NationStates | Dispatch | L✬cal C✬uncil Campaign! [March 2023]

Dispatch → Bulletin → Campaign

by The Pilotipality 🛩️ of Osheiga. 1 year 70 days ago. 185 reads.

L✬cal C✬uncil Campaign! [March 2023]

CITY FINAL ________________ Wednesday, March 1st, 2023 ______________ VOL. 32 NO. 1472
OSHEIGA 4 LOCAL COUNCIL!

Hi! If you're reading this, you might be thinking: "who is this guy", or maybe even "what was this guy thinking running for local council". Well, you've come to the right place!- er, right dispatch.
I plan to expand this dispatch further with questions people might have about my campaign, so do ask me stuff through the RMB or by telegrams!

↳ A bit about me!

My name is Osheiga! Just kidding, that's not my real name. Or is it? 🤔
I was most active on the RMB in mid-2021 when I first joined NationStates. I was originally going to run for the November 2021 election, but school got really intense in my junior year and led to me taking a break in early 2022 to focus on school - but now that I'm a senior in high school and already in college, I feel like I have less academic stress (at least for this spring) and am willing to finally run for local council!

I've started to re-involve myself in the TSP RMB community since returning in mid-2022. If you couldn't already tell by me using 'junior' and 'senior' to describe high school, I'm American (and more specifically I'm in Eastern Time). Luckily for me, this tends to line up pretty well with RMB activity and I'm usually online during what you could call 'peak hours'. I do have experience moderating small to medium-sized Discord servers, but I acknowledge that being a Local Councilor will be a lot different than that due to the wider range of people coming through TSP (a result of our status as a feeder), along with the need to organize more cultural and community-focused events. I've never tried to run for any position on NationStates so this will be a first for me, and I'm excited to see what will come of it!

Now, it isn't really a secret that the RMB is not what I devote most of my time on NationStates to currently - instead, I have a very concerning addiction to the cards minigame (which you can probably pick out based on my top-60 world rank and my plethora of card farming puppets in Aerospace). However, now that season 3 is over three months old at this point and I'm starting to wrap up my legendary collection, I don't plan to farm quite as often. However, I don't foresee my amount of free time changing, which is where I feel like I can devote my extra time to the Local Council and being present in the RMB community (along with other aspects of TSP, like the SPSF)! My cards gameplay will probably still influence some of what I want to implement as a Local Councilor though which you'll see below.

↳ What I'll do as a Local Councilor!

✬ Publishing more frequent, fun polls! I already post frequent polls through my puppet storage region (here's a list), and I think making polls for TSP would be even more fun thanks to the much larger amount of voters! I plan to let people in the RMB suggest fun poll ideas, and organize these suggestions either in a private spreadsheet or a public dispatch with the table feature. Although TSP does post polls semi-frequently, the deadlines on the non-serious polls are often quite long (3-4 days in most instances, if not more). I plan to make polls last 1 or 2 days and fill the quicker queue with these suggested poll ideas (or random poll ideas I can come up with). The best case scenario for these would be to spark more conversation on the RMB - I personally find polls to be fun to talk about (like this legendary 47-47 tie) and a quick conversation starter.

✬ Creating cards giveaways! I've already done a few of these unofficially on the RMB, and I find them really fun to do! With the recent restructuring of the Ministry of Engagement and the current pause on a TSP cards program, I've been really itching to combine my cards involvement with my TSP involvement. There has been sporadic talk of this on the Discord, but as a Local Councillor I feel like I'll have more authority to actually run real, organized giveaways (rather than just having to resort to "like my post for free cardz!!" and it getting drowned out quickly). I really love Tepertopia's RMB activity posts and the cards rewards for them, and in addition to giveaways I would want to introduce card rewards with other programs other Local Councillors would be implementing. These cards would be coming from my own card farms and account instead of TSP's Southern Fort Knox account just to make sure TSP doesn't run out of cards or anything during my term.

✬ Maintaining RMB moderation! (and being more proactive with problematic users). I think the current state of RMB moderation is generally good, with a nice mix of casual conversation without devolving into single-word spam and emojis. I would maintain this state of the RMB, suppressing extremely spammy posts while still allowing a quicker pace of conversation. While my stances on posting won't be very different from the current LC's, I would be stricter on banning repeated rulebreakers or problematic users even if they are active on the RMB - making sure everyone is comfortable with the people they're surrounded by should be a top priority. TSP also gets a lot of trolls thanks to being a feeder region, and it needs to be ingrained in our RMB culture to not respond to these trolls and instead notify site moderators or nations with border control perms. Trolls shouldn't be able to completely derail discussion and be rewarded with turning into the main focus of the RMB, since that's exactly what they're looking for.

✬ Welcoming people to the region and showing them opportunities for further involvement! Beyond just moderating the RMB, I think it's super important to show new nations what there is to do in TSP! As a feeder, our RMB is pretty much the first place a new nation can see actual activity from real users in NationStates. Too often, posts from new nations get ignored and drowned out with other ongoing conversations when I think these posts should be given special priority and a warm welcome - otherwise, these users just find a recruitment telegram and leave TSP. Not everyone is interested in participating in the fast-paced (and pretty chaotic) nature of the RMB - but there are definitely other options such as the Discord, forum, and RP that should be presented to new users that post on the RMB.

Thank you for checking out my campaign, and special thanks to my campaign manager