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Throughout our history, Wintreath has been an exceptionally open community that allows its members to become full Citizens within minutes of joining the community. However, I feel this has led to some specific problems. First, it's left us with a number of inactive Citizens, some of whom have not been active in years. It's allowed multiple problematic members whose behaviour is generally immature, inappropriate, or skirts the rules to become members. And its left us with many Citizens who don't fully understand what this community offers, how its governed, or how they can take part in it.

Wintreath is a special community, one where its members put themselves out there as people to make it as personable as it is. We take great care and effort when we make the decision to ban a person from the community. Why don't we take some amount of care in who we allow to become part of it? And more importantly, why don't we invest our time and effort in the people that want to be part of it so they're as successful as possible? This proposal attempts to tackle both of those problems.

Starting Out as An Initiate
Under this proposal, prospective Citizens would become apply to become initiates instead of proceeding to full Citizenship. This will give the initiate time to learn about the community and give the community time to get to know them. Initiates would not have the rights of Citizens, but would receive a dedicated education on the civics, government, and principles of Wintreath and a mentor that would check in on them and help them become part of any aspect of Wintreath they desire. This period would last no less than 3 months.

When applying to become an initiate, the person would pledge to:
   1) Follow the rules of the community
   2) Embody the principles of the Wintreath community: civility, compassion, empathy, friendship, and respect
   3) Strive to become an active, contributing member of the Wintreath community
   4) Follow all other requirements of Citizenship as determined by law
   
Initiates must perform works in service to the community that demonstrates their knowledge of the community, their interests in Wintreath, and their unique talents. The initiate's mentor will guide and provide advice in this matter, but these works must be done by the initiate alone.
   
At any point during the initiative process, the Joint Moderation Group may vote to terminate a person from the initiate program due to immature, inappropriate, or rule-breaking behaviour. Initiates who have been terminated from the program may apply to the program again after 6 months if they have not been banned from the community. Initiates may be automatically terminated if they are no longer following the requirements for Citizenship.

Returning Citizens with a total activity score over 1,000 (determined by the formula of non-spam forum (posts + Discord posts / ) may skip the initiate process, but are still subject to a vote by the Council of Elders.

Becoming a Citizen
After three months, the initiate may apply to become a full Citizen. When applying, the initiate will detail how they have followed through on their pledges upon becoming an initiate and list their contributions to the community. Their mentor must also sign off on the application. Once submitted, the Council of Elders will hold a vote to determine whether the have fulfilled their pledges. If the body determines that they have by simple majority vote, the initiate will become a Citizen with all rights and priveleges.

Maintaining Citizenship
Citizens must maintain their Citizenship through one of the methods allowed by law. I would recommend changing the NS nation requirement to either require that they endorse our delegate or make so many posts on the Wintreath RMB. In my opinion, the only inactive methods of maintaining Citizenship should be through donation or through being a Paragon.

Mentors
Mentors would be members who have been Citizens for at least 6 months cumulatively and can speak to many aspects of the community, including some specialized aspects such as RP, gaming, etc. Mentors are responsible for regularly checking in on their initiates, ensuring that the remain active in the community, and helping them to learn and grow into a member of the Wintrean community. Because this is dedicated, hands-on work, mentors may not be assigned more than 3 initiates at a time. If there are no mentors available to assign an initiate to, their applications will be deferred until an opening becomes available. In this way, we emphasize quality over quantity.

When an initiate applies to become a full Citizen, the mentor must sign off on it to signify that they believe the initiate has fulfilled all requirements to become a Citizen. Upon the initiate's termination or ascention into Citizenship, the mentor is no longer responsible for them (but of course can remain in an informal mentor role as a friend).

Governance of the Initiate Program
Initiates will be approved for full Citizenship by simple majority of a Council of Elders, which would be composed of Citizens who have been a Citizen for 3+ cumulative years.

I withdraw the proposal. Thank you for your consideration.

For posterity, I have edited and posted my thoughts from Discord below. I believe that important discussion and thoughts on how best to approach community building arose out of the feedback to this proposal. Moot, I apologize for contributing to what was probably a very unpleasant barrage of criticism for you. I will be more mindful of avoiding that sort of atmosphere in the future, including aiming to provide thoughts in the forum format when the space exists.


One of Wintreath's core values is openness. That anyone can come in and instantly make great impact as a full member of the community is really important.

Creating a three-tiered, seniority-based citizenship system creates artificial barriers to entry. Think to just a year ago, when we were struggling to get any new members, even those who had been around in the RMB for years, to integrate into our forum and Discord community. It was a monumental effort for many of our newer members to finally join this part of Wintreath - with further restrictions I wonder if such things would even happen. Getting people to commit to such a long process, especially when they're new to the community, is very difficult, and many would simply not bother or get too stressed about it and go elsewhere.

In my experience running clubs and other social organizations, there are two ways to grow and maintain a community. Being exclusive makes people want to stay because they feel like they are in a special club, but inevitably people leave and then there's nobody to replace them because everyone else has been alienated by the exclusive recruitment process. Or, you can be incredibly opening and welcoming of everyone and anyone. Most people won't stay for long, but the ones who do will be self-selecting to be well-suited and enthusiastic for the community, and are drawn from a wider talent pool.

Citizenizing new members is fast and easy and I see no reason why this is a problem. The more people are accepted and welcomed into our community, the more will stay. On the other hand, bans should require more careful consideration. Exile from a community, particularly one which prides itself in its openness, should not be taken lightly.

Furthermore, mentorship systems in Wintreath (and pretty much everywhere else I've been) are prone to inactivity and disinterest from both ends. Tying citizenship to such a long stint with the mentorship system would be concerning as a result, especially if (as outlined in this proposal) this leads to backlogs/waitlists for even starting on the citizenship process. In my experience, interacting with the existing community on equal footing tends to produce better results. That said, we could always beef up our mentorship system, perhaps by expanding the Hearthkeepers into a more prominent role.

There are some advantages to mentoring now compared to before. Explaining our system of government is easier now than ever, with the convoluted Storting system long-gone. We just have a set of senior appointed Jarls and junior elected Thanes that specialize in specific community work. And if there's something you want to do in Wintreath you can do it yourself no matter your position, and others will help if you want. These are not complex points to get across - the difficulty is getting people interested. The better approach is not to force people to do work if they want to get citizenship, but rather to foster a strong enough sense of welcoming and community so that people want to help out and give back.

Finally, if citizenship were to be changed in such an intrinsic way, so that it is so deeply tied to active community participation, then the only way to maintain citizenship while being inactive should be through Paragonhood. Monetary contributions can and should be honored through many other means. But if citizenship is tied to active civic participation, then donations are a fundamentally different kind of contribution that should be celebrated and rewarded in a different way. Citizens should be equal before the law, and should not reflect real-world class differences and hierarchies.

We are a community of second chances, of working to make members feel as welcome as possible. This is why efforts for community building need to err on the side of openness.

So I'm going to make a few comments and then I'm going to move on.

I didn't see the initiate program as creating artificial barriers or reducing our openness. I saw it as a structure that would help people get into the community without being overwhelmed. Sure, it would ask that they do works for the community in that period, but only as a demonstration that they understood the community and had become part of it. And we were going to provide a lot of support in the process...educational resources and a dedicated mentor, which I thought would comfort people who were apprehensive or shy about getting into a community. Obviously, I wouldn't have proposed what I did if I didn't think it would benefit new people and the community as a whole.

And I would argue that the people on the RMB struggled to integrate because there was no such support structure in place. It seems to me they started to get involved when WARPP began serving as a sort of coincidental structure bridging the RMB with the rest of the community.

And I think it's appropriate that we focus on quality versus quantity. I've come to the realization that it would suck if our community were to grow huge. It would be hard if not impossible to maintain the personable community of friends who are comfortable being themselves and being open with each other (usually). That doesn't mean that I don't think there's room for growth, but I think on the whole Wintreath would be more successful if we focused on the people we get already rather than focused on doing more recruitment. For all the NS recruitment that I've done, we have a whole 51 more nations than we did in 2017, and that kinda sucks (in terms of being the person that's sent out almost 500k telegrams). In that time we've had hundreds of people fill out Citizenship applications, so I think it makes sense to focus on people who took that bit of effort.

And I think we're in a place where we could do that if we focused on it. Traditionally mentoring has been an uneven practice, but I think we have the people to make it work now, and I planned on limiting the number of people assigned to a mentor to keep it from being overwhelming. In my mind, mentoring just means keeping up with the people assigned to you, making sure they're getting involved, and reaching out to them once in awhile to either make sure they don't have any questions or issues or to help them get involved if they're having trouble. To be honest, Point Breeze and I often wondered if the mentors of the time were doing those things, and I know he'd planned to audit the program and find out before he went inactive.

This isn't to push for the program, since I've withdrawn the proposal. This is to explain my thinking, because I was taken back by the...intensity of the opposition to it. Again, I wouldn't have proposed something that I didn't believe would be helpful to new Citizens and the community as a whole, especially something that would take so much work and energy to do right. I didn't see it as limiting our openness, I saw it as helping people interested in being part of our community make that a reality.

I'm not going to dwell on this aspect for long, but I will say the part about donations did upset me.

Chanku — Yesterday at 11:27 PM
Also if we allow people who donate to be citizens and don't attach an activity requirement to them as well, then well you're just allowing people who have more money to not have to worry about what they do and they can still fundamentally be inactive, meanwhile people who have less money would be forced to spend more time they may not have within the region or they would have to spend money. In fact if anything it would lead to a perverse incentive and also lead to the issue that people will now compare their time spent active here to the cost of donating.

In fairness, when I said inactive I should have said non-contributing. I do see donations as a sort of contribution, and an important one for me as Wintreath has now become a small portion of my livelihood, as I mentioned in this month's thanks to our supporters. Some of our donations come from people who aren't around anymore, like HannahB, but I think that's actually quite extraordinary that people believe in Wintreath enough to do that even if they're not here to see the benefit of it. It's something that I'm appreciative of, and I see an honorary Citizenship (which is what it really is since they're not around) as a small token of that appreciation. On the other hand, I don't see maintaining an inactive nation in the NS region as contributing. I could easily make a puppet and do that myself (and I do have quite a few puppets in the region for Z/N-Days, as the poor people who have to cure them can attest to).

And it's not like our activity requirements are high: 5 forum posts or 50 Discord posts. Either can be achieved in a few minutes, and people have a whole month to do it. Not having money is not a barrier to remaining a Citizen in this community.

Intentional or not, I felt like I was being accused of giving preferential treatment in exchange for financial favors, which I don't see as the case. Whether they have Citizenship or not doesn't impact anybody else's Wintreath experience (or even their own for that matter). But as I wrote down at the time, I felt like I was being "cast as a capitalist stooge because I believe a donation is a valid contribution", and that really upset me. I've moved on from that, but it's the main reason why I disengaged from the chat when it was happening.