Foreign Affairs Committee

Turbeaux

Mount Seymour That is fine, it was just a little bit of culture shock for me as both Forest and Norrland are/were relatively serious.

Uan-aa-Boa

Mount Seymour I'm not sure I buy all this because I'm looking at Anarchy, which takes none of these precautions and has an extremely stable delegacy based on only 18 endorsements. It also overlooks the fact that in the game mechanics delegacy is determined by an open, onsite process - whoever has the most endorsements wins. If seems to me that offsite citizenship effectively serves to perpetuate the control of the small clique who, not coincidentally, wrote the rules in the first place. That's probably just me, but when some GCRs manage "delegacy transition" by literally getting foreign armies to help overwhelm native endorsements doesn't it seem to you that something's amiss?

Caracasus

Uan-aa-Boa one of my concerns about these forums and these committees is that if we aren't careful we could run into a situation where committee members effectively operate as something of a clique... Why I keep posting updates from the committees really... gives people as many chances to get involved as possible.

Mount Seymour

Uan-aa-Boa I'm not sure I buy all this because I'm looking at Anarchy, which takes none of these precautions and has an extremely stable delegacy based on only 18 endorsements. It also overlooks the fact that in the game mechanics delegacy is determined by an open, onsite process - whoever has the most endorsements wins. If seems to me that offsite citizenship effectively serves to perpetuate the control of the small clique who, not coincidentally, wrote the rules in the first place. That's probably just me, but when some GCRs manage "delegacy transition" by literally getting foreign armies to help overwhelm native endorsements doesn't it seem to you that something's amiss?

And Anarchy has been raided over and over and over again. Because of the way game influence rules work in User-Created Regions, they can rebound from that fairly quickly. But influence works differently in GCRs— it decays over time if you’re not gaining endorsements. GCRs can not afford to be couped even once, because by and large those coups are permanent if executed well. Anarchy’s stability is dependent upon no one deciding to raid it.

The argument for “delegacy supremacy”— that is, whoever has the most endorsements and can get the most endorsements deserves to be delegate because it’s how the game mechanics work— is one which is very appealing at first but falls apart upon closer inspection. In Forest I could join the WA right now and probably gather endorsements right up to Ransium. Because we’re not so huge and we’re generally very involved in the region, someone might notice before I took the WA and withdraw their endorsement, which would be enough to keep me out of seizing the delegacy. Errinundera could banject me when he got online. But in a GCR, where most residents are new to the game or do not take any part in the region, just answering issues, they will see someone endorsed them and endorse back. Frankly, most people in GCRs don’t put their priorities on who the delegate is, and because of their size, one or two people withdrawing endorsements from me is not going to do a lot. If I can gain the delegacy by just sending a lot of telegrams saying “hey, would you mind endorsing me?”, all while while flying the Black Hawks flag with the stated intent of banjecting as many nations as possible upon my ascension to the delegacy, is that really fair? Is that really an election?

I won’t dispute that offsite elections help to perpetuate a clique of elites. I don’t like it one bit. But I don’t see endorsement supremacy or any other model as sustainable or more fair in a GCR.

Uan-aa-Boa

Caracasus And I think you're absolutely right to be cautious about that and maintain the link to the RMB. Even among vocal regulars, we rarely see FuF, Ruinenlust, Montmorencia or CWA on here. Still, the key difference is that Forest has no definition of citizenship. You don't have to jump through any hoops to get voting rights. Even the WA criteria is just to keep it to one player one vote for really important things. I keep thinking back to the time I tried to close the inactive embassies. I would have won that if I only had to persuade the vocal and visible people, but the region as a whole wasn't having it.

Ypogegrammeni

Caracasus Government-by-forum-committee seems effectively to be what happened in my old region, the difference in my experience being my transition to peripherally-in-but-mostly-out under the old regime to being more-firmly-out under the new, which means that it now goes on mostly behind locked doors from my perspective.

It's difficult because in my casual experience attempts to keep stuff on the RMB radar is highly dependent on how fast the RMB travels; I know that as someone whose RL commitments have kept him from poking his head in for about a month at a time it's very easy to miss something that was flagged on the RMB at backpost #2500, 2475, 2450, and 2425 -- not for lack of will on either side, but simply because at some point you've gotta call a time limit on what's happening. (And indeed my ability to stay abreast of significant developments in Gay was highly conditional on being anointed a Penguin of Sound Judgment by the former delegate, who would occasionally ping me off of NS if there was something he felt would imply large changes for the region. The current administration does not do that, at least not with me -- feeling, perhaps rightly, that government of the region is by and for those who are most active in the region.)

This is all a lot of tl;dr to say that I think the theory behind keeping the RMB pointers to debates on this forum is really valuable and is better than nothing. I'm not sure how, if at all, the problem of citizens who feel strongly about Forest's direction who nevertheless miss out on RMB/forum activity due to sporadic presence can be addressed.

Uan-aa-Boa

Mount Seymour If you say Anarchy's approach wouldn't work in a GCR then obviously I defer to your considerable gameplay experience. I don't want to diss your involvement in GCR politics either, but I don't particularly envy you.

Mount Seymour

Uan-aa-Boa I don't particularly envy you.

And you should not. ? There's a reason I'm not planning on sticking around in Lazarus once this convention is over.

Caracasus

Okay guys, written up a summary for the RMB to be found here. Let me know if anything is missing.

https://www.nationstates.net/region=forest/page=display_region_rmb?postid=31400483#p31400483

Kozmix

If I may put in my two cents looking at the flow of discussion here:
10000 Islands and TRR are the two regions I am a voting member of. Citizenship laws in XKI are firmly tied to the WA membership, and happens on the forums, the upsides of which have been discussed before. However, even after continuous campaigning, the election turnout is usually between 40 and 60, and we have about 300 WA members in the region, the reason being, forum accounts become difficult to maintain, as far as I have seen, and for people not as heavily invested, that becomes a problem. Also some people find forums confusing, but that is not a problem for the great forums you guys have <3

I think the GCR aspect of things has also been described above in the TSP election post, and in TRR, the citizenship policy is quite simple as well, but only forum users are considered citizens (because it is TRR), so the number of actively participating people in regional politics and elections remains stable and decently high, and they don't care much for

Anyways, the tradeoff essentially is that would you have a lot of people vote, but some of whom are not going to be active, and so won't really care one way or another, or would you want people invested in the region to be a part of the electorate, because that will decide where you hold your elections, in my opinion.

Areulder

So I just found a lovely little environmental region. https://www.nationstates.net/region=conifer they're still younger then six months, having been founded in March, but they seem like an excellent match for an embassy.

Turbeaux

Areulder I believe that Conifer has already been discussed and the feeling was that we should wait until September.

Areulder

Haha, So it has.

Uan-aa-Boa

Really sad to see the decline of Philosophy 115 after the loss of Dr George/Bear Nation. Since I sent a puppet over literally nothing has happened there. On many days fewer than 10 nations do anything that registers on the activity feed. Not much we can do to help other than be around and offer though.

Uan-aa-Boa

Do we have a representative to The Rejected Realms? I ask because they've just ordered the closure of 16 embassies due to inactivity on their forum, which is where they consider the important diplomacy to be. We're better than many, and we do have a treaty with them. but I checked and we haven't posted to their forum since December. Obviously we've had quite a bit of news since then.

With the Foreign Affairs Ministry more or less inactive I'd be happy to post an update over there if it's not treading on anyone's toes. What does anyone else think?

Caracasus

I would say go for it now and we will work put something on here in the meantime. If no one has posted since december then I cant see any reason why it would be stepping on toes.

Mount Seymour

Does Ruinenlust follow this thread? (shouts to @Ruinenlust) If not, we should probably make sure this gets to him ?

Peninsular

That reminds me of something

begins typing in MS Word

Uan-aa-Boa

Good morning Forest, let's talk about foreign affairs.

Beyond the current interest in Conifer I'm happy with our embassies and I don't have a shopping list for new ones. Ruinenlust is handling incoming applications but is extremely busy in their new real life job. I'm not sure about the status of the ambassador programme, but there are people out there representing us in the embassy regions.

I've asked Lord Dominator to run an embassy thread in the NS gameplay forum to bring Forest to a wider audience - they'll be really good at that because they don' t take themselves nearly as seriously as most of the people on there. To be clear, I'm very much looking for Forest to be a breath of fresh air on there rather than for us to get sucked into the negativity and ego-posting that's often prevalent,

Forest continues to have an expanding inter-regional profile and our recent N-day success has brought new members. This brings opportunities, but we have to be aware that many players have no desire to simulate nuclear war and find the "My region! Woo!" that comes with it deeply unattractive. For obvious reasons, such players will be more attracted to Forest than to many other regions. When I was Foreign Minister I set out to close old embassies with inactive regions and had a bit of a shock with the poll I thought would be a simple rubber stamp. I realised then that Forest has deep roots that are quiet but not to be pushed around and I don't want to repeat that mistake now by doing things that make substantial number of Forestarians go "Aaagh! I came here to avoid this stuff." Neither do I want to risk Forest's distinctive identity. It's a great thing to have people who are also involved in other regions, and I hope we'll attract more such people. but it's important not to be just "Yeah, I'm in TSP, TEP, XKI, Laz and now Forest too." Forest needs to be a bit different.

In view of that, before we get involved in joint enterprises with the GCRs and other activities that come with our increasing profile, I'm interested in having a referendum to make sure that this kind of approach has regional support. It would most likely be an agree/disagree question with a statement such as "Forest should be highly visible and involved in shared activity with other regions."

This has become a bit rambling, so please let me know what you think.

Caracasus

All good points, I'd also like to add that raising our profile while also remaining a unique region is possible I think. But the downside is that it'll take work. Ideas like the ones proposed on the culture committee will help with that no doubt - if we can establish our own voice and produce stuff that people engage with I think it'll go some way to establishing Forest as a culturally unique place.

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