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Citizens!

This month there has been an immense effort across Cabinet to update how the Government works, raise standards of communication and transparency, and ultimately to make sure our Ministers are doing something. Each ministry is now fully functional again meaning we are in a great position to evaluate what is working and make adjustments or try new things over the month ahead.

The benefit to the eUK has been equally immense. Our resources are deployed to address specific outcomes, our money is used more fairly; we have corrected some errors in past accounting practises to ensure we are no longer bleeding cash; we have acted on information regarding foul play rather than just ignored it; and we have engaged with a wide pool of citizens to design new processes for Education and Defence to help deliver an efficient and stylish service to eUK’ers.

You will recall that the policies I have put forward are all to enable a long-term Strategic Plan. A high level long term plan has been a fantastic tool for orienting Government activities and as a transparency aid. Everything we do, every penny we want to spend, we can ask ourselves will it help achieve these goals. It provides a clear justification for how we approach things, and allows others to contribute and scrutinise our initiatives. This is an innovation in the eUK’s Governance that is hopefully here to stay.

The manifesto that follows is a look at each of those goals, reflections on what has worked and where I see opportunities to do more, or improve on, how we are achieving them.

I will note here - what I am avoiding doing is talking about what we are already doing (all of which will continue!) because I am constantly advised that my articles are too long (whaaaat??). But you can get a detailed overview of what’s been going on in the CP Update articles.


On the Education and Immigration front, both activities of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA), we have arrived at a new approach to new registration, and began ‘experimenting’ with immigration articles to try and see what drives up interest. Naturally it remains to be seen if this has an impact, albeit feedback so far is positive. The next steps for work towards these goals is:

Education
We will keep liaising with the MoEd focus group to refine and streamline resources. Identify an active mentor pool and take practical steps to increase our chance of contacting people on their first log in (when they have proven to be much more likely to reply!) such as demanding Cabinet have the online now page as their homepage.

Immigration
A lot of consideration went into our approach with MoImm articles due to the potential for ‘upset’. Hybridising our eUK Adverts with genuine MoFA outreach activities has generated activity on the articles, and time will tell if anyone seeks to move here as a result. Next month we have a hit list of large nations to advertise too, which we feel we can do more directly. Additionally we will draw upon the experiences and networks of people who have moved to the eUK to identify players who may want to come here and if possible enlist help in persuading them.


Pre-Epic Rewards and Live-Fire Exercises have been the rump of Co-ordination rewards over the past month. In essence they are to see if we can get people to deploy where we ask them too. The number of people engaging with these is in the high-teens, but this is a small proportion of our fighting force. There is room for improvement. As coordinated damage is the absolute keystone of international influence, our TW reputation and any actual fights we may end up in, this is an element of the long-term plan which deserves a lot of attention. We need to nudge people over time to encourage a mindset of readiness.

Co-Ordination
There are two big things I want to do over the next month to get coordinated deployment back into the eUK psyche. First to really promote the eUK Discord as a place where battle orders are pushed out and sell people the merits of being in those channels to chat to each other as well as to respond to events. (In-game communications will of course be maintained). We will also increase the number of LFE exercises and the number of rewardable objectives to improve the incentive to participate, and continue the wider communications work to let people know what is on offer if they participate in our exercises, where they can find information/orders and where they can interact with their fellow citizens.

Targeted Advice
In addition to the above I will also make sure the Ministry of Defence is sending people targeted advice. If we can see that someone has deployed on the wrong side of a battle or marginally missed out on a Coordination reward we will reach out to explain where orders are and importantly, why we may have required their damage somewhere different. In most situations this will be because of Region Swaps or Resistance Wars, and making sure our damage is on the right side ensures the battles stay open and TWs do not close when we don’t intend them to. This is effectively an education campaign doubling up as a reminder for where to find more information. Battle discipline maketh the nation!


Goal three is my favourite goal. For far too long Monetary Market trading was benefiting only a tiny number of players (or as we now know, one player) because it was subsidising huge huge payments, blindly paid, to fulfil terms of poorly designed programs. Our reserves have been built from years and years of tax income and MM trades made on that taxed income. There’s not just a principle-based reason to return it to taxpayers, but when it can form the backbone of player support and therefore reduce spend over other programs it is a fantastic and fair way to use MM profits. I will continue to distribute them equally to active players. Long live the Citizen Dividend!

Tax survey recommendations
We’ve collated and published the Tax position of every country in eRepublik. There is not a huge variance but it is interesting to see countries of different sizes trying things with VAT and Import tax. I’d like to spend some time looking through our markets and this data set to set up a wide conversation with Congress about our taxation. This at minimum will serve to justify our current position, and at maximum will generate good discussion and recommendations on what Taxes may change.

Reward Frequency and Advances
Because we send everyone a breakdown of their rewards entitlement (showing them how they got what) the full process of disseminating rewards is quite lengthy in terms of man-hours. However, we still want to be able to be flexible. As such we shall allow people to take an Advance of their rewards entitlement if they need it. This is particularly with new players in mind who may want to upgrade storage or begin businesses. Each and any request will be assessed on its merits and factoring in how confident we can buy about repayments being made, but the provision will be there if people require a quicker lump-sum. In the same vein we will identify some people with whom to run a trial on paying rewards each fortnight rather than once a month. This will allow us to assess how much time it would take to distribute rewards more frequently and whether we can scale it up without turning the MoF into a husk.


On the Media front I certainly hope the materials published by the Government have been relevant and fun, I hope they’ve served to aid your understanding of what goes on in Government and generated some discussion. Maintaining a dialogue is important to help capture and act on feedback, and there have been materials published publicly and to Congress to keep everyone in the loop and capture as many thoughts as possible. (A polite thank you here to everyone who has contributed any thoughts over the past four weeks). Having a much more ‘present’ Government has introduced elements of dynamism into how we capture and react to feedback, and has assisted in de-escalating disagreements and clarifying how certain things work. Nirvana here we come. Here’s a couple more ways to make the eUK a great place to play!

TW Appraisal
We have a couple of training wars pre-dating this administration where our partners' fighters routinely spill onto our side, and where battle discipline is poor. These battles require constant attention and can see eUK players get overhit by allied or 3rd party fighters. This is predominantly because the nations in question are large, and just as we have a small proportion of fighters who don’t always follow the best advice, so do they. The trouble is a small proportion for them is actually quite large relative to our size, and the wisdom of entering a TW with such places to begin with can be queried. As such we will encourage people to record overhits from such nations on the reporting tool. That way we can have a log and can raise it with the nations in question to see if they can do anything about battlefield discipline. If they cannot, we will seek to replace the TW with someone else on a one-out-one-in basis. We have a framework in place now for identifying more appropriate partners which will help us at every step, and this will complement our coordination and fighting rewards..

Ideas Exchange
I’d like to put out articles just for the purpose of sharing ideas, or encouraging the sharing of ideas and feedback. The Government can provide a response, work to implement the idea, or set up a group with the idea-maker to figure out how we can make it happen. This will encourage conversation, promote more dynamism in politics and avoid missed opportunities! With a full-bodied Cabinet I have an ambition to give ideas a try, and see what works.


There will be a bit of cabinet shuffling as we work around availability, though you can expect the team to remain largely the same. So far, Darkmantle and Garth will be occupying less demanding roles with Betafoxtrot and Sambo223 stepping into MoD and MoHA respectively.

It is totally vital that we get people involved and create space and opportunities for more people to see what they need to do if they want being in Gov or the CP seat entails. If you have any desire to be involved in Government in any capacity, get in touch!

My final thoughts (at last…) are that the amount of work gone into raising the bar of Government has been huge, and my profound thanks goes to everyone in Cabinet for helping make it happen, and helping demonstrate what a proper Government looks like.

Raising the bar was one thing help us hold it there by saying Yez to the Fez on Election Day!

Thanks for reading,
Mr Woldy