Hello the RegionIt's been several months of inactivity, without policy or recruitment or much worldbuilding. We all share in the blame, but blame isn't the point: correction is.
We've spent too much of our effort on struggle and too little on cooperation. We know we can build great things together, we've done it not once but a number of times. Perhaps we've taken to taking that for granted.
To build things together we have to work togetherWho's in charge or in control is, in the end, fairly irrelevant. (So long as they're working with the rest of us.) No one person can afford to do all that needs to be done. Never could.
There's nothing I can do to
make people work together, but you and I can ask each other to, and that is how it can happen. I'll probably be doing quite a lot of asking, as, I surmise, will Khem. But you should be asking too.
I'm hoping we can build a team for each core function of Taijitu that needs taking care of: Recruitment, Retention, Infotainment, Worldbuilding, Diplomacy, and the Military. (I may have missed one, shout to me if I did).
Whether the Citizen-Initiator or the Citizen-Delegate has ultimate authority over
Recruitment, we'll all need to work together to make it work again. We need people clicking send a bit less than we need people scrutinizing what works how well and how to improve on it.
Retention is a bit of a vague thing. Part of it is ancillary to recruitment, part to everything else the region does. I'm suggesting we'll want some sort of context where we're asking "how can this help retention?" about various things we do as a region, and consider new ideas to help that too.
By
Infotainment I mean something like the Voice of the People. We can be extraordinarily good at showing ourselves off to the rest of NationStates, and further engage our own in the region. That's a strength we can really use.
Worldbuilding is extraordinarily important to Taijitu. It's why many of our core members stick around. We have a shared conception for a whole alternate world and history which, at its best, is both coherent and flexible enough to include new people coming and going. That takes work, but I think that if we can share the burden of maintaining helpful guides and the map, even if only to the extent of whoever's doing something having someone to talk to about it as they do it, we can provide that superlative 'Taijitu Experience'.
Diplomacy is something that not everyone in Taijitu cares about, but it
is our ability to have a presence in the rest of NationStates. Given my
onsite responsibilities I'd like this to be shouldered by others to the extent possible: it'd be potentially intimidating and unfair for diplomatic messages from Taijitu to come from a nation tagged as [Game Administrator] onsite... Please help!
Dyr Nasad has agreed to serve as Citizen-Sergeant, which is great, but the
Military is of course one area that most transparently can't be done by one person (at least not without multiing). Our Militia has often been respected for its high average competence and its periodic ability to deploy significant numbers of updaters. We can use that, if people chip in.
What are we building, anyway?If I was lazy, mean, or cruel, I would point you to my 2013
Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate. This is not, however, the time for playful obscurantism. This is the time for plain speaking, or at least as close as I can get to it.
In my hopes and aspirations, the idea of Taijitu was to be the ideal, balanced, region. While in practice we started off as a freer, more open version of the Lexicon, I think this dream was at least implicitly shared by many.
We've had an invading army and we've had a defending army. We've gotten involved in all kinds of interregional politics and we've stepped back from them. We've had straightforward roleplaying-as-a-nation's-government Roleplay and we've had epic collaborative storytelling and worldbuilding. We've had times of complete unity and times of internecine bickering. We've learned a lot.
A couple of wise
song writers once said, "Life can be a challenge, Life can seem impossible, It's never easy, When so much, Is on the line, But you can make a difference."
We can be great. Not just a large region with many nations, not just an active polity, but a great one where people can enjoy the many ways we've found NationStates to be enjoyable, and perhaps new ones we'll discover together.
