Hi. As you can see I’m your new Overseeing Officer. It’s nice to meet you if I haven’t met you already.
I can’t wait to get started making the EPSA the largest, chonkiest, scariest, most swole military on NS. But for that, we need some planning and co-ordination, as well as a set of goals that we’ll work towards. This post is a list of goals and plans, both short term and long term. Most of this should be accomplished within the next four months, provided that Aurora’s successor agrees with this list and I remain as OO.
- A Back-End Cleanup
Right now we have no system for recording. Embarrassing, I know, but fear not(!). I’m at the rescue, with new ways to record updates through a (yet to be created) intricate system of spreadsheets. Going forward, we’ll have nice things, like monthly update leaderboards and awards for updating. This nicely leads me into the next point:
- A Cleanup of the Applications System
I have a confession to make: not even I get how this all works sometimes, and I created it. Currently, nations have to do 4 things:
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Register on the forum
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Register as a citizen
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Post a PDF
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Join the Discord and fill in the form
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Wait to be accepted
This is at least two too many and it takes me a very long time to get people to do it, so I’d like to slim the process down somewhat by creating an applications thread specifically designed for the EPSA as a trial run. This means that the five things the people will need to do will go down to three. The only reason we’ve had a Discord form is beacuse the executive applications form isn’t fit for purpose for the EPSA, which is much more security conscious than the other ministries. Here’s the new proposed process:
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Citizens sign up to the forums
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They apply on the EPSA thread
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They join the discord and are immediately accepted upon sight.
- Re-Shifting Our Priorities
This is hopefully going to happen not so long after the next delegate elections if Aurora’s successors agree. Recently (and by “recently” I mean the past two years or so), we’ve been kicking ass at getting civilians to engage with the EPSA, but we’ve been doing the opposite of kicking ass during tagging (is that kicking out of the ass? Terrifiying thought). Anyway, the point is we should re-shift our priorities to having a large civilian base who can update and pile and can spend half an hour on the EPSA every month and a team of dedicated soldiers who tag, chase and trigger for training purposes and are essentially potential future commanders or are just there because they have some time to kill to do some fun tagging. In any case, I’d like to put more energy in making our military chonky, which leads me nicely into my next plan.
- Creating new corps and things
Much like a good fork, my idea is for the EPSA to have three prongs:
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A Piler Corps: people who are in TEP but aren’t around to update or don’t care for R/D that much, but still want to make the EPSA shoot to the moon for glory. These people aren’t around for update, but are happy to volunteer their WA from time to time to pile after updates on large ops.
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An Updater Corps: these are for people who don’t want to commit to having hundreds of switchers to tag, but still can and want to hop into active updates. They’ll update with other EPSA soldiers, but won’t be expected to tag or have more of an understanding of update works (unless they want to).
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The EPSA itself: soldiers who do everything - tag, detag, chase, laugh and have a jolly good old time.
All in all, I think that the updater corps and the piler corps should have a different ranking system from the main body of EPSA soldiers, but if a person from the updater corps wants to apply for the EPSA, we can look into “custom-placing” them on a rank. The finer details of this will still be worked out (ideally I’d like a ranking system as well as leaders from both corps to have some say in command), but that;s the basic idea.
- Changing how we interact with Libcord?
I love working with Libcord just as much as any guy, gal or NB pal, but it’s clear we need to change how we’ll interact with Libcord. If I can focus on building pilers and “one-off” updaters regionally, it is not sustainable to make people join the server for every operation because we don’t only defend and that’ll be too hard to manage. Therefore, I’d like to do what other large militaries (primarily the ERN) do, which is to keep all military people in the EPSA server and have commanders crosspost instructions from libcord, or just trigger. This means we’ll still chase, detag etc., but we’ll do it regionally and in EPSA infrastructure to make it easier to manage. This is primarily to accommodate for the focus on chonk.
- We aren’t forgetting about tagging either
Although much of my personal focus will be to make things larger, this doesn’t mean I’ll be forgetting about tagging. I’ll be introducing new award systems to recognise frequency and quality of updates, with a nice custom badge every month.
- Command Portfolios
Last but not least, a long-term goal. I’d like to personally recruit people. I won’t be around forever (even though I intend to stick around for a good while), so having the new generation of R/Ders join the EPSA and work up to command so that they can lead the org when the current (dying) command cohort is gone. This also means introducing command portfolios: under my EPSA, different commanders will collaborate but will also be in charge of different things as determined in conjunction with the said person (such as recruitment, piler management, tech & dev etc.). We’ll be really flexible with and play to people’s strenghts as much as possible, and this is obviously an end goal, but I thought it’s better to state this now rather than never.
In any case, join the EPSA when I get the form up (or even before! I can help if you DM me) and running and if you have any questions you’re free to DM me, post in this thread or notify me using smoke signals.
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