Join the new world

Citizens!

Welcome to the (nearly) End of Term Update. It's been a busy month, not only for the Cabinet and their long to-do list, but for everybody with the events Plato has organised for us.

Each Ministry has been kept active and busy and will continue to be so right through to the closing days of term. Active Cabinet has paid off - we've done everything we set out to do (maybe I should have worked them harder?) Let's take a whistle stop tour of where we have gotten to across Government activities since the last update.



Defence

A lot of time and thought has been put into the battle guideline recommendations which you can read about here. A massive thanks goes to everyone who shared views as part of the consultation.

The MoD newspaper will make it clear when any changes are in effect, we want to give people the opportunity to share final thoughts and feedback so until then still operate under the old rules. In the meantime we have published guidance for making a good overhitting report and explained how reports are verified with battle statistics.

We have also completed the facelift of our external order resources. The eDefence page now provides you the key information for fighting in one place. This information will be communicated in-game also, but we definitely encourage use of the eDefence page to see what orders are ‘live’ to save time seeking out shouts and messages.

Otherwise our Live Fire Exercises and Pre-Epic rewards are over for this term, and the results of which are being fed into your rewards entitlements. A big well done goes to everyone who participated. Once the kills for the current week are over and captured we can calculate your final entitlements for the month.

Thanks of course goes to Darkmantle for his help in the MoD this term.



Foreign affairs

In the MoFA we've seen a lot of activity not only liaising with allies but proactively seeking out new (or at least, not touched for a very long time) relationships. Betafoxtrot has been invaluable in this effort, supported by Fenraar, and hopefully the work undertaken keeping congress up to date with world events has proven useful.

This has led to two new Training Wars (TWs) coming down the pipeline, one with the eNetherlands and one shortly to commence with eJapan. Additionally we've devised a simple framework for assessing the suitability of TW partners, based on guidelines they use, their size, and their battle discipline to prioritise nations whose fighters are least likely to spill into the UK side of battles and most likely to deploy manageable amounts of damage. This criteria will be used to evaluate the appropriateness of current partners to identify where we may replace TW’s where the battle discipline is poor.

In addition to providing Congress with the first MoFA report on how international events are impacting the UK, we have also touched base with eTaiwan to confirm our response to any Scotland RW. (The response is to fight against any Resistance there, eTaiwan is confident and ready to defend it but we will need to assist).

We've also worked on our Epics pipeline to deliver regular epics. We’ve had six Epics this month with a total of 43 eUK’ers participating.

There will not be epics next week, this is because the huge amounts of damage being done in the balloon bonanza event will raise the epic threshold beyond the damage we can confidently deliver.



Finance

Finance is one of my favourite areas of Government (says a lot about me, doesn't it?) We've been busy working to improve transparency, build our MM profits and provide useful information to Congress and the Public. We’ve also corrected errors in how previous administrations were calculating costs due for Concessions.

To that end we have published the Government Transparency Document. This contains the rewards calculations (and the next round of calculations will be added to it), Ministry spending sheets and international money transfers. It's a public document so anyone can access it whenever they please and it will be kept up to date.

Congress has been sent the results of the Tax Survey, which MIK has compiled as a snapshot of tax positions across the eWorld. You are welcome to use it for your own insight too! This is a very useful document for Congress to consider our own tax positions with, and we intend to pop some questions to them to encourage some hard thinking as to what our own taxes should be after they've had time to engage with the resource.


I've mentioned Money Market profits which I am sure you will remember are being distributed to active citizens.

I'm very pleased to report that the trading profits from the beginning of term to today stand at £11,253,249.00 £8,455,488.07 (figure revised as I didn't remove private investment - a perfect opportunity to advertise that you can invest in Gov Orgs - get in touch!) which means the Dividend will be approximately £68,000.00 per person. This is in addition to any fighting or coordination rewards you receive.

The final valuation will be made once rewards entitlements are calculated and the full list of active citizens is compiled, this will be Tuesday at the earliest when this week's kill stats are available.



Home Affairs

There's been loads of activity (and whimsy) this week. Hopefully you've seen the Education Strategy published by the Department for Education. This outlines the approach-in-principle to helping new arrivals understand how the game works, whilst remaining flexible (and hopefully incentivising) enough to support as wide a cross section of players as possible.

You can help out, if you ever spot a good guide or useful article please send it to us and we can add it to the list of resources. Likewise feel more than free to review the Ministry of Education paper to suggest edits or highlight any gaps in the material there. We've got a good team working on reviewing materials (thanks all!) But anyone can send in suggestions.

We have also published a couple of ‘postcards’ overseas. These serve a few purposes; to act as a springboard for making connections, to begin conversations on ideas and programmes offered by different countries, and (we hope!) To give a positive impression of the eUK to citizens overseas, and if we are really lucky, maybe even plant some seeds in the minds of anyone looking for a new ehome. An example of the aesthetic we've aimed for in these communications is below, and you can see the postcards here.


No doubt you’ve already seen Weekend Whimsy Number 4, so no update needed there! A huge thanks goes to Garth and the wider MoHA team, Laskii, Chemical Chaos, Pontefract and St Roar who all contributed thoughts and suggestions over the term.



That brings us to the end of this update - not quite as whistle stop as I first intended when I started typing, but … yolo (yolo - how long did you spend reading this).

Have a great Weekend and as always if you have any questions fire them over.

Thanks for reading,
Mr W