Picairn for Delegate 3: Restoration

Owenstacey:
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?
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One of the issues with the previous ambassadorial system was that our ambassadors often went inactive or became unwilling/unable to do tasks asked of them. A simple solution to that would be to vet our ambassador hopefuls in advance by instituting an application system to assess their activity levels and willingness to do important tasks, such as posting our news and publications to the embassies, monitoring their posted regions for major developments and submitting regular reports to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which can be included in the FA Digest. I'll note that since the abolition of the Ambassador Corps, the old practice of distribution of our publications have fallen off - the latest issue of The North Star has yet to be distributed to our foreign allies and partners, for example.
 
Pallaith:
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.
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I absolutely stand by everything I have said, and would have gladly produced screenshots to prove my claims were it not for the fact that the conversations happened in the classified High Command channel. Even still, none of the administration officials (including the Vice Delegate) have been able to refute my recount of events, instead choosing to make vague and distorted attacks about my alleged lack of involvement. Being a Minister is a far more taxing job than a staffer, and uncooperative leadership is the last thing I want while serving as a Minister (ask me how I know this.) Urgent problems can not be properly addressed if the leadership is unwilling to listen to input.
Pallaith:
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.
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This is a mischaracterisation of what I have said. No one can do anything alone, but you are not doing things alone. Each Ministry is a team, and part of the Minister's job is to mobilise their staff into driving the projects towards the finish line. New staffers who take initiative and do everything themselves are few and far in-between, and in most cases they need guidance and assistance from the leadership to do their jobs.
Pallaith:
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.
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Your new method hasn't been working. How many staffers this term has demonstrated their initiative and skill to become future members of the Committee without guidance from leadership?
Pallaith:
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.
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This cavalier attitude to staff turnover is extremely alarming to me personally. Being unable to control when and why people leave is one thing, doing nothing to solve it is another. There are only so many departures and resignations the government can take before it struggles to do even basic operations.
Pallaith:
Picairn, what new talent did you uplift last time you were delegate? How did you do it, and how would you do it now?
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As an example, I elevated Cosmic to Minister of Defense after a period of mentoring them under my own leadership as MoD. They went on to perform well in the position with my support and has since remained one of the NPA's most active members. My approach to mentorship is mainly attentive leadership, in which I not only guide newcomers through the workings of our government and military but also seek to forge bonds and help solve any challenges they meet along the journey.
Pallaith:
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.
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Except the numbers don't lie: Chipoli has already seen most of his April endorsement gains wiped out at the start of May and he's barely above 700 at the moment. This is in line with our falling endorsement trends since the F/S update: summer has hit us particularly hard in the past two years. Can you tell me earnestly that he will keep us above that level when summer starts to hit in June - July if re-elected?
Pallaith:
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.
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This is a deliberate obfuscation of my arguments. I said this administration has failed to stop the exodus of our staffers from the executive as the primary evidence of its inability, not because it is failing to keep our endorsement levels up.
Pallaith:
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.
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How much lower? How much of that will be due to the summer lull, and how much of that will be due to the delegate transition? If we only drop fewer endorsements but continue to hemorrhage talent from the executive staff until the government is unable to function, is that marginally better compared to a delegate transition that makes our endorsement levels marginally worse but the new government makes serious progress at fixing our turnover?
Pallaith:
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.
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Stability means little if we are going into a slow, painful decline.
 
Picairn, you have previously noted your service in Carcassonne and Vibonia, two places that are highly relevant in events that are currently still unfolding. Carcassonne raided an alleged wasteland with the support of the NPO and LWU, two regions currently on the outs with most of the game as well as our own region following the dissolution of the PPO. The raid was initially touted as one featuring FOCUS, NPO, and LWU, before we discovered that the FOCUS regions supposedly involved, The Wellspring and Vibonia, were not aware the op would include anyone outside of FOCUS, and causing Communitas to release a statement condemning the claim. The WFE was then corrected, and Vibonia then withdrew from the region. However, it then opted not to assist in the liberation, despite the fact that we had also discovered TBH was involved through a prominent piler, and there appeared to be other piler puppets who had come from Suspicious. This now implicates Carcassonne in a raid that features enemies of this region. When I finally heard about this from Carcassonne hours after I reached out, I was informed that TBH had not been invited, and yet they apparently were allowed to remain in the region, and Carcassonne opted to remain involved.

What did you do as a member of their government to push back on this, if anything? What did you advise Vibonia to do when all of these revelations were discovered? And how would you as our delegate respond to these facts, if you had to engage with these regions diplomatically following this event?
 
I'm not going to answer the above post because it pertains to classfied government conversations that I'm not allowed to discuss on a public forum without explicit authorisation from Carcassonne and Vibonia's governments. I will, however, state that my position as Minister of Culture in Carcassonne is an internal-facing position with little to no influence over Carcassonne's foreign policy, and the function of my Deputy MoFA position in Vibonia is mainly to advise the government, with the President and MoFA of Vibonia making the final decisions.
 
Picairn:
I'm not going to answer the above post because it pertains to classfied government conversations that I'm not allowed to discuss on a public forum without explicit authorisation from Carcassonne and Vibonia's governments. I will, however, state that my position as Minister of Culture in Carcassonne is an internal-facing position with little to no influence over Carcassonne's foreign policy, and the function of my Deputy MoFA position in Vibonia is mainly to advise the government, with the President and MoFA of Vibonia making the final decisions.
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By all means don't reveal classified info, but surely you can express your own thoughts on these decisions and what, if you could make the call, you would have done differently. And you certainly could answer my third question without crossing any classified lines.
 
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This used to be a standard question, but if you think it too intrusive, you don't have to answer. How many hours a week to you currently spend on ns, and how do you anticipate that changing over the summer?
 
Great Bights Mum:
This used to be a standard question, but if you think it too intrusive, you don't have to answer. How many hours a week to you currently spend on ns, and how do you anticipate that changing over the summer?
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Currently I spend about 4 hours on NS every day, so about 28 hours a week. My work in TNP and other regions requires me to check in regularly, and while I'll resign my foreign positions if elected Delegate, the extra workload will most likely occupy a lot of my time and attention in the summer. Thankfully my schedule isn't very busy in summer and I don't see that changing, so I'll be able to fully concentrate on my work if I'm elected.
 
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