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One of the more surprising things to come out of the process we're going through is learning how some people felt about Citizenship. Citizenship is a basic NationStates concept that most large NS regions use to determine who can participate in community governance. Usually, Citizens have undergone some kind of vetting and are expected to maintain some kind of relation to NS, even one as basic as keeping a nation in the region. Over the years, as members drifted away from NS, we added a number of other options to maintaining Citizenship.

However, we never saw things from the perspective of people who had never been involved in NS. Although the most active of us saw the activity requirements as basic, those who couldn't commit to regular month-to-month activity could see them as intimating. Their options were to either not become Citizens at all, request an exemption through a bureaucratic process that was never actually used, or keep being called out for failing to meet the requirements and potentially have to keep reapplying, a prospect is not only a hassle but was described by one person as humiliating.

The only benefit these requirements ever provided is that it encouraged people to maintain or revive their nations. Those nations almost always remained inactive, because they were maintained for the purpose of meeting the requirements and not to be part of NS, so the only benefit was usually a slightly inflated regional nation count. That's at the cost of creating barriers for people to get and stay involved, not to mention the monthly work of Citizenship checks. When you think about it, it's just not worth it.

In fact, the only benefits to Citizenship at all is that it allows someone to indicate that they want to be more involved in the community (especially in governance) and lets us reasonably verify that our Citizens aren't banned members or running alt accounts through the security check everyone goes through when they first apply. And those are what remains after this update.

Over the weekend, the Regional Stability Squad voted to amend the Citizenship Act as proposed here. This means that all requirements to maintain Citizenship have been dropped, and that Citizenship is now permanent unless it's explicitly revoked or resigned from. Some of the specifics about the new Citizenship process are below:

Becoming a Citizen
As before, you will need to have a forum account and then apply for Citizenship here. The form has dropped all references to activity requirements, but encourages you to provide your NS nation and Discord if you're on either. Once you submit your application, I will conduct the security check and reply to your application with the result.

Resigning Citizenship
Resigning Citizenship is now an automatic process. Just go to the top-right menu (the one that has your username), and select the last option Resign Citizenship. You will be asked to confirm, after which your Citizenship will be dropped.

We hope that this changes will make being a core member of Wintreath less bureaucratic and intimating, and in turn make the community feel more accessible to all.