Mid-Term Executive Poll

Calvin Coolidge · Aug 19, 2016

Mousebumples said:
Common-Sense Politics said:

Mousebumples said:

I remember back when WL and Calvin (in Interior and FA, and in Culture and Comm prior) would put out weekly, "Here's what I've been up to!" posts during the term. I don't want to detract from other jobs within a given Ministry but perhaps that's something worth looking at for the last few weeks of the term?

Click to expand...

Yeah, and Calvin's were bloody awful and told us nothing.

"I've been doin' stuff this week, you guys. Great stuff, all the best stuff is being done. Nobody does stuff like we do stuff. See ya' next week!"

I hate all of you with the burning, white hot passion of a thousand burning suns.

Click to expand...

They were long enough ago that you could very well be right, and I've just idealized them as being useful and informative when they weren't. h43r:

I pooled a few weekly updates here in case you guys wanted to see them.

This week I will again tell you the good things to come from the Ministry of Communications. First off, the usual stuff: the Wire remains daily, and there has been one EBC article this week, from the Who's Who project. We have released two dispatches this week, one on the ERN's recent success, and the other to promote the Winter Ball. Additionally, we have kept the Knight Description Bracket Dispatch updated throughout the course of the poll. The big news this week, as stated earlier this week by President Malashaan, is the shift of the International Paper over to the EON format. This is not a failure of the project, although the project has yielded disappointing results so far, through much of the staff's lack of effort. So, the EON's results will be distributed to our allies, and around the world. Judging the International Paper, then, should be a matter of looking to see how widely distributed that material is, at least for now. This term is winding down, but we've still got some big projects coming up, including the Pre-Standing Presidential Poll results, election coverage, and more, so stay tuned.

Source

Now in the third week of my term, the Ministry of Communications, as always, is abuzz with activity. During the Z-Day event, seven different updates were posted, bringing additional information to those fighting on the front lines against the zombie invaders. Additionally, a dispatch was put out today to raise awareness of the standing period for Senate. For the EBC, we have put out a Senate poll, and the article is near completion, and is expected to be released either today or tomorrow. The Wire, as per usual, has been putting out daily updates. The International Paper has presented drafts for their first issue, which I expect to be released in the near future. Again, this term is about bringing as much communication to the public as possible, and each week, each dispatch, and each poll brings us closer to that goal. Thank you, and I hope to continue along this path for the remainder of the term.

Source

Who wants to know what FA did this week?

Trick question, everyone does.

EFS

- We've updated the Arnhlem document to reflect newer signups.

- The new Foreign Update has been drafted, is being tweaked, expect a release later this week, or next.

Regional Reports

- The inactive embassies and diplomats are in the process of being purged.

Ambassador Academy

- Yeah, we're actually starting to train diplomats now.

EON

- Interview questions have been to a foreign leader, and once the response is received, it will be published.

- Talks are underway with a new potential EON partner.

- A mixlr event was hosted for New Year's.

General

- A dispatch has been drafted and will be released soon to enlighten people about our embassy policy.

Conclusion

- FA is up to some great, exciting things. Expect more in the future, much love, etc. ^_^

Source

Notolecta · Aug 20, 2016

Deepest House said:
To be fair, I didn’t say that there was no place or value in feature pieces by the EBC, nor that dispatches were the answer to internal communications. Dispatches are a starting point for internal communications, not an end point. And the MoC has a responsibility to produce content related to elections and other official business. That’s a core function, so I don’t see any question in the value of continuing to do so. In fact, we have had new citizens come to Europeia based solely on the quality of our dispatches because they demonstrated the robust political and cultural environment that exists in the region. Now, we don’t do dispatches to recruit, but everything that demonstrates Euro’s professionalism and excellence helps with overall recruitment and retention.

I have in the past said that the EBC shouldn’t focus on editorials or opinion based pieces. That statement was early in my time here and based on my real world experience planning and implementing information campaigns for a federal agency (we do use OpEds and LTEs in very limited instances, but not as a regular part of operations). The dynamics of Europeia and NS, in general, allow for and encourage a bit more latitude in these kinds of pieces, although I will say that I’d prefer to see private media take on more of a role (especially in regard to satire, which I don’t think has a place in government communications).

The MoC can take a passive approach and say “yeah, everyone should know who won the election.” And yes, most probably will. Or the MoC can say “it’s our mission to disseminate information about this election, so we are going to do so.” Elections are just one example, switch out whatever official activity you like. The passive approach to the MoC is saying “most happenings are publicly available on the forums,” and letting people peruse the multitude of forums and subforums to find information themselves. The active approach is saying “we have a responsibility to collect and present this information to the public out of an interest of government transparency and customer service.”

The MoC is a customer service organization, whether our customer is the general public of Europeia/larger NS world and we collect and provide information to them, or if our customers are other ministries who request support in sharing producing and sharing information/news with the region and the larger NS world at large.

Another thing that I’ve seen in my time here is that the MoC has often been left out of the planning process for events, announcements, etc., and only gets brought in in the last minute. That’s a terrible approach, and I’d really like to see future administrations involve the MoC (minister) earlier in the process. There are a lot of positive benefits to this: the MoC is not reactive but proactive; the MoC can provide comms planning and advice in shaping a communications rollout and advise on potential public reaction, etc. There is a lot more that a minister can offer the president and vice president than simply pushing information – the Minister should be a real comms advisor and have a seat at the table for ALL major discussions involving the region, whether that relates to the ERN, FA, internal cultural events, etc. This would also be consistent with the real world, where we are constantly involved in meetings at the highest levels even if they don’t directly pertain to our operations immediately, simply to be aware and serve as an advisor. MoC might not always have something to say, but better to be there than not. Euro has been too stovepiped, in my opinion. When a president appoints a minister, that should be done with full trust and confidence not only in technical ability, but also ability to keep things confidential when necessary (sensitive discussions about FA, military, etc.) A president should appoint the MoC minister with enough trust to bring that comms advisor into any meeting without hesitation.

I'm just going to say Comms(please stop calling it "MoC" since "MoC" is much more readily used for culture, it leads to confusion and essentially no one else refers to it as such) isn't really a customer service ministry, it wasn't created to be that either. The name has caused confusion for some and I think the relation between the name and your real life occupation has created an unintentional bias for how you veiw the ministry, but that doesn't change the fact that it is an always has been primarily a ministry about media, not information. I think it isn't unreasonable for you to argue that you believe comms should be focused on dissemination information or "customer service"(I'm not really sure I like the use of the term, but understand what you mean), but that simply has not been what it has done historically even in recent terms, nor was that an original purpose. I would argue it isn't good to muddy the purpose of comms by making it in charge of media and information dissemination which personally I question the need for a ministry dedicated to. As I've stated such information dissemination doesn't serve our citizens and we've made no attempt to confirm that any outsiders even notice or pay attention.

My arguments on dispatches in particular is that we use them to simply repeat information on our forums with little though as to whom is looking for or reading the dispatches. Are our dispatches really serving the audience they have? We don't know. They certainly don't serve much purpose for any euro citizen and I haven't seen any evidence that anyone else even notices our dispatches.

Honestly I don't think the vision you have for comms fits it's purpose or role in the region(essentially it is a very separate concept and entity from what comms is now and has been). Nor do I really think it's necessary in a volunteer game environment. Necessary updates on ongoing matters aren't something that really can often be given because we don't want to talk about the goings on behinds the scenes and spoil the end result, and what can be given is often small enough that a single individual could handle this rather than a whole ministry. There simply is no need to have a minister for comms with access to any Fa or sensitive matters because it isn't the realm of comms.

Trinnien · Aug 20, 2016

Well, just as one example on dispatches.... I did receive a few telegrams from citizens from other regions that read my resignation dispatch and sent me well wishes. And we have dispatches that have hundreds in views so someone is looking at them.

Deepest House · Aug 20, 2016

We just have a fundamental disagreement, and that's fine. And maybe I do have a little bias, but as you said it's not unreasonable. It just depends on what one thinks the mission of the ministry is. Characterizing it as a customer service ministry simply means we are working for others, and we should keep that in mind in what products we develop and how we develop them. It is a mindset to have that is meant to encourage putting the best product out there. And if the ministry wasnt created to produce/share/disseminate information, not sure what its point is. The government has a responsibility to be transparent and accountable to the people, and this is just one of many ways to accomplish that.

I will vehemently disagree with your assessment about bringing the minister into broader discussions, but like you, I can see your point. I've just seen instances where had The MoC been brought in earlier, better results could've been had. In the end, this is a game and nothing terrible is going to happen if not, but it doesn't hurt anything either. Nothing bad can come from sharing information, and a minister should have the full faith and confidence of the president.

And again, regarding outsiders, I've been specifically told on at least one occasion that a citizen joined our region based on our dispatches, so people are reading them.

Notolecta · Aug 20, 2016

Deepest House said:
And if the ministry wasnt created to produce/share/disseminate information, not sure what its point is. The government has a responsibility to be transparent and accountable to the people, and this is just one of many ways to accomplish that.

I don disagree with you that the government should try to be as transparent as reasonable(within the understanding that much can't be released or it can spoil some of the importance of what is going on), but that isn't the role of comms. The role of comms is and has been media. It was created as basically a second attempt at a similar but differently named ministry(ministry of media) and essentially only had domain over the EBC(and at points in time the Foriegn update had been tossed between it and FA in attempts to improve it, but unless I'm mistaken not at first, I'd have to check to be sure) As I have said though the forefront role and responsibility of media in NS is and needs to be producing content and commentary that provokes though and drives discussion, which is what the EBC supposed to do. This is the job of Comms, to facilitate conversation and thought through forms of media.

As a note my biggest problem with dispatches is that most of our knowledge of who is reading them and why is limited and based on anecdote evidence. We are wasting our efforts with dispatches if we are not accurately targeting our audience with a specific end goal in mind, but right now I don't think we know much about our audience besides the fact that we clearly have people that click on the dispatches(we don't even know how far in they read for that matter). We need to take a more oranized and planned approach to dispatches if we want to use them rather than just blindly reproduce material from the forums through them assuming it is benefiting us in some way, but not bothering to investigate how or why.

Deepest House · Aug 20, 2016

I think we are more or less on the same page, except I view the ministry with an expanded responsibility to produce a bit more hard news for domestic consumption (in addition to the traditional media role you mention) and for the minister to serve as an actual communications advisor where necessary

I would say that looking at the number of reads is a data point and not anecdotal. It is only one data point, but it's the only one we have. Unfortunately there aren't more metrics, other than upvotes, which is kind of artificially inflated anyway.

The comment about gaining new members is an anecdotal observation, though.

I don't foresee any scenario in which we would or should abandon dispatches, and if you compare ours to the rest that are out there, it's not even close in terms quality difference between ours and others. It would be nice to have more data, but the only way to get that would probably be a poll or survey of foreign citizens, and that's unlikely to produce usable data (speculation). Given the realities, I think our dispatch operations are pretty good, and probably the best in NationStates for hard news dissemination.

We have tried issuing dispatches directly to foreign media for them to run in their publications, but that did not produce results so we stopped and kept focused on the dispatch hub.

Notolecta · Aug 20, 2016

Frankly, I don't believe there is value is distributing hard news internally because besides things in hidden forums that we don't want to release and in many cases don't benefit from everything is already available to all citizens. We don't need to look at the wire or a dispatch to see that the standing period for senate is open because we can all see that. The same goes for who won elections, what events are going on and literally every public occurrence in the region. Any hard news that isn't releasing information from classified sub-forums is simply redundant.

Deepest House · Aug 20, 2016

I'm not saying that everything needs to be reported.

It seems your position is that all citizens should be following all the goings-on in each ministry and across the region. I suppose it's nice to think that way, but it's certainly not true. Citizens are engaged at varying levels, and the MoC serves all citizens, casual observers and die-hard players.

There is value on having information collected and distributed in a central location. It's not redundant to do so, and is the responsibility of the ministry. We are sharing news externally for good reason and to good effect. It is wasteful not to share news internally since it is already created.

Trinnien · Aug 20, 2016

My main argument for the use of dispatches is that it costs us nothing and we can only gain from them. Do we gain a lot? That's harder to quantify due to our limited access to data from NS itself. However, we could do away with dispatches and focus solely on those here on the off-site forums and it is my opinion - a very strong opinion at that and one I will always fight for - that engaging only those that are here on the forums is just plain bad policy. Sure, the information/content may be here and accessible but miss a week and come back to the forums, it is very difficult to catch up on all the threads and discussions going on. That is why I like the EBC Wire, Dispatches, and when I made my post showcasing various articles that had been written so far in the term, because it allows a person to quickly jump into a discussion that they may find interest in.

shufordbrian · Aug 20, 2016

Common-Sense Politics said:
I hate all of you with the burning, white hot passion of a thousand burning suns.

...are you alright man? :blink:

Lime · Aug 20, 2016

Deepest House said:
I'm not saying that everything needs to be reported.

It seems your position is that all citizens should be following all the goings-on in each ministry and across the region. I suppose it's nice to think that way, but it's certainly not true. Citizens are engaged at varying levels, and the MoC serves all citizens, casual observers and die-hard players.

There is value on having information collected and distributed in a central location. It's not redundant to do so, and is the responsibility of the ministry. We are sharing news externally for good reason and to good effect. It is wasteful not to share news internally since it is already created.

:wub:

My main issue about Europeia is that people seem to think that because nearly everything is public you should know everything. The MoC should deliver more hard news in my opinion because not everyone who will read the EBC will be interested in politics or culture or whatever and will only look into the stuff they are interested in. I'm guilty of it, I mean I never even knew that Euro Olympics was on until I saw it in a newspaper.

Just having analyst and opinion pieces over and over again doesn't inform people. The EBC should try and find that right balance of hard news and casual news. Then die-hard players can learn or at least be more informed about the goings on in the casual world and the casual players can learn or be more informed about what is going on in the die-hard world. To say that real news is useless is completely ridiculous. It's just one thing I can't understand bout this region, all the large regions in NS that I can think of and no doubt the ones I can't think of have newspapers that provide real news not analysis and opinion and for some strange reason they seem to be disliked in Euro.

Mousebumples · Aug 20, 2016

Punch - do you find it easy to find news in Europeia? (Be it through the WIRE, EBC area here, Dispatches, etc. ?) Is there a better way that things could be presented or displayed or disseminated?

hyanygo · Aug 20, 2016

Punch, it's literally staring you in the face. There is a button called "news".

Anumia · Aug 21, 2016

hyanygo said:
Punch, it's literally staring you in the face. There is a button called "news".

But then again, the Active Topics list is right there on the index page too, so I'm not sure how someone could be unaware of EurOlympics until they read about it in a newspaper :s

Common-Sense Politics · Aug 21, 2016

My main issue about Europeia is that people expect you to at least put forth a token effort to find an answer before it's spoon fed to you. Super annoying.

hyanygo · Aug 21, 2016

I am picturing this CSP as a bear of man playing with a giggling Punch. And then it cuts to a shot of CSP making aeroplane noises whilst shoveling spoonfuls of commonsense into a wide eyed Punch. And then like, Punch vomits everywhere and then CSP is like "right fuck this shit"

Brunhilde · Aug 21, 2016

hyanygo said:
I am picturing this CSP as a bear of man playing with a giggling Punch. And then it cuts to a shot of CSP making aeroplane noises whilst shoveling spoonfuls of commonsense into a wide eyed Punch. And then like, Punch vomits everywhere and then CSP is like "right fuck this shit"

...

Hyanygo, you have a problem.

Common-Sense Politics · Aug 21, 2016

I like it when he gets weird with it, personally.

hyanygo · Aug 21, 2016

Brunhilde said:
hyanygo said:

I am picturing this CSP as a bear of man playing with a giggling Punch. And then it cuts to a shot of CSP making aeroplane noises whilst shoveling spoonfuls of commonsense into a wide eyed Punch. And then like, Punch vomits everywhere and then CSP is like "right fuck this shit"

Click to expand...

...

Hyanygo, you have a problem.

You're too charitable.

Rach · Aug 23, 2016

Brunhilde said:
Perhaps you should read my mid-term speech outlining our plan to host a large scale conference on Anti-Nazi cooperation. I personally think my Ministry has its hands full trying to plan that without having to look for more.

Empires of Earth did this a few years ago with far less resources at their disposal than you have. These things are only hard if one thinks they are hard. But I think there is a huge tendency to over-estimate the difficulty of tasks in NS. If you think of these tasks as simple and easy, they will simply be that way. People were all impressed by the TP-Balder-TWP treaty but that was basically just the result of some of my pancake on the ceiling thoughts one day. Mind you, Pierc did do a fair bit of work but it was accomplished in a very short time. In any case, one simply needs to imagine where they are going and just do it. But I am glad if you are reviving old EoE ideas!

Brun said:
And please, don't use a five year old conference as an example on why we should have large scale projects every term. Not only are things vastly different from five years ago but trying to hold large scale conferences every term would be little more than busy work that would do nothing for our foreign agenda.

When did I say we should have large scale projects every term? Anyway, if you lack vision or base knowledge (like how WA works... ugh...) that is your problem. Like I said earlier, it really only takes a little effort to accomplish some "MASSIVE" things in NS...

Brun said:
The fact is that we have done a lot this term both internally with training, dealing with issues with previously treatied allies, and planning massive events. I'd like to know what, exactly, I should do instead to make people realize that this term has been anything but mediocre.

An Anti-Nazi conference is not a massive event. You might call a brownie a cake, but it simply does not make it so. Anyway, I told you what you could be doing. Anyway, I think I would have given you a 7 despite some legitimately scary responses.

Mid-Term Executive Poll

Calvin Coolidge

Spellcaster

Notolecta

New member

Trinnien

New member

Deepest House

Notolecta

New member

Deepest House

Notolecta

New member

Deepest House

Trinnien

New member

shufordbrian

brb turning euro into a bitcoin mine

Lime

Lime Green At Last

Mousebumples

hyanygo

Well-known member

Anumia

New member

Common-Sense Politics

Audentes Fortuna Juvat

hyanygo

Well-known member

Brunhilde

New member

Common-Sense Politics

Audentes Fortuna Juvat

hyanygo

Well-known member

Rach

Banned