MERLOGATE 2.0
We are so back.
Hi again everyone, apologies for the slight delay in getting a campaign overview out, it’s been a busy few days. Once again I’m honoured and thankful for all the nominations received, and I hope to have the opportunity to do you proud for a second term.
All questions and queries are of course welcome, and I’ll do my best to answer anything that comes my way. If there’s anything here I don’t cover, which there likely will be, then feel free to ask my thoughts or plans.
THE EXECUTIVE STRUCTURE
Probably the best first point to touch on. I noted in my campaign four months ago that I’d be removing the titles of Chief Minister and the Chief Ministries. This happened on day one of my Delegacy, however, I must note that due to constraints in the Executive Act, I was physically unable to run a government without having a MoRA assigned. I appointed Vice-Delegate Dremaur as MoRA, despite it having zero purpose or power. Whether I am successful in this race or not, unless my opponents seek to revive that system, that will need to be changed, which means uprooting part of the Executive Act. I can already hear the Magisters foaming at the mouth.
To be clear, that is a day-one project. I’m not familiar with the intricacies of our legal system and how easy a fix that is, but it’ll get done one way or another.
Outreach
Outreach was relatively quiet during my first term, as Minister Romanoddle can no doubt attest. I haven’t exactly asked much of this ministry, so it’s not the fault of the current staffing. It should be noted where I have asked for it, work has been done to a perfect standard.
I don’t have a concrete plan set up for Outreach in a second term, and it’ll be a work in progress heading into the next four months. One area I’d like to see Outreach manage is our automated recruitment. As the Cabinet is aware we’re planning on starting up automated API recruitment telegrams over the next month or two. I’ve established the client key for doing so, we have a template written up and I’m happy to host this on a 24h server. Once that’s up and running, I think it should be placed under the watch of the Outreach ministry, which can ensure it’s running smoothly, answer any questions from newbies and promote TEP to a wider audience.
This is of course a hypothetical at this stage, and the finer details would be discussed with the new Cabinet on day one of my second term.
Culture
Culture has underperformed in my first term. We’ve held cultural events here and there but we’ve been unable to establish all that much outside of monthly hunger games, which is run entirely separate from the ministry.
On the bright side, we’ve got eager new staffers in the ministry, and this bodes well for activity. In a second term, I’ll be more firm in the need for cultural events. Culture will work side-by-side with FA to plan events with our allies and embassy partners. I’ll also be encouraging staffers to create and plan events themselves, ensuring it’s not all centered around one minister, but a group of culture staffers.
News
Not much to comment on. The news ministry has continued on its trajectory and EPNS continues to be one of the best, if not the best news publication in NationStates. I’ll endeavour to have a new minister in place immediately and hit the ground running. I have no plans to alter this ministry, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
World Assembly Affairs
I’m quite pleased with the results we’ve seen from the MoWAA in the last four months. The ministry itself has faced struggles, notably Gem’s resignation, but we’ve persevered and I’m happy to see Aurora has got off to a great start there.
We’ve seen some bright positives, Commend Staynes and Condemn Kampf Empire for example. I have never been prouder of my region than when I saw RMB’ers coming out en masse to join the WA and lodge their vote for Kampf. Despite it’s failure, Commend EM nonetheless had the same impact in bringing our region together to rally around one of our own, I want to see more of that.
It is clear, however, that our position in the World Assembly is not ideal. Even a well-written, entirely RP-based condemnation like Condemn Kampf still only squeaked out a narrow victory. To put it bluntly, we either need to reach out and see whether people are willing to bury hatchets, or we’re left with little choice but to go make new friends. I’m not interested in seeing very commendable/condemnable individuals have their proposals shot down in a childish tit-for-tat.
I’d certainly be interested, as other candidates have noted in encouraging and fostering a stronger WA drafting subcommunity in TEP. We’ve already made great strides over the last four months, and I’d like to see that trajectory continue. I have no plans for doing such yet, but that’s a discussion to be had with the WAA Minister and is dependent on manpower, willingness and feasibility.
Foreign Affairs
FA is probably the largest area to touch on in this campaign, not just for me but for any aspiring Delegate. The last month has seen us undertake a massive overhaul of our internal FA structure, under my direction we’ve begun work to bring back the old ambassador system, which seeks to revitalize our Foreign Affairs outreach and ensure our allies, embassy partners and consulates have a constant point of contact with The East Pacific. This is a big undertaking and I plan to see it through during a second term.
As I’ve noted in FA circles, but not so much publicly, TEP could be a better friend. Sure, we keep in touch with our allies and friends, but we could do more, we could show a little more enthusiasm, we could host more events, and there is always more we can do. If we are to voice our concerns about our treatment by our friends, we must hold ourselves to the highest standards.
This is what the ambassador program aims to achieve. I expect each region we have relations with to hear from us, to know we’re there and available should they need us.
Our position in the wider NSGP environment is delicate. Let me begin by noting our non-alignment is firm, and that won’t change under my delegacy. TEP is committed to its non-involvement in the ongoing war, and as Delegate I will not commit our region to the fighting, directly or indirectly.
Over the next four months, I hope to simultaneously expand TEP’s network of friends, and also make some changes that will tighten and formalize our requirements for obtaining relations. That may sound contradictory, but it’s entirely doable.
Our Foreign Affairs handbook will be scrapped and rewritten from the ground up, maintaining the Consulate-Embassy-NAP-Ally structure, but with more formal guidelines on how relations are established, and stricter requirements on who we establish them with. For example, there would be a minimum requirement on how many nations must be in a region to meet our standards. We currently have a soft requirement of 15 endorsements, which several regions we have relations with do not meet. We don’t follow our own rules, and that makes no sense and is no doubt confusing for any region looking to form relations, this will be fixed.
Once our ambassador system is set up, and our FA handbook is completed, we’ll move into overdrive. We’ll cull relations that do not meet our requirements (with internal discussion of course) and get in touch with every single region we have diplomatic relations with. They’ll be informed of their new ambassador from TEP and our new system, and this will be used as an opportunity to check in and ensure our relationships are comfortable. Alongside this, we’ll engage in more formal talks with several key allies to discuss furthering relations and solidifying friendships. EPNS will continue to be sent out by diplomats monthly, to ensure TEP’s matters are visible to the wider NS audience.
EPSA
This is one of the key points of this campaign and something I’m keen to get to work on. The EPSA right now sucks, sorry to be blunt and the bearer of very obvious information but our army might as well not exist currently. We can muster a grand total of maybe 5 pilers, if we’re lucky. For a feeder army, that’s pathetic. We need to step up our game with the EPSA big time.
This means a full rework from the ground up. We’ll start with the identity, we don’t have one currently. Other regions have a theme, but we don’t. We’re just an army, there’s nothing special about it, nothing that stands out, this has to change before we go any further. We’ll start with polls and questionnaires, and reach out to the wider TEP community to get feedback and ideas. What do they think is cool? What would they like to see? We’ll use this feedback to brainstorm as a group and decide on a theme. Once we have that established, we’ll get to work on the rebrand. We’ll set up a new rank hierarchy, rebuild the Discord, and establish a command structure.
Once we have the foundations in place, we move on to a full-scale recruitment campaign. I want cool propaganda posters, flags and banners. Make things look cool as hell. Our main recruitment pool lies in the RMB community, there are dozens upon dozens of individuals who would be amazing recruits. We don’t need them to be active 24/7, we don’t need them to be experts, but their presence is invaluable. This means reaching out to RMB’ers personally, getting them interested in serving, making it worthwhile, handing out awards and shoutouts to those who take part, making a massive deal out of new recruits and hyping up every win we get, no matter how minuscule.
I highlight the RMB community specifically as of course I’m from there originally and continue to be very involved there, but the same efforts can and should be made for every corner of our community. Encourage new arrivals to serve their region, Forum RP’ers of course can still serve with honourary EPSA citizenship, ensure they’re aware of this.
Of course, our army isn’t fighting a war right now, and we have no intention to, but having a solid and capable force available to us is very important. We adore punching fascists in the teeth, so let’s keep doing that. We’ll have the EPSA leadership make friends with other military organizations, connect and network, and take part in interregional military operations, the sky is the limit.
I have very high hopes for what we can achieve with the EPSA, especially considering the practically blank slate we have currently. Sky. is. the. limit.
UTEP
Slow and steady wins the race. UTEP’s revival hasn’t moved at the pace I think most of us had envisioned, and part of the blame for that definitely lies on my shoulders. I am still fully committed to its progress, and despite the fact things have been slow, we’ve still seen some very promising signs. We’re very close to having a fully polished new dispatch structure, and we’re now beginning to port over UTEP works and libraries to them. We’ve already seen some great works made by various individuals, and we know more is on the way.
UTEP progress needs to be ramped up. PEE continues to be the roadmap (god damn it that is such an awful sentence) and the plan has not changed, however, we need to be realistic with our goals. The UTEP reforms should be finished by the time my second term would end, however, our plans for an interregional university connection will need more time and a lot more manpower than we’re working with currently. UTEP, since October, has mostly just been Aivintis and myself, we need more support from more individuals to get this up and running, and I plan to hold people at gunpoint (ping them and ask if they’d be interested in working on UTEP) to help things out.
The Plan for Educational Engagement will come up for re-evaluation at the start of the next delegacy term, and this will all be hashed out there anyway, but I figure I should note my thoughts here since it’s an important part of the next term.
CONCLUSION
To put it simply, there’s just so much more to do over the next four months. This first term has flown by, as apparently they always seem to do. I don’t feel remotely close to being done here, and I want to see through the projects I started. We’ve got plenty more to do, and I feel we’d be remiss now to reset and start anew. I ask for your vote next week, for the opportunity to finish what we started.
