Opening Address: May 2025
My thanks to our recently re-elected Delegate @Chipoli for giving me the honor of serving in this crucial role for this crucial time. While the seal on this address is our usual Home Affairs seal, this term is not one where we will approach matters as we always have with this ministry. Our focus and approach will be entirely novel, and will focus more than ever on turning out our players and members of our community. It is about maximizing the talent and players we already have, more than the usual focus on recruitment, as we aim to meet them where they are, and secure their cooperation and participation without having to direct them someplace new. This has always been our approach, and it was fine when our numbers were such that we could successfully bring in a handful of players to our offsite areas. Losing half our reliable numbers means it has been more important than ever to activate and inspire players who for one reason or another chose not to join us on the forum or Discord servers. The delegate recognizes this, and the cabinet in the previous term concluded that we must radically adjust our approach. That is what this new Ministry of Integration is about, and it is why I am here.
Our plan is simple, though that underestimates just how difficult it will be to successfully execute it. We will dive headfirst into our Regional Message Board, and center our communication and even our activities on it. NationStates is a game with a website and regional spaces. For too long TNP has decided to focus its efforts and daily activity in our offsite spaces, inviting our players on the site to come join us for the "true" experience. That experience has obviously failed to engage even those players we already brought over here, and is diminishing in its returns. Aside from leaving out those players on the RMB, we need to reinvent things on this end of things, and create something that will give these prospective players something to do and enjoy if they do decide to join us offsite. It is our hope in the MoI that our efforts on the RMB will not only bring new faces, but develop the very things we wish to build offsite. This is a time of creativity and experimentation, and finding new avenues and activities to interest our community. But this will take time. I will not promise that it will be done in four months, but we will be engaging in the biggest effort in memory to fundamentally change the pattern and expectations in our community. Our goal is to change the kind of posting and engagement on the RMB that can be called the norm. If we do our job correctly, the RMB will regularly feature TNP news and developments, NS updates, and just discussion of the region and the game more generally. There will always be casual, silly, and non-NS topics and engagement. That is crucial to having a healthy balance, and to allow our community to connect in stronger ways. But we will no longer cede the ground to such things - the RMB should not be that different from any other place in our community, and our regular and active players, especially our staff and government, should not be rare sightings there, but frequent faces.
The delegate and I believe that there are forgotten players in the RMB, just as the RMB in general has so often been forgotten in favor of the offsite properties. These are players who would likely be interested in joining our forum or Discord, who would enjoy NS gameplay, or at least NS in general, but often do not see these things discussed, or players who seem to even mention it. They may have long dialed it into the background, and simply casually read and check in. We want them to gradually learn that the culture has shifted, and these topics are accessible and present in our community. In so doing, we hope they will get more involved and be an active part of TNP. More crucially, newer players will know nothing else, and hopefully be more likely to stay engaged from the start. This should eventually bring new players to our forum and citizenry, bring new life to our Discord, contribute additional staffers, and eventually new leaders. More players sticking around will also hopefully bring us more endorsements. Talking, of course, isn't enough. We will need concrete and interesting things for these players to do. Instead of blanketing the RMB with advertisements for activities we think they might like, and push them somewhere else to participate, we have to organize and execute the events on the RMB itself. There are obvious limitations to what we can do, but these early efforts will set the standard and expectation, and as the regulars and the interest grows, there will be a natural inclination to expand those limited capabilities, which will lead them to offsite spaces, as it did when this all started.
People growing to know each other, trust each other, and enjoy each other's company will be the single best way to bring players deeper into the community. Telegram lists, advertisements, all of these things have their place, and will continue. But they are better done as supplements to these more personal efforts. In the past we made an effort to develop a mentoring program, where new citizens could be shown around by members of our staff. This was always inconsistent, largely because personal bonds simply cannot be synthetically created. Not everyone is good at the personal touch, and not every pairing has chemistry. But we had the right idea, and this is the approach that should take first priority. This is how you grow the community: friends bringing friends in, inviting them to do things together, giving them a reason to make an effort and explore. Staffers in this ministry have to be social players, they have to want to make friends and participate in the region's activities. We are the frontlines, and will be the ones posting on the RMB and finding things to do, and partnering with our friends in Culture to make many of them a reality. We are the ones who will introduce players to the various aspects of our region, and try to match them with the place of their interest, thereby bolstering the other staffs, adding to our military, and strengthening our delegate's vote in the WA. If you want some passive tasks to click a few buttons and do a little, I cannot promise you will have much to do. While we still have our old techniques and resources, and will utilize them, we simply will not be focusing most of our attention on them. You will be asked to engage, and you will not always have specific instructions. You have to be a self-starter, or at least willing to assist others who are. I encourage you to try different things, to experiment with communication and to never be shy about expressing a new idea or proposal for how to connect with your fellow players. We will figure out what works best, and what appeals to the community we have - because while we want to bring in new players and even recruit to our region, we are most concerned with inspiring and exciting the many nations who currently reside here, and whose names are barely known, if at all.
In the days ahead I will be building this team. If you are in Home Affairs currently, and you think this approach suits you, I invite you to stick around. If it doesn't, I will be sorry to see you go, and hope you find an area of the region that interests you. Do play with us and take part in what is to come, if nothing else - at the end of the day, we want to give you something fun and interesting to do. And never be shy about chatting - we can always use more RMB posts, even if you're not working for the ministry. I will be accepting applications for deputy roles as well as reaching out to some players who I think would be a good fit for this new ministry. These deputies will take charge of the various initiatives we will be doing, so I imagine one will focus on the classic old HA tools and programs; one will work with the gameside advocates on regional communications, including dispatches and official RMB posts; and one will lead the team focused on recruiting and mentoring players as we do our work and receive inquiries and interest. I am open to this structure being changed as we hit the ground and figure out how this all plays out. We'll all have an interest in serving as teacher, talent scout, and sometimes news reporter, and our collective efforts will change the face of the RMB and therefore our community. It sounds like simple things, most of which have been done to some degree before, but this is not simple. You know how quickly the RMB can move. You know how easily distracted people can be, and how easily the posts of importance can be buried. The challenge for us will be to essentially engage in product placement and exposition without sounding out of place. We have to be there all the time, we have to be friendly and legitimate conversation partners. We cannot be brief visitors shouting newspaper headlines and handing our pamphlets. We have to be the friends who nudge people to do things, and we have to be a regular part of their experience, which means we have to actually master small talk and make some actual friendships. Sometimes all you need to do is have a brief conversation about nothing, building the bond, and you may feel like you didn't do any "work" for the ministry. Let me assure you, this will go a long way. There's only so many words I can use to describe this - this, I fear, is something that must be shown. We must do, we must act. And the more we do, and the better we get at it, the better the results will be. If we don't put everything we have into it, then this won't work and the delegate's ambitions will be delayed and affected by the state of this game. We can change that. We can make history and bring this region back to life. They're counting on us. If you want to figure this out with me, I invite you to join. Keep an eye out for signups. Hope to see you around.
-Pallaith