I generally agree that the citapp form should be simplified, but I disagree with leaving out the regions/organizations question. Even if those with shady pasts won’t properly report them, it’s nice to see who will hold double citizenship and, therefore, who could, for example, easily serve as an ambassador, or who can’t be in EPSA full-time because their WA nation is in a foreign army. And if someone leaves out a shady region and we find out later, then they can be tried for lying on their citapp. Sure, we’re the region of second chances, but keeping the option open is important imo.
I’ll go at this step by step because this represents many arguments that are generally against the citizenship application.
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I generally agree that the citapp form should be simplified, but I disagree with leaving out the regions/organizations question.
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Alright
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Even if those with shady pasts won’t properly report them, it’s nice to see who will hold double citizenship and, therefore, who could, for example, easily serve as an ambassador,
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This is sensible and makes sense. However, it’s more of an amenity. Do we really need to know who has double citizenship? The East Pacific allows double, triple, quadruple citizenships. It doesn’t affect us that much. And from what I can tell, that information is usually skipped over. We do not do anything with such information either. It would be definitely nice to have, but I believe adding the question back for this reason is not worth it.
The topic on ambassadors is an interesting point. However, it is not that difficult to be an ambassador to another region (even as a complete newbie, since most regional communities are friendly). And I don’t believe it’s worth having this question here for the small number of citizens who are citizens of another region, who also are signing up for citizenship in TEP. Odds are, that person is few and far between.
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or who can’t be in EPSA full-time because their WA nation is in a foreign army.
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This should be the Overseeing Officer’s responsibility. The Viziers shouldn’t be the ones worrying about EPSA, EPSA should be worrying about itself. We’re trying to help out the region by allowing citizens to see whether they wish to join EPSA or other TEP-groups, however at this point we’re going a bit too much into the internal processes of EPSA.
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And if someone leaves out a shady region and we find out later, then they can be tried for lying on their citapp. Sure, we’re the region of second chances, but keeping the option open is important imo.
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Yes, they can be tried for lying on a citapp. But what happens if someone puts a shady region on their citapp and gets accepted? Then nothing happens to them. There’s no point in keeping the question in order to (hopefully) catch someone lying and try them for doing so. It hasn’t happened for the two years this question has been on the citapp, as far as I know. Well, besides Meddacah, but that ended up in his citizenship just being removed rather than a trial.
Viziers now have the ability to prohibit groups/regions from entering into the East Pacific. If anything, this is the venue we should take when trying to try someone, because there is legitimate cause to it.
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My point I’m trying to make is that we need to treat citizenship like we’re trying to sell a service or product. Because this is, in effect, how we’ve been dealing with citizenship since the Empire coup. I mean, even our legislation is telling us to advertise citizenship by listing its benefits within an official NationStates government dispatch.
And the target market for our product? The East Pacific’s residents, mainly the minority (around 1000) of issue-answerers and endotarters. When keeping this in mind, we should try to gear the citizenship application to them, because these are the main type of people who we are trying to attract.
Now, I do understand that security is an important part of the citizenship application. However, the thing is that anyone who really cared about infiltrating TEP would be at least careful enough to lie on their citizenship application, and then not make a peep about that lie. If someone is incompetent enough to do something like that, chances are that they’re going to amount to nothing in the East Pacific. On the flip-side, however, we end up scaring off residents with our long citapps. For a person who has never experienced our forums, filling out the citizenship application is one of the weirdest things you’ll ever do in the East Pacific. I remember filling it out, and I was super-duper confused. A shorter app helps mitigate that process.
The reason I’m talking about target markets and etc. is because there is an argument for every question on the old citapp. Every question was carefully added, and I would expect nothing less from Viceroy Aelitia. However, the previous citapp really focused more on security rather than the people who were actually answering it. This includes the “what organizations are you a part of”. The entire citizenship application was geared towards catching people red-handed in a lie and not much else. And yes, while that has seen some action over the years, ultimately I don’t believe it accomplished what it set out to do.
This is why I suggested shortening the application, and also why that question is, at least to me, non-essential.