So this is my proposal to change up the Cit Office.
The primary goal of this proposal is simple: the burden of Citizenship applications should be on multiple people selected specifically for the job. The reconfirmations serve as an accountability measure but also as a check-in to let us remove someone who may not wish to do the job anymore.
Viziers can still act ex-officio, but the burden of the work relies on the Citizenship Officers who will be responsible for the work the viziers do. If the Viziers aren’t doing anything ex-officio, then the Citizenship Officers must step up because it is primarily THEIR job - not the Viziers’, at the end of the day.
Feedback is appreciated but two problems I’d like thoughts on:
Reconfirmation timeline right now conflicts with October 1st, which we have Delegate elections. Not sure if there’s a better option.
What to do with our current Citizenship Officials. My thinking is to probably reconfirm the existing ones if they’re willing to do he work and etc, ig.
The writing oscillates between “Officer” and “Official” – only one of those titles should be valid.
The ex officio citizen members should have a unique title as well, such as Deputy Citizenship Officer. “Citizenship Office specific non-Vizier ex-officio members” is a horrid mouthful.
The ex officio citizen members should not have all the powers and duties of the big boy CitiOfficers because if they did then this functionally means that there’s no difference between them. They should take a lower role, perhaps only taking on tasks as assigned by the Citizenship Officers and GV.
I think the distinction between Vizier Citizen Officers and Vizier ex officio members is muddied. Perhaps instead phrase things as “All Viziers shall serve as Deputy Citizenship Officers for the duration of their tenure, with the exception of any time served as a Citizenship Officer confirmed by the Magisterium.” That way the lines are clearer and more easily understood.
The reconfirmation every six months is great, but why specify 1st of April and 1st of October? Are you planning to implement this act starting in October or April? It’s particularly odd because it’s the middle of the year AND one of the dates is the start of an election, where an audit might be necessary. It’s not the same as Arbiters either (Jan 1 and Jul 1) so it seems very arbitrary to me.
My first impression is that I’m not sure we need 4+ citizenship officials.
Currently, I’d say the biggest burden is chasing after people with the 48h window (hopefully over soon), then IP checking people: a solution to the latter isn’t something we can easily expand the committee to allow for.
That’s fair, although not where I’m seeing the problem.
the issue is less the burden in a day and more the burden in a year or two. Yes, it’s doable - otherwise we never would’ve had one person do it for a while, but I’m not a big fan of placing that expectation on one person. You offer to help out for a bit and next thing you know you’re doing citizenship applications for two years and are kind of sick of it.
The point in splitting it up is to reduce the long-term burden, mostly. It also lets people cover for each other, because sometimes people may not even wanna hop onto NS for 1 minute to do bureaucratic work for X or Y reason - but that one day can be a big slow down if it happens too often.
One could argue Viziers being ex-officio fixes this but I dont really see many Viziers stepping up because frankly must of us aren’t interesting in doing this, so there’s that. But I’m letting the Viziers stay on in this system because they are our security branch and should have full access to the citizenship system, IMO.
I’ll respond to aiv’s feedback before i motion this to vote nw, just wanted tor espond to this
Another big problem I’m seeing after going back over a year through the CitApp thread actually arises when there are multiple people handling applications: a lack of tracking / communication resulted in over 10 applications just sort of falling through the cracks while 3 - 4 people managed Cit Office in sort of a disorganized fashion. We lost more potential citizens when a group was managing citizenship than we did when one person took charge.
The solution may be simplifying and solidifying a process more than it would be throwing more people at the problem - especially when we constantly see this trend of throwing bodies at problems and those bodies subsequently burning out and becoming part of the problem themselves (see elements of modern Conclave and many previous Conclaves, see previous Cit Offices, see Executive attempting to spread 5 - 10 people across ministries and ministries inevitably doing nothing, see Delegate endorsements drifting downwards towards endocap in Dec 2024 and Prae not noticing until shock therapy was applied - I’m not blaming specific people; in fact, all of us are essentially to blame for all of these things, myself very much included for hibernating for over a year). I don’t support a trend of “more jobs for more people”, and I think some of the amendments we’ve passed recently will make citizenship a lot less onerous and unmanageable. I currently don’t think I support the idea of forcing the GV to appoint a handful of cit officers. I could maybe be persuaded.
I tend to assist in audits, these days, for the record. Reading through this thread, I think this is a problem that may be solved by the GV getting on the ass of every active Vizier and CitiOfficer. I’m not particularly against the distinction here – it may work – but I honestly think the issue could be solved either way. I don’t feel strongly about it.