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by The Pacifican Empire of East Durthang. . 411 reads.

Survey Results and 2019 In Review

Hi all,

It has now been roughly a month since I sent a survey to the region for gathering feedback about how we can better design regional events, activities, and information. With the responses having ceased trickling in, it is now time for us to look at and discuss the results. But before I get to that I wanted to take the opportunity to make some reflections about the New Pacific Order's progress in 2019 and our goals for 2020.

2019 was a year of reflecting upon and exposing problems stemming from past paradigms, of questioning ourselves and our processes to see where we can improve. It was a year of finding cracks in the pavement, filling some and contemplating how best to approach filling others. Of developing an unprecedented bold and entrepreneurial vision for our future and the betterment of the community we all share together. A vision for a new decade. 2020 marks the beginning of turning that vision into reality.

2019 In Review

Foreign Affairs

2019 had a turbulent start diplomatically, with the fallout from our previous administration's controversies still in full swing. As the year wore on hostilities dwindled down to a just handful of remaining parties, lingering due to their pride and specters of the past.

We canceled our St Abbaddon protectorate treaty.

Embassies were re-established with The North Pacific, The South Pacific, and Balder and we began to reopen diplomatic activities abroad.

We issued a statement in support of our ally The East Pacific and helped liberate their region from an attempted coup.

Finally at the end of the year we launched a foreign affairs Discord server to avoid cluttering up our main one with embassy channels.

Domestic Affairs

With input gathered on our regional forum we drafted and later enacted a new charter for our government. An elected representative government position was later created to increase transparency, communication, and represent the interests of our members. The first election was held in March and the second in September.

The province system of grouping nations alphabetically into sub-communities was abolished in favor of treating Pacificans as first-class citizens of one community, rather than relying on multiple inconsistently managed separate ones. Early development began on a trading card initiative and revised university program to facilitate education about the game as well as regional structure and history. The region's World Assembly resolution advisory and authoring committee was reinvigorated and relaunched.

We ran 22 events for both residents and citizens ranging from a RMB Q&A to Thinkgames to the Koreaboo Takeover to art features and more. Plus an additional 6 citizen exclusive events ranging from creating a cookbook to a pet photography contest to scrabble games. That's an average of roughly one event every two weeks and quite possibly the most events run by any region throughout the course of the year. To facilitate this a new culture department began to take shape.

2019 was the first year in recent history where we released an issue of our newspaper during almost every month of the year, with a total of nine issues published: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9

Defense

Our military, the Legio Pacifica, had a very active year, conducting a total of 250 operations, both large and small. Several particular highlights include participating in the liberation of The East Pacific from couper Fedele and helping multiple other regional militaries defeat the fascists attempting to protect The Iron Confederacy. The LP also liberated Xoriet's catnip from the clutches of Elegarth and his hugger brethren.

Throughout the year extensive efforts were made to both craft educational material and train up a new generation of military commanders and soldiers. The command hierarchy of the Legio Pacifica was revamped and split off from its former convoluted union management between several departments. A standardized format was established for recording the results of operations as well as performance metrics for our soldiers and military commanders.

These efforts paid off and the Legio stands today capably outfitted for its growth to continue and as a role model for the environment we aspire to nurture throughout the rest of the region's departments and jobs.

Survey Results, Analysis and Commentary

We were pleasantly surprised by the amount of survey responses we received. There were ninety-two submissions. Give yourselves a pat on the back! If you joined within the past month or simply missed the survey telegram fret not, we will be conducting additional surveys on other topics in the future, in addition to some more specific to some of the topics which were broadly covered by this one.

Without going into too much detail and ruining the surprises in store for late in the year, I can say that we have several things planned to make issue answering and being an active contributing member of the region more engaging and purposeful. You'll just have to wait and find out!

There was an almost 50-50 split in answers for whether people participate in roleplaying. What I found particularly interesting here is that just over a third of all respondents answered that they've being RPing since prior to coming to NationStates. The feedback to this question raises many further questions for consideration as to how we can improve our roleplaying community. Since some many people answered that they started RPing prior to creating there nations, what types of RP do they like doing? Are those who don't RP at all doing so because they don't want to or due to a lack of knowing what to do? We'll see about delving into these questions and more with a dedicated RP survey.

There were not any surprises in the answers to this question. Ultimately a combination of utilizing all available mediums will always be best for distributing information across a wide audience.

The good news: we'd like to create an extensive collection of information dispatches in all of these categories. The bad news: we want to first mostly finish implementing tweaks to our government structure, adjusting the roles of various positions and departments they belong to, and creating some new positions and departments. It would not make much sense to go to the effort of drafting dispatches up only to need to make substantial changes to them within a relatively short time frame. We are, however, getting quite close to the point of not having to worry about that anymore and the dispatch drafting project will likely begin to take shape within the next few months.

Some of the more popular interests and/or hobbies submitted, in no particular order, include: gaming, music (K-pop, power metal), politics, sports, technology, writing, roleplaying (D&D), history, and movies/television (Star Wars, anime).

Some of the most frequently mentioned activity/event/competition suggestions submitted, in no particular order, include: the card programme, awards, trivia games, statistics leaderboards, expanding RP, and encouraging more WA voting.

This is something else I think we'll be holding more future surveys about. What interests people have, and more importantly, share is a very broad concept to evaluate and analyze so that we may come up with related things with a moderately sized audience to whom they appeal. Of the above hobbies and interests, most, such as gaming, music, sports, history, etc., have a multitude of different subcategories. As far as the activity/event/competition suggestions go, all of the aforementioned ones are on our roadmap of things to do.

We'll have to work towards improving these.

RawReport