeated Reducing Noise Pollution resolution would effectively ban transportation hubs away from residential centres, which would kill public transportation as we know it. Hence I casted my vote against that resolution.

Fachu · Thursday at 9:33 PM

Would you be willing to host weekly cabinet meetings like Chipoli has promised (and delivered) on?

Picairn · Thursday at 10:20 PM

Fachu:
Would you be willing to host weekly cabinet meetings like Chipoli has promised (and delivered) on?

I would, but I'll say earnestly that I don't view weekly Cabinet meetings as an effective solution to our problems. While I value Cabinet meetings on principle because there's potential for discussions and new ideas, mandatory weekly ones appear to me as a lot of effort for insufficient benefit, particularly when our manpower attrition is being neglected despite being a highly urgent and important issue. Ultimately, what matters the most is for the Cabinet to remember what projects are needed to be done, who is doing them, how much has been completed, and how to manage the Ministries to finish those projects on schedule. Many times, that can be achieved with a tracking spreadsheet and regular reminder DMs instead of meetings that produce little result.

Petronellania · Friday at 1:39 AM

Full support! :salute:

Picairn · Friday at 1:50 AM

Petronellania:
Full support!

Thank you for your support. If every citizen joins me in this endeavour to rebuild the executive staff and revive regional activity, we will come out stronger in the end.

Simone · Friday at 2:12 AM

Some questions - I'd think of more later:

1. Do you genuinely believe reviving cards guild is viable given that the operation of various scripts is now more difficult given the Cloudflare? (That's also the reason I haven't turned up often to NS these days as I can no longer use my work computer for NS)

2. Who would run cards guild?

3. How would reviving WALL IFVs work given that WALL members generally vote in GA differently from the views of S7?

4. Do you consider if you are NatSov or IntFed in GA?

5. Am I in your list of authors that you dislike in the GA and would vote automatically against?

Halsoni · Friday at 2:28 AM

Picairn:
I would, but I'll say earnestly that I don't view weekly Cabinet meetings as an effective solution to our problems. While I value Cabinet meetings on principle because there's potential for discussions and new ideas, mandatory weekly ones appear to me as a lot of effort for insufficient benefit, particularly when our manpower attrition is being neglected despite being a highly urgent and important issue. Ultimately, what matters the most is for the Cabinet to remember what projects are needed to be done, who is doing them, how much has been completed, and how to manage the Ministries to finish those projects on schedule. Many times, that can be achieved with a tracking spreadsheet and regular reminder DMs instead of meetings that produce little result.

Just want to hop in real quick to say that the cabinet VCs have helped this administration immensely, and they’ve increased our productivity and organisation by creating a moment where everyone is able to get on the same page and the Delegate is able to be updated on everything that’s going on.

I think it would be wise to reconsider this policy, coming from a member of the Chipoli I cabinet.

Picairn · Friday at 3:07 AM

Simone:
Some questions - I'd think of more later:

1. Do you genuinely believe reviving cards guild is viable given that the operation of various scripts is now more difficult?

2. Who would run cards guild?

3. How would reviving WALL IFVs work given that WALL members generally vote in GA differently from the views of S7?

4. I'd there even any support from other regions for a symposium?

1. Reviving the Cards Guild is important over the long term because our cards supply is not infinite. Off the top of my head, the card stock on TNL is going to exhaust itself in about 8 years with the current daily lottery, which may sound like a lot but it can run out faster if we want to pursue additional card rewards for events or WADP. Establishing a stable replenishment for our card stock is important, and the Cards Guild is central to that effort. The deployment of Border Control made card farming more difficult, but technical workarounds have been made to address that problem for card farmers, like Kractero's scripts.

2. My appointed Cards Guildmaster, who will work with our ally The Wellspring to pool our resources together and restore the Guild to stable activity.

3. I believe we are a member of WALL, not the S7. There is common ground for WALL to work on with regards to joint IFVs, such as supporting our allies' resolutions and opposing bad quality ones.

4. The key to maintaining interest in a joint project is commitment, and my administration will commit its available resources to help organise a symposium with our allies. I think organising a symposium will be beneficial to new authors and aspirants who want to learn more about the WA, as well as fostering deeper discussions about recent WA trends, which are important goals that all of us should support.

Picairn · Friday at 3:21 AM

Halsoni:
Just want to hop in real quick to say that the cabinet VCs have helped this administration immensely, and they’ve increased our productivity and organisation by creating a moment where everyone is able to get on the same page and the Delegate is able to be updated on everything that’s going on.

I think it would be wise to reconsider this policy, coming from a member of the Chipoli I cabinet.

I am not against regular Cabinet discussions on principle, but I am skeptical of the value of weekly meetings when they have produced little result under this administration. Just as an example, our manpower attrition problem has worsened this term and it was never addressed in an organised manner, despite it being perhaps the single most critical issue the government is facing. There was no organised recruitment campaign anywhere, no honest discussion of the high turnover within the executive staff, nothing. If weekly meetings have not driven the government to act on addressing our most important issues, I have doubt as to its approach.

Pallaith · Friday at 3:47 AM

Picairn, you are one of the more fascinating members of this community and your career trajectory has been quite interesting. In a big way I am glad to see you back and running for this office, because it did feel like we lost one of our best when you opted to explore other regions in the wake of your loss in the previous election. The situation is as dire as you say, and we need all the help we can get, so having you back and ready to tackle these issues is great. of course, we don't need you to be delegate to do that. Can we count on your continued efforts helping to get this region where it needs to be even if you lose again? Would you serve in this government if it continued to a second term, and offered you a place in it? Where would you best fit, do you think?

As a member of the current government you're challenging, but also a member of the previous government that did not survive that last election, I feel I am one of a few uniquely qualified to compare and contrast. Because this election is a special one: we have two choices and we have experience with both so we know what we can expect if we choose one over the other, and there is no guesswork or giving the benefit of the doubt. You have both earned whatever doubts may exist about picking you, and the interesting part is that in viewing both your platforms I see a lot of things that are the same. This tells me you both have your fingers on the pulse of the region and your lived-in experience as delegate has led you to come to similar conclusions. This is to be expected, and as a member of both governments I am unsurprised that some of these specific ideas are being advanced. We would be well served with either of you in this way, and I think you'd both be solid leaders. Naturally, there are differences, and I will have to quibble with some of them.

When I ran against you I advocated for consolidation of ministries. You disagreed. Chipoli consolidated communications into Culture. You will undo that if you win. I recognize that a lot of people in this region have a soft spot for Comms, and the idea of our traditional separate ministries remaining so. I share that soft spot - I was a former Comms minister myself, and it was an area I excelled in when I was first delegate. In times such as these, when personnel and morale are low, consolidation crops up, because it simply does not make sense to try to staff such a high number of ministries when you do not have the manpower to operate them. People make the mistake of seeing the decline in publications or radio shows as a consequence of the consolidation, rather than what it actually is: a consequence of not having enough people around to do the various things you want to do. When the manpower and the manhours are there for the project to be completed, it will be, whether Comms is a separate ministry or not. Unless you fix the root cause of the problem, your expanded ministries will not perform markedly better than the consolidated version.

I recognize the skepticism about cabinet meetings comes as much from your preferred leadership style as it comes from the fair observation that a cabinet on the same page and highly synchronized does not guarantee any kind of results, even if it may improve things on the margins. As a long-time member of almost every government in this Discord era, I can tell you that there is a huge difference in governments that are closely connected and communicating regularly with each other, and ones that are not. Ask the members of Tlomz's cabinet if they would have preferred regular cabinet meetings. Compare their responses to what McM's cabinet would say. Even without the meetings, McM clocked more lines of text in his cabinet chat than any delegate since. Communication is crucial outside of the ministry context: we've seen what happens when the government is insufficient in communicating to the citizens, and with each other. You have to make this easier, and more central to the administration of the government. I recall this being an area where you struggled as well, which was surprising considering how big of an issue it was with Simone's government, and how personally you felt that ache of loneliness from not having that communication. I am taken aback by how flippant you have been about this specific area which has been a strength in this government. I also bristle at your suggestion that this government did not address this issue or put a focus on it. We were all very well aware of it, it is after all an obvious issue. There is no magic wand solution to it though. If there was, you would have waved it last September, but you shared the very same struggle. You, like Chipoli, had an entire term to address it, and you, like Chipoli, ended that term having learned a lot about what worked and what didn't, and imagining a future second term where you could apply those lessons. We find ourselves here again. Is it entirely fair, then, to have two delegates with this experience, both ready to launch their proper response to the problem, but to act as if the current one failed in some unique or different way? At the very least, if trying Chipoli out was a mistake, we now have a situation where we're going to get an experienced delegate learning his lesson from last time, so you're both kind of on equal footing there.

It strikes me as interesting how much of what you propose is a bit of a rollback of what we've just done or a return to what we did in the past. You would also return ambassadors to the FA ministry, something we finally did away with, before we have had much time to evaluate how the new setup works. A crucial element of that setup, by the way, is observing and gradually bringing up new talent to higher levels of FA planning and work. It troubles me how impatient you and much of this region seem to be, considering how cavalier TNP has been with how it switches out delegates these days, and tries seemingly anything to see what will stick. We certainly won't know if this approach would make more sense because we're going back to the one that gave us diminishing returns and left our staffer no wiser or capable of doing FA work. The FA Digest, which has been very well-received since being published not even 24 hours ago, was an untested, often-contemplated but never realized project, and we knew early on it would take most of the term to do. This was the major project I was tasked with doing as MoFA, and your characterization of it is not accurate. We did not downsize the release - the goal was to capture all the major events in the last year and demonstrate how they determined gameplay and the interactions between regions. We did exactly what we set out to do. One method that was explored was stringing smaller articles together for each event, but we ended up going with a single lengthy narrative that allowed the events to flow into each other, and found a creative way to highlight some of the minor items. I certainly don't expect future issues to look exactly like that one, or even be as long, but that was always baked into the pie when the first issue was meant to cover an entire year.

At this point I feel trying to go back to the well of WALL and a symposium is tired and outdated. It's no secret that WALL is often dormant and not being utilized, but there's very good reasons right now not to do that without a plan. Two of our WALL signatories are also signatories to the Sovereign Seven. If we try to instill greater cooperation among WALL members, we will walk right into that contradiction, and invite conflict. That may be what we want to do, if it is our intention to challenge S7 and begin finding ways to strengthen IntFed influence in the WA. That's certainly a choice, but I do not get the sense it's something you're trying to do. As for the symposium, I think we all know what that would like in this climate, and what would be discussed to death. That may be interesting and even therapeutic for the parties involved, assuming you can get buy in, and are willing to moderate and police the likely explosive and stressful environment it would be. And again, attaching WALL to it will invite the awkward tension with S7 that's dormant within our alliance. So if you go this way, I would like to see your strategies and goals for it, because both of these can quickly become a loaded endeavor if not handled properly, and giving them the old college try just because it seems like it would be a good idea is not the kind of approach we should take with them. And since this has come up, where do you stand on this now anyway? You were very explicitly NatSov while delegate last time, but your participation in votes this term suggests that is no longer the case. What changed, and will it still the same in a second Picairn term? If you've turned over a new IntFed leaf, where does that leave our cooperation with allies who are in S7?

I will say that your experiences in other regions, while not directly transferrable to this region, could give us some interesting angles on how to improve our internals. Both you and Chipoli recognize that must be the focus next term, and I agree. I believe the vision for HA and the RMB he outlined is the key to that. I do not see the same thing in your platform, though I do recognize these as the approaches you highlighted the last time you were delegate and planned to do if re-elected. A little more hands-on involvement, consistent application of events and these proposals, and you certainly may be on to something. And the focus on internals is made even easier if the external ministries are strong. This was an area I felt you struggled with when you were delegate, particularly diplomatic spaces. You want to project strength and stability, but one thing our allies really hate is flip-flopping leaders every 4 months. If you're going to put them through yet another leader change in quick succession, you need to have a strategy for how to achieve continuity with our allies while also being able to pursue your own plans. Have you given any thought to this? I know you have been part of the FA committee, but I am not entirely sure you understood the nuances of the dissolution of the PPO. More valuable to the voters, I think would be to know, if all of these turbulent things had happened during a second Picairn term, how you would have approached them, what your decision would have been during The Outback incident, or leading up to the joint statement, or our response to these events and how we handled PPO and the AA alliance. What would you have done differently?

Regarding defense, you and Chipoli seem to have the same idea. I note he's proposing joint ops that are more, us supplementing existing ops rather than planning something in advance, which I think will work better. I do find your critique to be a bit difficult to prove, however, because almost the entire time we were piling on allied regions or doing our transition. That did not leave much time for organized updating, which to be fair I have doubts about our ability to have done successfully, but technically we didn't really get to try. Seems a bit unfair to strike at the military for failing to update when it was parked most of the term by necessity. You cited the loss of HC generals, which yes, is concerning, but these were busy people who had stayed on out of obligation and because needed them, it was bound to happen. While I'm at it, you mentioned that and the loss of Culture ministers, the loss of deputies, to suggest the government was shedding talent. I would note you had three different FA ministers. When I was delegate, on two separate occasions I had 3 different MoDs. Turnover happens for various reasons, in the case of Culture we had a long-serving minister who simply couldn't balance the time, and another who took on the role when he shouldn't have for similar reasons, then a third who was in government for two terms and shifted roles at a bad time in her life. None of this had anything to do with our manpower shortage or poor direction from the delegate. Just keeping it real here.

What would you do HoV-wise? Would you author some of the resolutions? Which nominees? Perhaps lend a hand on commending another region's players, assuming we run out of our own? By the way, I wrote four commendations, just thought I would mention that

Also I really like spreadsheets, can you dive into yours a bit more? I'd like to see how that would translate to our ministries and this region.

Picairn · Friday at 7:24 AM

Pallaith:
Picairn, you are one of the more fascinating members of this community and your career trajectory has been quite interesting. In a big way I am glad to see you back and running for this office, because it did feel like we lost one of our best when you opted to explore other regions in the wake of your loss in the previous election. The situation is as dire as you say, and we need all the help we can get, so having you back and ready to tackle these issues is great. of course, we don't need you to be delegate to do that. Can we count on your continued efforts helping to get this region where it needs to be even if you lose again? Would you serve in this government if it continued to a second term, and offered you a place in it? Where would you best fit, do you think?

I believe I'd serve this region better as Delegate to address the systematic manpower attrition and low morale within the executive staff. Based on the performance of this administration so far, I don't think I'd be very effective at driving results as a Minister if I had to contend with an ever diminishing staff while being largely powerless to change the situation. During my term as Minister of Defense, I worked very hard to drive both recruitment and activity by religiously leading ops every week (where practicable) and publishing reports gameside, on top of writing the Soldier's Manual and designing new medals largely by myself to motivate the troops. That took a toll on my mental health as while activity was maintained, my personal recruitment efforts failed to bear much fruit as it was too little and too weak to solve the NPA's institutional problems. I didn't have access to effective assistance because Home Affairs went inactive and its inactivity was not resolved, thus stronger recruitment efforts were not made. From then on, I became skeptical of serving as Minister of an inactive or uncooperating administration. I can not work for those who are unwilling to put in the work themselves.

But if you were to put a gun to my head and make me choose, I'd choose to be Minister of Home Affairs. It is arguably one of the most vital Ministries beside Culture, responsible for recruiting new talent and converting them into committed, hard-working members of the region, something that we are dreadfully short at the moment. It is also the best equipped and most specialised Ministry to address our manpower issues on a systemic scale thanks to its resources: the recruiters, the Welcome Wagon, and Gameside Advocates.

Pallaith:
When I ran against you I advocated for consolidation of ministries. You disagreed. Chipoli consolidated communications into Culture. You will undo that if you win. I recognize that a lot of people in this region have a soft spot for Comms, and the idea of our traditional separate ministries remaining so. I share that soft spot - I was a former Comms minister myself, and it was an area I excelled in when I was first delegate. In times such as these, when personnel and morale are low, consolidation crops up, because it simply does not make sense to try to staff such a high number of ministries when you do not have the manpower to operate them. People make the mistake of seeing the decline in publications or radio shows as a consequence of the consolidation, rather than what it actually is: a consequence of not having enough people around to do the various things you want to do. When the manpower and the manhours are there for the project to be completed, it will be, whether Comms is a separate ministry or not. Unless you fix the root cause of the problem, your expanded ministries will not perform markedly better than the consolidated version.

I strongly object to the consolidation of Communications because it gives the Culture Minister an additional burden to keep track of, and they may choose to prioritise other fields while leaving it neglected, which is a death knell in an understaffed Ministry. Over this term we have gone through four Culture Ministers, and it was only until the fourth that serious efforts were made towards completing a TNS edition. A separate Ministry provides the impetus, the pressure to perform and produce results (which also attracts the Minister's full attention - a critical factor to a project's success), whilst as a department it may become ignored in pursuit of other priorities, as we have seen here.

Pallaith:
I recognize the skepticism about cabinet meetings comes as much from your preferred leadership style as it comes from the fair observation that a cabinet on the same page and highly synchronized does not guarantee any kind of results, even if it may improve things on the margins. As a long-time member of almost every government in this Discord era, I can tell you that there is a huge difference in governments that are closely connected and communicating regularly with each other, and ones that are not. Ask the members of Tlomz's cabinet if they would have preferred regular cabinet meetings. Compare their responses to what McM's cabinet would say. Even without the meetings, McM clocked more lines of text in his cabinet chat than any delegate since. Communication is crucial outside of the ministry context: we've seen what happens when the government is insufficient in communicating to the citizens, and with each other. You have to make this easier, and more central to the administration of the government. I recall this being an area where you struggled as well, which was surprising considering how big of an issue it was with Simone's government, and how personally you felt that ache of loneliness from not having that communication. I am taken aback by how flippant you have been about this specific area which has been a strength in this government. I also bristle at your suggestion that this government did not address this issue or put a focus on it. We were all very well aware of it, it is after all an obvious issue.

You were aware of it, but have you acted on it? When WA Affairs cried out for help in March, I, alongside others, joined the Ministry to assist in the publication of IFVs and voting threads. The situation from there became less dire for MoWAA thanks in part to the help of those who joined. Where is this urgency for the rest of the Ministries? Where are the public messages, the campaigns to attract citizens into the executive, the calls to address a criticial issue? You say you were aware, but failure to act on that awareness has consequences: the staff keeps losing more people than it could replace, and now here we are.

Pallaith:
There is no magic wand solution to it though. If there was, you would have waved it last September, but you shared the very same struggle. You, like Chipoli, had an entire term to address it, and you, like Chipoli, ended that term having learned a lot about what worked and what didn't, and imagining a future second term where you could apply those lessons. We find ourselves here again. Is it entirely fair, then, to have two delegates with this experience, both ready to launch their proper response to the problem, but to act as if the current one failed in some unique or different way? At the very least, if trying Chipoli out was a mistake, we now have a situation where we're going to get an experienced delegate learning his lesson from last time, so you're both kind of on equal footing there.

I recognise that my September delegacy did not end on a high note. Foreign affairs wasn't my strong suit then, and various changes in the foreign landscape at the time left my concentration disoriented. In some cases, my faulty judgment made the situation worse. I became more concerned with trying to put out the fires than focusing on rebuilding the executive staff, and by the end of the term I was overcome with disillusion and burnout.

But I have spent the last four months on a good run in Carcassonne, where I gained valuable experience in reviving an inactive Ministry and bringing it back to full activity. The experience also lifted my spirits, and I now realise that giving in to pessimism was my biggest mistake. No longer. I will not stand by and watch the executive lose more people every day and our activity fall off a cliff.

Pallaith:
It strikes me as interesting how much of what you propose is a bit of a rollback of what we've just done or a return to what we did in the past. You would also return ambassadors to the FA ministry, something we finally did away with, before we have had much time to evaluate how the new setup works. A crucial element of that setup, by the way, is observing and gradually bringing up new talent to higher levels of FA planning and work. It troubles me how impatient you and much of this region seem to be, considering how cavalier TNP has been with how it switches out delegates these days, and tries seemingly anything to see what will stick. We certainly won't know if this approach would make more sense because we're going back to the one that gave us diminishing returns and left our staffer no wiser or capable of doing FA work.

I find it difficult to see how abolishing the Ambassador Corps and funneling new staffers into the Analyst channel—which has recently become devoid of meaningful FA discussions—to be the best way of educating new talent. That seems like a recipe for them to go off and become inactive. Without an attentive leadership to foster discussions, this method will not work anymore than the old ambassadorships. If your approach is not producing any meaningful results after four months, then perhaps it is time to reevaluate and change.

Pallaith:
At this point I feel trying to go back to the well of WALL and a symposium is tired and outdated. It's no secret that WALL is often dormant and not being utilized, but there's very good reasons right now not to do that without a plan. Two of our WALL signatories are also signatories to the Sovereign Seven. If we try to instill greater cooperation among WALL members, we will walk right into that contradiction, and invite conflict. That may be what we want to do, if it is our intention to challenge S7 and begin finding ways to strengthen IntFed influence in the WA. That's certainly a choice, but I do not get the sense it's something you're trying to do. As for the symposium, I think we all know what that would like in this climate, and what would be discussed to death. That may be interesting and even therapeutic for the parties involved, assuming you can get buy in, and are willing to moderate and police the likely explosive and stressful environment it would be. And again, attaching WALL to it will invite the awkward tension with S7 that's dormant within our alliance. So if you go this way, I would like to see your strategies and goals for it, because both of these can quickly become a loaded endeavor if not handled properly, and giving them the old college try just because it seems like it would be a good idea is not the kind of approach we should take with them. And since this has come up, where do you stand on this now anyway? You were very explicitly NatSov while delegate last time, but your participation in votes this term suggests that is no longer the case. What changed, and will it still the same in a second Picairn term? If you've turned over a new IntFed leaf, where does that leave our cooperation with allies who are in S7?

I don't believe Europeia has formally signed on to the Sovereign Seven yet. I also don't think the Sovereign Seven aims to block all GA legislation, considering how supportive they were of AA and NPO-sponsored legislation until recently. There are also repeals which our more IntFed WALL members have publicly supported, such as Repeal: "Sustainable Timber Standards". Here, I think there is ground for us to work with, particularly in important international issues, even if we may strongly disagree in others.

I wouldn't call myself IntFed right now. I still reject bureaucratic overreach in the WA, and have voted for many repeals on issues that the WA has no business with, like In-Ovo Sexing Of Chicks. However, I have come to believe that there is ground for the GA to legislate on, particularly in international matters like warfare, civil rights, international commerce, etc. and if they were to be repealed, they should be accompanied with high quality replacements.

Pallaith:
I will say that your experiences in other regions, while not directly transferrable to this region, could give us some interesting angles on how to improve our internals. Both you and Chipoli recognize that must be the focus next term, and I agree. I believe the vision for HA and the RMB he outlined is the key to that. I do not see the same thing in your platform, though I do recognize these as the approaches you highlighted the last time you were delegate and planned to do if re-elected. A little more hands-on involvement, consistent application of events and these proposals, and you certainly may be on to something. And the focus on internals is made even easier if the external ministries are strong. This was an area I felt you struggled with when you were delegate, particularly diplomatic spaces. You want to project strength and stability, but one thing our allies really hate is flip-flopping leaders every 4 months. If you're going to put them through yet another leader change in quick succession, you need to have a strategy for how to achieve continuity with our allies while also being able to pursue your own plans. Have you given any thought to this? I know you have been part of the FA committee, but I am not entirely sure you understood the nuances of the dissolution of the PPO. More valuable to the voters, I think would be to know, if all of these turbulent things had happened during a second Picairn term, how you would have approached them, what your decision would have been during The Outback incident, or leading up to the joint statement, or our response to these events and how we handled PPO and the AA alliance. What would you have done differently?

I have no plan to upend our existing alliances and relationships, and I welcome cooperation with our allies on matters of mutual interest. While I don't have access to all the facts of those events, having learned only through other people's accounts and public statements, and thus my hypothetical approaches here may not be complete, I think I'd have tried my best to investigate the state of the region fully and try to negotiate a workable solution before having to resort to the ultimatum. The latter was done while we had insufficient information of what was going on and how the Outback was functioning, and it predictably carried negative consequences. If I had decided to go through with the ultimatum for whatever reason, I'd have offered a private apology to the Outback and TWP once the fuller picture surfaced, and advised the AA, NPO, and LWU not to overcomplicate the issue by posting the joint statement. That made the issue public and resulted in explosive consequences. The rest: TWP's departure, the dissolution of PPO, all came from the result of NPO/LWU/AA publishing the joint statement instead of giving a private apology.

Pallaith:
Regarding defense, you and Chipoli seem to have the same idea. I note he's proposing joint ops that are more, us supplementing existing ops rather than planning something in advance, which I think will work better. I do find your critique to be a bit difficult to prove, however, because almost the entire time we were piling on allied regions or doing our transition. That did not leave much time for organized updating, which to be fair I have doubts about our ability to have done successfully, but technically we didn't really get to try. Seems a bit unfair to strike at the military for failing to update when it was parked most of the term by necessity.

From a technical military standpoint, The Wellspring updates early (and TNP updates late), and so it was entirely possible to organise update operations while still piling safely. But we didn't try that, nor did we organise anything else to keep the troops engaged during the piles.

Pallaith:
You cited the loss of HC generals, which yes, is concerning, but these were busy people who had stayed on out of obligation and because needed them, it was bound to happen. While I'm at it, you mentioned that and the loss of Culture ministers, the loss of deputies, to suggest the government was shedding talent. I would note you had three different FA ministers. When I was delegate, on two separate occasions I had 3 different MoDs. Turnover happens for various reasons, in the case of Culture we had a long-serving minister who simply couldn't balance the time, and another who took on the role when he shouldn't have for similar reasons, then a third who was in government for two terms and shifted roles at a bad time in her life. None of this had anything to do with our manpower shortage or poor direction from the delegate. Just keeping it real here.

I consider the loss of HC generals to be concerning because that is, at its core, a loss of institutional experience that has served previous MoDs quite well. I myself benefited from their advice when I was fresh into the position.

The first Culture minister whom I talked to said he was burnt out from the work, and hated how the Delegate pushed him to do work on his days off. This suggests to me that the Delegate was inconsiderate towards his first minister. I'll grant you the third one, and I don't know enough about the circumstances of the second to comment.

But we didn't just lose the Ministers, we also lost the Deputies. I'll also note that the first Culture Minister has essentially ceased his participation in Culture and returned to RP, the second has resigned his citizenship entirely, and the third exited the government. We didn't simply lose Ministers, we also lost participants in government.

Pallaith:
What would you do HoV-wise? Would you author some of the resolutions? Which nominees? Perhaps lend a hand on commending another region's players, assuming we run out of our own? By the way, I wrote four commendations, just thought I would mention that

Also I really like spreadsheets, can you dive into yours a bit more? I'd like to see how that would translate to our ministries and this region.

SInce I recently authored an Injunction, I'd be willing to take up a draft. I also would like to see other TNP authors participate in this, through the MoWAA's mentorship and assistance. I have no problem with us lending a hand to help write allied commends.

The spreadsheet that I used for Carcassonne's Culture Ministry comprised of four tabs: personnel, Discord events, gameside events, and Voice of the People. Personnel is self-explanatory, it tracks the Ministry's staffers and their preferences for doing tasks (like our own HA's roll calls). Discord events track the schedules of everything that is hosted in the region's Discord server (movie nights, game nights), while gameside events track polls, questions of the day, and regional contests e.g. flag contests and the Hunger Games. Lastly, the Voice of the People tab tracks the articles claimed and written for the news publication, with author progress compared against the deadline for me to see who's near completion, who's falling behind, etc.

St George · Friday at 7:46 AM

Picairn:
One of the main pipelines through which we regularly recruit new talent is the gameside community. We have recruited our spawns with the telegram lists and the Gameside Advocates, and used regional dispatches as an assistance tool. Many of our newcomers (and myself) arrived from the RMB through recruitment or gathering information from our dispatches, so I think gameside campaigning is entirely a workable solution.

This all speaks to an approach that views the RMB as a resource to be tapped, not as a part of TNP's community. And that's part of the problem and why the pipeline from the RMB to greater involvement in the region has broken down. If you just view gameside as a place to campaign, not only does that devalue that place implicitly, it also leads to telegram and RMB post fatigue as people get harangued into joining a place they have no interest in joining much of the time. We could do more to bring people in - but that can only start when you build something worth them investing in, not by skipping that step.

Picairn:
And the RMB community will be given a lot of attention if I'm elected. The regional contests (flag/music/dispatch design competitions), the Hunger Games, and the Lennarts will provide a lot of engagement within not just our Discord community but also our RMB one. We can also honour the contributions of those who are a part of the RMB community by giving them a spot on the WFE, a pinned dispatch, or a special RO position for a day, so that the RMB community will see that the government cares about them and inspires them to follow.

The last few times the Lennarts were run, it took me promoting them directly both in VCs and text on discord to RMB RPers to even get them to engage with it - what guarantees can you give that this wouldn't go the same way?

On a larger note - you've repeatedly pointed out our manpower issues, but have committed to your administration doing a lot if you win. How are you going to ensure this happens and we see results? Can you promise a golden toilet and actually deliver one?

Picairn · Friday at 8:44 AM

St George:
This all speaks to an approach that views the RMB as a resource to be tapped, not as a part of TNP's community. And that's part of the problem and why the pipeline from the RMB to greater involvement in the region has broken down. If you just view gameside as a place to campaign, not only does that devalue that place implicitly, it also leads to telegram and RMB post fatigue as people get harangued into joining a place they have no interest in joining much of the time. We could do more to bring people in - but that can only start when you build something worth them investing in, not by skipping that step.

That's a strange characterisation because I'm planning to do a lot of things for this "resource". It's a two way interaction, not a one-sided extraction.

St George:
The last few times the Lennarts were run, it took me promoting them directly both in VCs and text on discord to RMB RPers to even get them to engage with it - what guarantees can you give that this wouldn't go the same way?

On a larger note - you've repeatedly pointed out our manpower issues, but have committed to your administration doing a lot if you win. How are you going to ensure this happens and we see results? Can you promise a golden toilet and actually deliver one?

The Lennarts is an opportunity for TNPers to nominate the best and brightest within the community. That includes RPers too in awards such as "Best RPer of the Year", "Character of the Year", and "Article of the Year". Being able to nominate and vote for the best among us would be an exciting prospect for the broader community, to recognise and honour the achievements of our finest members. We can maximise engagement by receiving gameside nominations in addition to offsite ones, and put the nominations to gameside polls.

The region-wide recruitment campaign that I outlined will tackle recruitment on all fronts - gameside, forumside, and Discord-side, with an emphasis on personalised, one-on-one messaging. All of our available resources: the recruiters, the Welcome Wagon, mentors and the Gameside Advocates will be mobilised for this campaign. This is my top priority because it is currently the single most critical issue affecting our government. The success of this campaign will have a major impact on all other government projects: with more available manpower, we will be able to jumpstart government activity and finish those projects.

Halsoni · Friday at 9:23 AM

Picairn:
I am not against regular Cabinet discussions on principle, but I am skeptical of the value of weekly meetings when they have produced little result under this administration. Just as an example, our manpower attrition problem has worsened this term and it was never addressed in an organised manner, despite it being perhaps the single most critical issue the government is facing. There was no organised recruitment campaign anywhere, no honest discussion of the high turnover within the executive staff, nothing. If weekly meetings have not driven the government to act on addressing our most important issues, I have doubt as to its approach.

For what it’s worth, this is inaccurate. Discussions have been had and plans were made, but due to situations out of our control some things have moved more slowly than we would’ve liked. I think this creates a distorted image of what this administration has worked for so far.

Also, have you considered there might’ve been things that were progressed due to the cabinet meetings? I can think of a few, both classified and unclassified.

Picairn · Friday at 9:35 AM

Halsoni:
For what it’s worth, this is inaccurate. Discussions have been had and plans were made, but due to situations out of our control some things have moved more slowly than we would’ve liked. I think this creates a distorted image of what this administration has worked for so far.

Also, have you considered there might’ve been things that were progressed due to the cabinet meetings? I can think of a few, both classified and unclassified.

I'd like to know what plans were made and what situations forced the plans to move more slowly, because from the outside there is zero effort anywhere at an actual recruitment campaign for the executive staff. Even the basic application processing has slowed down significantly.

By all means, tell me the unclassified information. Regardless, I maintain that the failure of this administration to address our manpower problems will have a detrimental effect on the rest of the government and its future activity.

AraFuttio · Friday at 12:15 PM

Coming back to this region after a hiatus has been an interesting experience for me. What has been stark is the exponential deterioration in the activity and enthusiasm in various branches of our government. Cracks were beginning to show when I left, but those cracks have clearly gotten bigger, and in my opinion, the pillars on which TNP stands are close to collapse, leading to a great drop to our traditionally high standing in NS.

I may ask more specific questions once I have pondered over your campaign in detail, but for now, I have to praise your vision, Picairn. Whilst, according to some people in this thread, some of your specific policies seem misjudged, I believe you have identified the threats that this region faces, and the urgency and action we need to tackle them with to avoid dire consequences. For that reason I do find myself supporting your campaign.

Picairn · Friday at 8:38 PM

Simone:
4. Do you consider if you are NatSov or IntFed in GA?

5. Am I in your list of authors that you dislike in the GA and would vote automatically against?

To answer your latest two questions, Simone:

4. Right now I'm not a hardline NatSov as I once was, but I'm not necessarily an IntFed either. I still reject bureaucratic overreach in the WA, and I will continue to vote for repeals on issues that the GA shouldn't intervene in. At the same time, I have come to believe that there is ground for the GA to legislate on, particularly in international matters like warfare, civil rights, international commerce, etc. and if they were to be repealed, they should be accompanied with high quality replacements.

5. You're not, and I wouldn't. I have no such lists, and I will follow the forum votes first and foremost as Delegate.

Comfed · Friday at 10:05 PM

Picairn:
The region-wide recruitment campaign that I outlined will tackle recruitment on all fronts - gameside, forumside, and Discord-side, with an emphasis on personalised, one-on-one messaging. All of our available resources: the recruiters, the Welcome Wagon, mentors and the Gameside Advocates will be mobilised for this campaign. This is my top priority because it is currently the single most critical issue affecting our government. The success of this campaign will have a major impact on all other government projects: with more available manpower, we will be able to jumpstart government activity and finish those projects.

I can't speak to what St George was thinking when he asked his question, but this doesn't really address what I'm wondering about.

Which is... what you're promising is impressive at first glance, but as you know very well having done it before, but no delegate governs alone. This is an incredibly ambitious agenda, and it is going to take a very dedicated and energized team to deliver. A spreadsheet isn't going to be enough. I'm wondering about how you plan to prevent/deal with frustration, turnover, and burnout amongst your cabinet, especially if you're going to scrap cabinet meetings. I'm especially interested to know how you're going to approach things if the going gets tough. If your recruitment plan faces delays, or doesn't work, or the manpower issues that have worsened since the frontier update (certainly not uniquely during the last four months, as you will recall from your own recent delegacy) continue to get worse - what is your plan to make sure your cabinet stays resilient?

In short, you're promising in this platform to grow our manpower base. My question is, how are you going to manage the manpower we have right now?

Picairn · Saturday at 8:15 AM

Comfed:
I can't speak to what St George was thinking when he asked his question, but this doesn't really address what I'm wondering about.

Which is... what you're promising is impressive at first glance, but as you know very well having done it before, but no delegate governs alone. This is an incredibly ambitious agenda, and it is going to take a very dedicated and energized team to deliver. A spreadsheet isn't going to be enough. I'm wondering about how you plan to prevent/deal with frustration, turnover, and burnout amongst your cabinet, especially if you're going to scrap cabinet meetings. I'm especially interested to know how you're going to approach things if the going gets tough. If your recruitment plan faces delays, or doesn't work, or the manpower issues that have worsened since the frontier update (certainly not uniquely during the last four months, as you will recall from your own recent delegacy) continue to get worse - what is your plan to make sure your cabinet stays resilient?

In short, you're promising in this platform to grow our manpower base. My question is, how are you going to manage the manpower we have right now?

In my experience on NS, burnout (that is not real life-induced) usually happens due to a combination of a huge workload and feelings of helplessness and frustration, in that you have a lot of work to do but no one to help or care for, and you feel powerless to change your situation. This I have experienced during my term as MoD, which I have explained above. Another factor that leads to burnout is a hostile, uncomfortable working environment. The remaining staffers in our government whom I talked to commonly cited the deadness of the executive staff (and the server) as one of the causes of their burnout. That is true: going to work in a deserted, empty workplace is not a pleasant experience. To energise the staff, we need to make our staffers feel like they belong as a team, working together to achieve greater things. While weekly Cabinet meetings may have inspired the Cabinet to work together as some claimed, they have failed to inspire our staff and keep them from leaving. The exodus of staffers from our government is happening despite the allegedly beneficial weekly Cabinet meetings, which is why I don't believe it to be effective.

I intend to check in with my Ministers regularly—with the help of my useful spreadsheet—to examine their progress, work to set up and complete large projects, and intervene when problems arise. If there are broader issues that require the full attention of the Cabinet, I will call Cabinet meetings to debate and figure out a solution. What I'm opposed to is meetings for the sake of meetings while urgent priorities continue to be neglected and not treated with the severity they deserve. Beyond that, I will work to foster a more friendly, welcoming work environment for our staffers by honouring their contributions and keeping a close touch with them to maintain their interest and engagement. One of the reasons I committed so much activity during Kaschovia's Delegacy was because I felt the leadership cared about my work and wanted to help me ascend further. Kasch himself checked in on my TNS article writing progress while I was just a lowly staffer and he was the Delegate, which helped motivate me to work harder because I felt like he cared about me and was working together with me to achieve something bigger. Working for the government shouldn't feel like a thankless chore for our staffers, it should feel like they are all part of a team striving for a greater purpose.

Halsoni · Saturday at 8:24 AM

Picairn:
By all means, tell me the unclassified information. Regardless, I maintain that the failure of this administration to address our manpower problems will have a detrimental effect on the rest of the government and its future activity.

Just to name one example, we discussed, for several hours in the last cabinet meeting, a solution for the RMB engagement problem and the culture we want to create there. This was such a huge discussion, and so many talking points were uttered that it's difficult to summarise, but we've created a plan. One that I endorse with everything I've got lol.

I think that your focus on this manpower problem, which is impossible to solve in one or two terms, is severely misplaced. Apart from the amazing work with the dispatches, you've done nothing for this region for the past few months except complain in the NPA High Command and being obstructive, but refusing to provide any assistance or solution whatsoever, or occasionally report on some FA happening. While we were working ourselves to death (something you're severely downplaying, which I can't say I appreciate), you were out camping in Carcassonne. Now you return to challenge an objectively good Delegate because, from what I can tell, you want to have power again. You point to your track record and say that this time you'll be able to fix all our problems. You failed last time and left your cabinet completely in the dark about everything that was going on. I, as Minister of Culture, had zero direction, and I was unable to execute your agenda due to not receiving any support to mitigate my real-life obligations.

I cannot, in good conscience, endorse this campaign, and I've come to the conclusion that your time still hasn't come yet. You are not ready, and I will not be voting for you.

mcmasterdonia · Saturday at 8:37 AM

My impression (as someone who stopped using discord) is that the regional government appears relatively inactive. The regional forum does not appear to be utilised in the ways that it once was. Even looking at the delegate’s government subforum, almost all of them have had a post in months.

I am wondering if you consider this to be a problem? I can see from your campaign that you see this is an issue. I am just wondering if there is some overwhelming amount of activity on the discord that means this perceived lack of activity is not such a problem.

If it is an issue, I am curious about what specific ideas you have to breathe life into the forum again.

On a related note, I personally love the RMB and find the activity there is fantastic. It used to be a great way to build connections with people in game, and potentially have them also participate in other areas - like the forum, discord, rp communities etc. My perception is that members of the government are not tuned into that community and don’t really participate in it. I also feel that it’s important from a security perspective. If the government is active and present, it helps build trust when there are disruptive behaviours there.

Is this a problem and if so, how would you address it? Do you imagine your personal activity and involvement in the rmb community would improve if elected?

Picairn · Saturday at 8:43 AM

Halsoni:
Just to name one example, we discussed, for several hours in the last cabinet meeting, a solution for the RMB engagement problem and the culture we want to create there. This was such a huge discussion, and so many talking points were uttered that it's difficult to summarise, but we've created a plan. One that I endorse with everything I've got lol.

I think that your focus on this manpower problem, which is impossible to solve in one or two terms, is severely misplaced. Apart from the amazing work with the dispatches, you've done nothing for this region for the past few months except complain in the NPA High Command and being obstructive, but refusing to provide any assistance or solution whatsoever, or occasionally report on some FA happening. While we were working ourselves to death (something you're severely downplaying, which I can't say I appreciate), you were out camping in Carcassonne. Now you return to challenge an objectively good Delegate because, from what I can tell, you want to have power again. You point to your track record and say that this time you'll be able to fix all our problems. You failed last time and left your cabinet completely in the dark about everything that was going on. I, as Minister of Culture, had zero direction, and I was unable to execute your agenda due to not receiving any support to mitigate my real-life obligations.

I cannot, in good conscience, endorse this campaign, and I've come to the conclusion that your time still hasn't come yet. You are not ready, and I will not be voting for you.

This is such an utterly distorted recount of events that I have to laugh. Aside from doing work on our regional dispatches, I wrote four articles for the government (the most out of all writers in the executive staff this term), two of which are still sitting in The Drafting Room. I led two update operations for the NPA, out of a total of four update ops that our army has participated in this term. I have repeatedly offered my services to assist in the publication of TNS to successive Culture Ministers, which were not taken up. Yet despite such a frustrating experience, when MJ called for writers, I still stepped up and wrote one.

My alleged "obstruction" in the NPA is a complete lie that you made up. I expressed my reservations with the government's ambitious project of getting a lot of RMB pilers for the NPA by simply stating that it would be a long and difficult project requiring extensive coordination and work by the whole government to get it done, something you deliberately waved away and ignored. Yet despite such an obstructive manner from you, I still offered to assist in the end if the government ever asked for me, something that, once again, it never did.

All of this, despite my "camping" in Carcassonne. All of this, despite the downright dismissive attitude from the government towards my concerns. All of this, despite a rapidly emptying executive staff that you failed to address.

Now when I come back to fix these problems, because you failed to make any systemic efforts towards solving them, you accuse me of wanting to have power again, which is completely, utterly comical. I did not sink two years into TNP, the community I have lived in for five, just to benefit myself only. As Minister of Culture, you had complete freedom to approach me for assistance, something you never did, and now you accuse me of giving you no support, when I'd have gladly given you mine when I was available.

I'm disappointed by your conduct, and the way you are trying to downplay my contributions to fulfill your agenda of keeping Chipoli in the seat. I hope the citizens of TNP will see this for what it is, a desperate attempt to hold on to power, to the detriment of our region and community.

Picairn · Saturday at 9:16 AM

mcmasterdonia:
My impression (as someone who stopped using discord) is that the regional government appears relatively inactive. The regional forum does not appear to be utilised in the ways that it once was. Even looking at the delegate’s government subforum, almost all of them have had a post in months.

I am wondering if you consider this to be a problem? I can see from your campaign that you see this is an issue. I am just wondering if there is some overwhelming amount of activity on the discord that means this perceived lack of activity is not such a problem.

If it is an issue, I am curious about what specific ideas you have to breathe life into the forum again.

On a related note, I personally love the RMB and find the activity there is fantastic. It used to be a great way to build connections with people in game, and potentially have them also participate in other areas - like the forum, discord, rp communities etc. My perception is that members of the government are not tuned into that community and don’t really participate in it. I also feel that it’s important from a security perspective. If the government is active and present, it helps build trust when there are disruptive behaviours there.

Is this a problem and if so, how would you address it? Do you imagine your personal activity and involvement in the rmb community would improve if elected?

Communication has certainly not been the government's strong suit in past administrations, including this one. Without consistent government communication to our citizens, they are left with little insight into our most urgent and critical problems, like the manpower attrition hitting our executive staff. Without being informed of what's going on, our citizens will assume that the government is inactive or uncaring about the community's issues.

I will seek to improve communication from the government, if elected, by issuing biweekly reports on the state of the executive and our progress on major projects, in addition to recognising the contributions of our most hard-working staffers. This will achieve two things: informing our citizens of government happenings and inviting discussions on how to improve. Such feedback is important to me, not only because it holds the government accountable but also to direct our attention into pertinent issues that are affecting our community.

As Delegate, I would continue to maintain an active presence on the RMB, and I would encourage my Ministers to chat and participate in conversations there, to build trust in the government and support for its projects. If we want the RMB community to be involved in the government, we must build deep connections and lasting bonds with them by socialising and making them feel like the government cares about them. One of my plans for Culture also include inviting the RMB community to participate in regional contests and events as a way to build interest and engagement, thereby inducing them to explore other parts of the region, including the government.

Halsoni · Saturday at 10:09 AM

I’m glad to see my concerns were correct in that whenever you face criticism, whether constructive or assertive, you shift blame and counter attack. Your aggressiveness doesn’t work and I do not see it as something this region needs at this time.

Picairn · Saturday at 10:14 AM

Halsoni:
I’m glad to see my concerns were correct in that whenever you face criticism, whether constructive or assertive, you shift blame and counter attack. Your aggressiveness doesn’t work and I do not see it as something this region needs at this time.

All of your "criticisms", if one could call it that, were loaded with falsehoods. It is telling that you chose not to refute any of what I said. What the region needs at this time is not inaction, but urgency in addressing our most critical problems.

mcmasterdonia · Saturday at 11:39 AM

Thanks for the answer.

Also the love story I’m going to write about you and Halsoni now is going to be fantastic! Inspiring stuff

Picairn · Saturday at 11:42 AM

mcmasterdonia:
Thanks for the answer.

Also the love story I’m going to write about you and Halsoni now is going to be fantastic! Inspiring stuff

Oh boy this is gonna be so cursed. I'm morbidly interested in reading it though.

Halsoni · Saturday at 1:17 PM

mcmasterdonia:
Also the love story I’m going to write about you and Halsoni now is going to be fantastic! Inspiring stuff

I thought I was already matched with Simone, but I guess this will suffice

Gorundu · Saturday at 1:19 PM

Halsoni:
I thought I was already matched with Simone, but I guess this will suffice

Have you heard of polyamory

Halsoni · Saturday at 1:23 PM

Gorundu:
Have you heard of polyamory

I am not polyamorous

Gorundu · Saturday at 1:28 PM

Halsoni:
I am not polyamorous

There's no shame in admitting

Halsoni · Saturday at 1:29 PM

Gorundu:
There's no shame in admitting

The voters will decide if I admit or not

Sauron · Saturday at 4:10 PM

You have my support.

Pallaith · Saturday at 9:11 PM

Picairn:
I believe I'd serve this region better as Delegate to address the systematic manpower attrition and low morale within the executive staff. Based on the performance of this administration so far, I don't think I'd be very effective at driving results as a Minister if I had to contend with an ever diminishing staff while being largely powerless to change the situation. During my term as Minister of Defense, I worked very hard to drive both recruitment and activity by religiously leading ops every week (where practicable) and publishing reports gameside, on top of writing the Soldier's Manual and designing new medals largely by myself to motivate the troops. That took a toll on my mental health as while activity was maintained, my personal recruitment efforts failed to bear much fruit as it was too little and too weak to solve the NPA's institutional problems. I didn't have access to effective assistance because Home Affairs went inactive and its inactivity was not resolved, thus stronger recruitment efforts were not made. From then on, I became skeptical of serving as Minister of an inactive or uncooperating administration. I can not work for those who are unwilling to put in the work themselves.

But if you were to put a gun to my head and make me choose, I'd choose to be Minister of Home Affairs. It is arguably one of the most vital Ministries beside Culture, responsible for recruiting new talent and converting them into committed, hard-working members of the region, something that we are dreadfully short at the moment. It is also the best equipped and most specialised Ministry to address our manpower issues on a systemic scale thanks to its resources: the recruiters, the Welcome Wagon, and Gameside Advocates.

I strongly object to the consolidation of Communications because it gives the Culture Minister an additional burden to keep track of, and they may choose to prioritise other fields while leaving it neglected, which is a death knell in an understaffed Ministry. Over this term we have gone through four Culture Ministers, and it was only until the fourth that serious efforts were made towards completing a TNS edition. A separate Ministry provides the impetus, the pressure to perform and produce results (which also attracts the Minister's full attention - a critical factor to a project's success), whilst as a department it may become ignored in pursuit of other priorities, as we have seen here.

You were aware of it, but have you acted on it? When WA Affairs cried out for help in March, I, alongside others, joined the Ministry to assist in the publication of IFVs and voting threads. The situation from there became less dire for MoWAA thanks in part to the help of those who joined. Where is this urgency for the rest of the Ministries? Where are the public messages, the campaigns to attract citizens into the executive, the calls to address a criticial issue? You say you were aware, but failure to act on that awareness has consequences: the staff keeps losing more people than it could replace, and now here we are.

I recognise that my September delegacy did not end on a high note. Foreign affairs wasn't my strong suit then, and various changes in the foreign landscape at the time left my concentration disoriented. In some cases, my faulty judgment made the situation worse. I became more concerned with trying to put out the fires than focusing on rebuilding the executive staff, and by the end of the term I was overcome with disillusion and burnout.

But I have spent the last four months on a good run in Carcassonne, where I gained valuable experience in reviving an inactive Ministry and bringing it back to full activity. The experience also lifted my spirits, and I now realise that giving in to pessimism was my biggest mistake. No longer. I will not stand by and watch the executive lose more people every day and our activity fall off a cliff.

I find it difficult to see how abolishing the Ambassador Corps and funneling new staffers into the Analyst channel—which has recently become devoid of meaningful FA discussions—to be the best way of educating new talent. That seems like a recipe for them to go off and become inactive. Without an attentive leadership to foster discussions, this method will not work anymore than the old ambassadorships. If your approach is not producing any meaningful results after four months, then perhaps it is time to reevaluate and change.

I don't believe Europeia has formally signed on to the Sovereign Seven yet. I also don't think the Sovereign Seven aims to block all GA legislation, considering how supportive they were of AA and NPO-sponsored legislation until recently. There are also repeals which our more IntFed WALL members have publicly supported, such as Repeal: "Sustainable Timber Standards". Here, I think there is ground for us to work with, particularly in important international issues, even if we may strongly disagree in others.

I wouldn't call myself IntFed right now. I still reject bureaucratic overreach in the WA, and have voted for many repeals on issues that the WA has no business with, like In-Ovo Sexing Of Chicks. However, I have come to believe that there is ground for the GA to legislate on, particularly in international matters like warfare, civil rights, international commerce, etc. and if they were to be repealed, they should be accompanied with high quality replacements.

I have no plan to upend our existing alliances and relationships, and I welcome cooperation with our allies on matters of mutual interest. While I don't have access to all the facts of those events, having learned only through other people's accounts and public statements, and thus my hypothetical approaches here may not be complete, I think I'd have tried my best to investigate the state of the region fully and try to negotiate a workable solution before having to resort to the ultimatum. The latter was done while we had insufficient information of what was going on and how the Outback was functioning, and it predictably carried negative consequences. If I had decided to go through with the ultimatum for whatever reason, I'd have offered a private apology to the Outback and TWP once the fuller picture surfaced, and advised the AA, NPO, and LWU not to overcomplicate the issue by posting the joint statement. That made the issue public and resulted in explosive consequences. The rest: TWP's departure, the dissolution of PPO, all came from the result of NPO/LWU/AA publishing the joint statement instead of giving a private apology.

From a technical military standpoint, The Wellspring updates early (and TNP updates late), and so it was entirely possible to organise update operations while still piling safely. But we didn't try that, nor did we organise anything else to keep the troops engaged during the piles.

I consider the loss of HC generals to be concerning because that is, at its core, a loss of institutional experience that has served previous MoDs quite well. I myself benefited from their advice when I was fresh into the position.

The first Culture minister whom I talked to said he was burnt out from the work, and hated how the Delegate pushed him to do work on his days off. This suggests to me that the Delegate was inconsiderate towards his first minister. I'll grant you the third one, and I don't know enough about the circumstances of the second to comment.

But we didn't just lose the Ministers, we also lost the Deputies. I'll also note that the first Culture Minister has essentially ceased his participation in Culture and returned to RP, the second has resigned his citizenship entirely, and the third exited the government. We didn't simply lose Ministers, we also lost participants in government.

SInce I recently authored an Injunction, I'd be willing to take up a draft. I also would like to see other TNP authors participate in this, through the MoWAA's mentorship and assistance. I have no problem with us lending a hand to help write allied commends.

The spreadsheet that I used for Carcassonne's Culture Ministry comprised of four tabs: personnel, Discord events, gameside events, and Voice of the People. Personnel is self-explanatory, it tracks the Ministry's staffers and their preferences for doing tasks (like our own HA's roll calls). Discord events track the schedules of everything that is hosted in the region's Discord server (movie nights, game nights), while gameside events track polls, questions of the day, and regional contests e.g. flag contests and the Hunger Games. Lastly, the Voice of the People tab tracks the articles claimed and written for the news publication, with author progress compared against the deadline for me to see who's near completion, who's falling behind, etc.

So to be clear, what I am hearing from your response to my question is that regardless of what solutions you believe you have, you believe that the past four months means that this government is not willing to do what is needed and therefore you cannot work with them. So you will not stick around to help this time either. Gun to your head, you'd choose HA, which I agree with - it's the most important role for sure going forward and it's one you are very good at it already.

If we had a Comms ministry this term I do not expect the results would have been different. I have every reason to suspect we'd have had more than one minister there too, because the problem has been manpower and talent available to us, not whether the work has its own box. Clearly we will never agree on this particular matter, because while a separate ministry just suggest special attention and some reduction in juggling multiple things, at the end of the day if you do not have someone writing the articles, the thing doesn't get published.

Citing WA getting special attention is misreading what happened. There was a very public and pointed argument about the WA threads being missed, and people stepped up to volunteer to help. The fact that this problem exists everywhere is not exactly a mystery or a secret, but they require different skillsets. It's easier for people to decide to jump in and post a few threads, but harder for them to jump in to organize and host an event or festival, or to whip up troops and do some updates, or to craft advertisements and park on the RMB and moderate. This administration developed advertisements for each ministry, and HA did the usual lists. There was some trial and error involved, and a grudging acknowledgement that putting people back into the usual roles to get these lists and threads isn't moving the needle where it needs to be moved. That's why the delegate has shifted his focus on where the effort will be put in and what we will focus on, and I think it's likely to achieve better results.

Just as you want to give old things a try that you felt were dropped inexplicably, I would point out that a shift from ambassadors to a smaller circle model shouldn't be dropped without properly being executed. I will grant that not enough higher level staff utilized the spaces to provide a more useful outlet for prospective FA staffers, but to be fair, the point of the shift was to be more exclusionary than in the past. Many people applied and upon learning they would not be assigned an ambassador role, decided they did not want to pursue the alternative, which was eventual admission into the committees. Those who did join knew that it was entirely what they made of it, and while it would be nice for them to have some pre-existing topics to build off of, it was still up to them to engage and show initiative. We were not looking for passive participants who join a region and post updates and nothing else, which is what most FA staffers did in all these previous governments. With a more robust and regular FA digest and better care for those junior staff spaces, we'd likely see more people start to shine through. But that process takes time. Four months we probably wouldn't have admitted more than one or two people at this point, in hypothetical "ideal" circumstances. It's perfectly fine if you would rather take the safe usual approach and hope that the basic ambassador tasks draws something out of these players, but I have just as little faith reverting to that is going to do anything for the problem you have identified and want to fix.

Europeia is not a member of the Sovereign Seven, yes. However, Europeia's cooperation with their initiatives and support on votes is still a problem in any potential WALL collaboration scenario with the other signatories who are very much not on board with Sovereign Seven behavior. It actually doesn't matter that they collectively aren't out to block all GA proposals, or that they selectively support ones for their allies, because the overall impact and much of their work is antithetical to what IDU or Europe would want to see in the WA. I happen to agree that we can work with them, my concern is that waking the dormant WALL will invite these conflicts to inevitably creep up. So again, you have to factor that into your plan if you are serious about pursuing it.

Your stance on resolutions is understood and appreciated. I believe that is more or less how TNP approaches these things, especially these days.

I want to be clear that you essentially outlined that you would have handled The Outback incident exactly the same way that this administration did. We pushed for an apology to TWP as soon as the situation became clear to us and we would have advised against the joint statement, had we known it was being planned.

There's a lot being made of the departures that have happened, which I continue to charge are unfair. These happen in every term, for a variety of reasons. Gossiping about potential mistreatment on the part of the delegate is a bit crass. We had people whose schedules and real life commitments did not line up with what was needed from them in the role. Deputies come and go even more often than ministers. And some people choosing to remove even the bare minimum of commitments by leaving the citizenry or the government does not have to be a failure of that government. The loss of HC members is particularly acute because of how few there are, and how hard it's been for going on a few years now to build up new ones. That's hardly Chipoli's fault that some of the last ones simply ran out of juice, it was going to happen on someone's watch and it probably would have been yours if you had won the last election.

I want to highlight something crucial, and this is from your previous campaign as a way of explaining your style and the struggle of dealing with this environment as delegate:

This leadership style, I have found, suits my needs and restrictions best. Direct involvement, or a hands-on approach, can be great for activity from an outside glance, but people who adopt this approach tend to end up burned out or focusing on one or two Ministries at a time only, while the rest are neglected and left to wither. Myself, I have discovered to my dismay that spending time to complete tasks in one Ministry usually distracted me from other affairs or left responses delayed. That’s hardly surprising: the workload of the Delegate is massive. Not only are you managing all six Ministries under your command, each with their own burden of tasks, but you also have to vote on WA resolutions and endotart daily, work on regional security with the Security Council and the NPA’s High Command, solve difficult Foreign Affairs questions with allies and enemies, maintain communication with the Regional Assembly, and generally attend to regional affairs at a strategic level. It is practically impossible (and unsustainable) for one person to tackle all the mundane Ministerial tasks and high-level matters at the same time, and harder still to maintain consistent activity like that for a full term. Therefore, the best approach, in my view, is to regularly collaborate and coordinate with your Ministers to fulfill specific goals and address urgent problems, to maintain a consistent level of activity and achieve the best results possible in line with your agenda and existing limited resources across all Ministries. Spreading yourself out trying to save every failing Ministry and nurse it back to vibrant activity is impractical, and the end results will generally make you feel disappointed, demoralised and unable to get anything done while the government continues to fail.

As we enter a new term with persistent activity problems across all Ministries and the NPA, a consequence of declining interest and activity in the broader region and NationStates at large, I will continue with this approach as your Delegate if re-elected. The problems of burnout and low activity, I believe, can only be solved in the long run by uplifting new talent to replace retiring players, by mentoring and preparing the former for key leadership positions, advising them on how to accomplish your objectives, and encouraging them with awards and recognition.

“No man rules alone,” it is often echoed.

When exactly did you decide this wasn't the case? When you became a challenge to an incumbent delegate? I do not see, as I said then and once before in this campaign, much of a difference in approach between you and Chipoli. Hands-on but trying to be a teamplayer and let the ministers also have some room to run their own spaces? Check. Contribute here and there but not dive too deeply into only one or two areas? Check. Even giving up some direct control of internal areas to make sure FA wasn't neglected is a big part of why Chipoli's term was a bit uneven. Though I would point out that FA is not really an area where you two are on the same ground - Chipoli's relations with other leaders and his involvement in these spaces was, in my view, markedly better than yours. And just as focusing too much on FA is detrimental for what it does to internal affairs, losing a step in FA in this environment to improve internals is just as perilous a step.

We're all trying to figure out how to adapt to these challenging times and get more out of the people in our community who have lost interest or burned out, and are not being as quickly or as often replaced with new talent. You are asserting this administration's different approaches and policies, things this region clearly wanted as they chose Chipoli last time, as being the reason why these problems have persisted, and have proposed returning for the most part to what you offered last time, and what was not chosen by the region. Your pitch, then, seems to be that that they made a mistake last time and should have picked you, so you want to give them a chance to redo it, without giving this government the grace and benefit of the doubt that it shared the same struggles you did, and maybe it takes longer than a single term in this enviornment to work through these problems. I think both you and Chipoli had to figure out how to navigate this stuff with a ton of other things going on, had mixed results and ultimately did not reverse the "bad economy," and so now you both have a better sense of how to proceed and likely would find much more success. If that is the case, and your moves will largely be the same (and in your case, will also largely be the same things you pitched before), then the biggest differences I can see with going with one of you over the other, is that Chipoli's plan is focusing extensively on the RMB and refocusing our activity around it, and he has more endorsements and a better endorsement track record and we would lose no ground in that department if we kept with him. I believe his RMB plan is the way to go, and crucial to any success we have, and support it wholeheartedly; and I do not want us to have another long transition and lose our endorsement position, especially when it is finally trending in the right direction. We have to stop the seesawing at some point, and give things time to develop. We have to recognize when we are expecting too much of, and placing blame unfairly on, our leaders. If we are going to go backward and lose our footing again for another shift in delegates, it has better be because we absolutely have to take that risk, and not because we're being too impatient or desperate to fling something else at the wall and see if it sticks.

I have no doubt you're as anxious as the rest of us, and believe you could have done this better - I often share this line of thinking myself. It's hard unless you've stepped into the arena to be able to judge what's going on, and to understand just what is at stake and what you have to do to run a place like this. And like I said, especially given where your platforms overlap, I think you'd largely do a competent job of things. But there are other areas where you diverge quite a bit, and the entire picture leads me to caution that a change at this point, and giving up some of these things we have now, is not worth it. That is why I am supporting your opponent.

Picairn · Saturday at 10:25 PM

Pallaith:
So to be clear, what I am hearing from your response to my question is that regardless of what solutions you believe you have, you believe that the past four months means that this government is not willing to do what is needed and therefore you cannot work with them. So you will not stick around to help this time either. Gun to your head, you'd choose HA, which I agree with - it's the most important role for sure going forward and it's one you are very good at it already.

This administration has ignored my offers to help and dismissed my concerns on multiple occasions, and I find it very difficult to work enthusiastically for those who brushed aside my input and were unwilling to listen. Yet despite this dismissiveness, I still remained in the government and did the tasks when I'm called for. Even so, this behaviour is the hallmark of bad leadership, and it's part of why I'm running to change it.

Pallaith:
If we had a Comms ministry this term I do not expect the results would have been different. I have every reason to suspect we'd have had more than one minister there too, because the problem has been manpower and talent available to us, not whether the work has its own box. Clearly we will never agree on this particular matter, because while a separate ministry just suggest special attention and some reduction in juggling multiple things, at the end of the day if you do not have someone writing the articles, the thing doesn't get published.

From my experience in government, a Minister's full attention is often the key to finishing a project. Staffers who enthusiastically volunteer to do the tasks are few and far in between, and hence strong and active management is needed to drive the projects to the finish line. A separate Ministry is better in this regard, because it creates the impetus in a concentrated field for the Minister to work towards finishing the project on time as much as possible by any means, including figuring out how to complete it with the resources at hand.

Pallaith:
Citing WA getting special attention is misreading what happened. There was a very public and pointed argument about the WA threads being missed, and people stepped up to volunteer to help. The fact that this problem exists everywhere is not exactly a mystery or a secret, but they require different skillsets. It's easier for people to decide to jump in and post a few threads, but harder for them to jump in to organize and host an event or festival, or to whip up troops and do some updates, or to craft advertisements and park on the RMB and moderate. This administration developed advertisements for each ministry, and HA did the usual lists. There was some trial and error involved, and a grudging acknowledgement that putting people back into the usual roles to get these lists and threads isn't moving the needle where it needs to be moved. That's why the delegate has shifted his focus on where the effort will be put in and what we will focus on, and I think it's likely to achieve better results.

Each Ministry requires different skillsets, that's why you need a team to tackle the tasks at different angles. When the WA Minister called for help, people answered. My question is why the government has not publicly highlighted the attrition in other Ministries this term and called for the people's help.

Pallaith:
Just as you want to give old things a try that you felt were dropped inexplicably, I would point out that a shift from ambassadors to a smaller circle model shouldn't be dropped without properly being executed. I will grant that not enough higher level staff utilized the spaces to provide a more useful outlet for prospective FA staffers, but to be fair, the point of the shift was to be more exclusionary than in the past. Many people applied and upon learning they would not be assigned an ambassador role, decided they did not want to pursue the alternative, which was eventual admission into the committees. Those who did join knew that it was entirely what they made of it, and while it would be nice for them to have some pre-existing topics to build off of, it was still up to them to engage and show initiative. We were not looking for passive participants who join a region and post updates and nothing else, which is what most FA staffers did in all these previous governments. With a more robust and regular FA digest and better care for those junior staff spaces, we'd likely see more people start to shine through. But that process takes time. Four months we probably wouldn't have admitted more than one or two people at this point, in hypothetical "ideal" circumstances. It's perfectly fine if you would rather take the safe usual approach and hope that the basic ambassador tasks draws something out of these players, but I have just as little faith reverting to that is going to do anything for the problem you have identified and want to fix.

You can't remove a space in which our new staffers could engage with our foreign affairs and hope that they will make do with the narrower space by simple initiative. New staffers are by definition new to our foreign affairs, and they need the guidance of experienced leadership to engage in discussions productively and grow their knowledge, something that has not been done much this term. The FA Digest was useful, however.

Pallaith:
There's a lot being made of the departures that have happened, which I continue to charge are unfair. These happen in every term, for a variety of reasons. Gossiping about potential mistreatment on the part of the delegate is a bit crass. We had people whose schedules and real life commitments did not line up with what was needed from them in the role. Deputies come and go even more often than ministers. And some people choosing to remove even the bare minimum of commitments by leaving the citizenry or the government does not have to be a failure of that government. The loss of HC members is particularly acute because of how few there are, and how hard it's been for going on a few years now to build up new ones. That's hardly Chipoli's fault that some of the last ones simply ran out of juice, it was going to happen on someone's watch and it probably would have been yours if you had won the last election.

You can not simply say "Departures happen for a reason", then shrug and do nothing about it. We are losing more people than we can replace, and the government needs to address that issue with the urgency it deserves, something it has failed to do this term.

Pallaith:
When exactly did you decide this wasn't the case? When you became a challenge to an incumbent delegate? I do not see, as I said then and once before in this campaign, much of a difference in approach between you and Chipoli. Hands-on but trying to be a teamplayer and let the ministers also have some room to run their own spaces? Check. Contribute here and there but not dive too deeply into only one or two areas? Check. Even giving up some direct control of internal areas to make sure FA wasn't neglected is a big part of why Chipoli's term was a bit uneven. Though I would point out that FA is not really an area where you two are on the same ground - Chipoli's relations with other leaders and his involvement in these spaces was, in my view, markedly better than yours. And just as focusing too much on FA is detrimental for what it does to internal affairs, losing a step in FA in this environment to improve internals is just as perilous a step.

We're all trying to figure out how to adapt to these challenging times and get more out of the people in our community who have lost interest or burned out, and are not being as quickly or as often replaced with new talent. You are asserting this administration's different approaches and policies, things this region clearly wanted as they chose Chipoli last time, as being the reason why these problems have persisted, and have proposed returning for the most part to what you offered last time, and what was not chosen by the region. Your pitch, then, seems to be that that they made a mistake last time and should have picked you, so you want to give them a chance to redo it, without giving this government the grace and benefit of the doubt that it shared the same struggles you did, and maybe it takes longer than a single term in this enviornment to work through these problems. I think both you and Chipoli had to figure out how to navigate this stuff with a ton of other things going on, had mixed results and ultimately did not reverse the "bad economy," and so now you both have a better sense of how to proceed and likely would find much more success. If that is the case, and your moves will largely be the same (and in your case, will also largely be the same things you pitched before), then the biggest differences I can see with going with one of you over the other, is that Chipoli's plan is focusing extensively on the RMB and refocusing our activity around it, and he has more endorsements and a better endorsement track record and we would lose no ground in that department if we kept with him. I believe his RMB plan is the way to go, and crucial to any success we have, and support it wholeheartedly; and I do not want us to have another long transition and lose our endorsement position, especially when it is finally trending in the right direction. We have to stop the seesawing at some point, and give things time to develop. We have to recognize when we are expecting too much of, and placing blame unfairly on, our leaders. If we are going to go backward and lose our footing again for another shift in delegates, it has better be because we absolutely have to take that risk, and not because we're being too impatient or desperate to fling something else at the wall and see if it sticks.

I have no doubt you're as anxious as the rest of us, and believe you could have done this better - I often share this line of thinking myself. It's hard unless you've stepped into the arena to be able to judge what's going on, and to understand just what is at stake and what you have to do to run a place like this. And like I said, especially given where your platforms overlap, I think you'd largely do a competent job of things. But there are other areas where you diverge quite a bit, and the entire picture leads me to caution that a change at this point, and giving up some of these things we have now, is not worth it. That is why I am supporting your opponent.

I stressed that the most sustainable way to revive our Ministries would be to uplift new talent to replace our departing staffers, something that this administration hasn't done this term, but only left to worsen. The government has become even more hollowed out than under my term, and that convinced me to come back and try to fix it. My Culture and HA plans both involve the RMB in their activities, and the endorsement argument is a weak one considering that he has already lost most of his April gains as the summer lull is fast approaching. You desire stability, but how is stability good when, based on this administration's performance so far, the region will likely be in for a harder time?

Pallaith · Sunday at 2:53 AM

Picairn:
This administration has ignored my offers to help and dismissed my concerns on multiple occasions, and I find it very difficult to work enthusiastically for those who brushed aside my input and were unwilling to listen. Yet despite this dismissiveness, I still remained in the government and did the tasks when I'm called for. Even so, this behaviour is the hallmark of bad leadership, and it's part of why I'm running to change it.

From my experience in government, a Minister's full attention is often the key to finishing a project. Staffers who enthusiastically volunteer to do the tasks are few and far in between, and hence strong and active management is needed to drive the projects to the finish line. A separate Ministry is better in this regard, because it creates the impetus in a concentrated field for the Minister to work towards finishing the project on time as much as possible by any means, including figuring out how to complete it with the resources at hand.

Each Ministry requires different skillsets, that's why you need a team to tackle the tasks at different angles. When the WA Minister called for help, people answered. My question is why the government has not publicly highlighted the attrition in other Ministries this term and called for the people's help.

You can't remove a space in which our new staffers could engage with our foreign affairs and hope that they will make do with the narrower space by simple initiative. New staffers are by definition new to our foreign affairs, and they need the guidance of experienced leadership to engage in discussions productively and grow their knowledge, something that has not been done much this term. The FA Digest was useful, however.

You can not simply say "Departures happen for a reason", then shrug and do nothing about it. We are losing more people than we can replace, and the government needs to address that issue with the urgency it deserves, something it has failed to do this term.

I stressed that the most sustainable way to revive our Ministries would be to uplift new talent to replace our departing staffers, something that this administration hasn't done this term, but only left to worsen. The government has become even more hollowed out than under my term, and that convinced me to come back and try to fix it. My Culture and HA plans both involve the RMB in their activities, and the endorsement argument is a weak one considering that he has already lost most of his April gains as the summer lull is fast approaching. You desire stability, but how is stability good when, based on this administration's performance so far, the region will likely be in for a harder time?

He said, they said. I highly doubt it went down precisely this way, especially since you were quite involved in the latter half of the term in several areas, and I know you were considered in HA and Defense. If this situation is so dire we have to throw Chipoli out with all the risks that it entails, surely it's important enough for you to provide your assistance even if you don't win. Especially since you keep saying you helped out despite how horrible they allegedly were to you. But you cannot even make that simple commitment.

Sadly not everyone can serve a leading role and go Thanos-style on things and do it themselves. It's far rarer than I'd like it to be, but I get it. Even I feel the impossibly of rolling up my sleeves and diving into something alone, and I know I am certainly capable of it. People can have a deadline and feel the pressure and struggle to meet it and ultimately fail, even if being the minister of it meant the buck stopped with them. You went on to criticize the idea that FA staffers would take initiative to move up in that ministry, as if that would never work and could not be expected, yet claim that ministers will get the comms projects done simply because they have deadlines and that job and need to do it. I think if I'm being unrealistic about this, so are you. FA is not like the other areas, again, as you said, every ministry requires different skills. FA requires a higher level of care and conduct than the others, we should be choosy about our staffers. We had a tiered system in mind for how to bring them up. I've done this job several times and have probably tried it a variety of different ways, I can accept when one attempt doesn't work or doesn't survive the administration. But going back to the old method we have tried very hard to get away from, one that many other prominent regions have abandoned as well, doesn't seem like the way.

I can absolutely shrug about departures, if the departures had nothing to do with the government mismanaging things. You defended the departures of your FA ministers when you were delegate, I did the same with my MoDs. People get busy, they get stressed, their needs or abilities shift. We have to shrug about that because this is a game and these are real people balancing this game with everything else in their life. You cannot force people to stick around just because you don't have a lot of people and things are bad. You have to adapt and find someone new if you absolutely cannot work with them anymore. I have been in this government, and all departures were on good terms or utterly unrelated to issues with the delegate. To suggest otherwise is not only untrue, it is making political hay out of personal issues people had, which is an unfair way to approach this topic.

Picairn, what new talent did you uplift last time you were delegate? How did you do it, and how would you do it now? You're right that we have a problem and we have to solve it, but you continue to completely disregard my observations about you and Chipoli having a lot of common ground in approaching that. I do not see how you're going to be that different, but I have the benefit of seeing how you did last time, so I have a pretty good idea of what to expect barring any new insights or changes that experience gave you. If it would be different now, that is precisely what I would say about Chipoli - you both benefited from 4 months of trying to make your various approaches work, seeing what worked and what didn't, and hitting on new promising avenues to try in a second term. So if that's true, then we must once again come to the key differences. I already identified the RMB plan as one big one, and yes, I have cited endorsements.

I have to say the idea of summer or winter lulls is in my view complete bullshit. These problems have plagued NS at every single part of the year at different times. I have seen amazing January terms, I have seen fantastic May and September terms. I have seen all of these be bad as well. There is no consistent, annual and predictable time where things are guaranteed to go wrong, these downturns happen, sometimes inexplicably. And people do not like it when things just happen, and they have to react to it, I sure don't like that, because it feels like we are not in control, and our fate is not in our hands. That sucks, but sometimes it's reality. Chipoli's endorsement slide affected everyone, and I am seeing it rebound as we speak. The fact simply is, he's kept us above 700 and kept us climbing. No one else managed to do that since F/S started. The fact that you constantly cite this summer lull as a forgone conclusion, combined with your previous recognition of the bad environment we are in and were in when you were delegate, actually cuts at the heart of your argument, that these troubles are due to Chipoli's inability to do this job. If you want to look at metrics where he fights against this environment, his work with endorsements needs to be noted. If you think it's gonna drop, and he can't stop it despite what we've seen, then you cannot deny we're going to go a lot lower on endorsements if we change delegates again. If we're likely to be in for a harder time because of this, that's definitely going to be true if we start from a lower point after your transition completes. Stability is good. Our endorsements not sliding further down than they may be destined to fall by extra behavior on our part is a desirable thing.

Owenstacey · Sunday at 7:54 AM

In your campaign, you refer to a new application system for becoming an ambassador to "test their activity and ability". How will this application system do this, and how will this actually make things any different in the Ambassador Corps?

Picairn for Delegate 3: Restoration

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