Thane of Integration Opening Speech
Monkey
25 June 2020
Hi all. I realize this is a little unorthodox, but I’ve always been used to releasing opening speeches whenever I’ve been elected to a position, and I thought this would be a good way to keep me accountable (and for me to show off all the awesome things I’ve been doing for the region!!). You might have noticed that I haven’t been around as often lately -- I sure haven’t been around as often as I’d like in Wintreath. I’ve told some people this, but I’ve just finished a very competitive election in Europeia, and I’m proud to announce that I am now the Second Minister (essentially Vice President of Domestic Affairs), and the Minister of Culture within Europeia. I’ve been caught up in drafting platforms, answering questions, and figuring out my path forward there as well, but it’s starting to settle down over there, so I’ll hopefully be able to divert more of my energy here.
This is long overdue, but first I’d like to thank everyone for voting for me and placing their trust in me. It means a lot for a community to welcome a newcomer and take such a big leap of faith into someone that just arrived into the region. Believe it or not, it was one of my first times that I’ve written a professional, serious platform, and I am beyond excited to have the chance to serve Wintreath in this capacity. I want to thank everyone for their support during the campaign, as well as their patience during this period where I’ve found myself busier than I expected. I will be working diligently to meet all of my goals in my platform, and I hope to look back on my term with pride at its conclusion.
I’ll launch into a little bit of a brief spiel on where I see each of my goals currently, and how I plan on addressing them.
Newcomer’s Handbook. One of my main goals was developing a guide or handbook for new citizens to the region. This is a great passive resource for our region, and it’s something I will be addressing shortly. I am still getting into the swing of things here, it’s probably difficult to gather this information when it’s not all in one place (like it will be at the conclusion of this handbook!) so it’ll likely take me a little bit to get this off the ground. When designing this handbook, I split it up into 5 parts: General NationStates/forums overview, history of our region, Government, Roleplay and Culture, and Resources and Links for getting involved. This still sounds like a sensible order of organization for me, so it’s something I will be sticking with. I will likely reach out to members of our community to get a starting point on history and roleplay/culture since those sections I am the least comfortable upon.
Recruitment. I just registered a couple of days ago to be able to recruit for Wintreath, and sent a few telegrams out today. I have to say….the system is terribly underutilized for how awesome it is! When I first took a peek at what it looked like, I thought it would take forever to get it down and learn how to do, but honestly, it’s a pretty straightforward system, and I really like the stats-tracker on the right that makes it pretty easy to track your progress. I still want to continue to launch a recruitment contest, and it’ll likely start out slowly to get people to start building it into a habit (maybe 10 or even 5 telegrams a day, consistency is key). Once we build up enough data on telegrams, I’ll also be interested in looking to see if there’s anything we can do to make the template more appealing, and it’s something I’ll be discussing with other leaders as well. Generally, shorter and more succinct telegrams tend to do better, so we want to work to make sure that our telegram template is updated, and showcases the best parts of our region.
Mentorship and Integration. This will likely be the last, and most difficult portion of my platform that I will achieve. This hinges on several things: building a successful program, and if there is a lack of interest, me specifically knowing enough about this community to be a mentor myself. Learning this community to the level that I would be comfortable in helping others might take a while, so this would probably be accomplished closer to the end of the term, and it’s something I would build on in the future as well.
There are topics such as RMB engagement that were also discussed on my platform, and those are topics I am very willing to look into. At this moment, I am not sure how exactly I will tackle those topics, but I will be sure to address those topics at some point within my term.
Thank you all for taking the time to read this! I hope to release a progress update soon with the objectives that I have accomplished, and I am grateful for your continued support.
Thane of Integration,