Introduction
In anticipation of transitioning the delegacy to someone who will hopefully be more interested in that part of NationStates than I am, I wanted to take some time to outline my thoughts about in-character (IC) governance in Wintreath, based on my experiences in Wintreath and observations of other regions. After a few months of thought, I’ve come to believe that simply bringing back a traditional NationStates regional government like the one we used to have would not serve us well, and in this post I hope to convey my thoughts on alternative considerations that I believe would be much better suited to the community we’ve become in the past year.
This is a post outlining my personal beliefs, but ultimately we all have to be comfortable with the direction we go in the future, so please share your thoughts and feedback if you have any!
Traditional Governance and its Suitability for Wintreath
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that regions adopt the regional governments they do because that’s what every other region does, to the point that it’s considered an expectation. While governments may take on different themes, they generally all follow the same template: an executive with some kind of cabinet, a legislature, and a court system to enforce IC laws.
There are obviously benefits to that system. Because they often mirror the structure of offline governments, it’s something that’s both very familiar to most people and in-line with what they expect in a political simulation game. It provides obvious routes for members to become involved in their communities, and promises them rewards for doing so in the form of decision-making power and social status as they climb up the ladder. It organizes the work into specific portfolios and defines hierarchies for who has authority over that work. Beyond that, it defines the relationships between the community and the people leading it.
However, I would argue that there are disadvantages to a large, sprawling, rigid system as well. In promising rewards for becoming involved in governments, it can put those people on pedestals and create an overly elitist relationship between them and the rest of the community. At the extreme, it can create “ruling cliques” where people have to be friends with those already in power in order to advance to a position of power themselves. It creates the expectation that the government must run every aspect of the community, leading to burnout for people in the positions that have to meet those expectations. It can hamper people’s attempts to contribute to the community, if they come to believe that they must be part of the government in order to do so. On the other hand, parts of government can fall inactive because there’s nothing to be done or nobody interested in being in that position, creating pressure to create busywork or finding someone to occupy the position so it appears active. I’ve even seen regions wipe their governments and start fresh just so they can work at redoing the things they’ve already done!
To various extents, these problems all existed in the Old Monarchy of Wintreath, our government up to February 2023. But beyond that, Wintreath is not a typical NationStates region that’s centered around that game. We’re a community that just happens to have a NationStates region, just like we happen to have a Minecraft server or a Discord server. They’re things we do, but they are not our identity as a community, so it doesn’t make sense to apply a template for communities centered around NationStates and apply them to us.
Minimalist Governance
For the past year, I have been handling NationStates and community IC matters myself, mostly without a formal title (besides the occasional use of the Founder title in telegrams to announce NS events), something that I feel has led to a much more positive experience for me in part because it’s allowed me to focus on what absolutely needs to be done and what I’d like to do beyond that for fun rather than the expectations attached to a title. That’s not to say that I’ve done everything the Old Monarchy was doing before. Beyond the NS events, we have not had an official event or dispatch in that time. But despite that Wintreath has survived and even thrived in some ways.
In the past year, we’ve become a more egalitarian society, one that revolves around hanging out with each other and not around those with “power” or “social status”. We’re no longer bothered with creating busywork for inactive legislatures or holding elections for uncontested positions. We no longer have grand ambitions in NationStates or anything else, we’re very comfortable with being a small, unpretentious community. Those all turned out to be distractions from focusing on the best part of Wintreath: our community. I believe these changes happened in large part due to the lack of power roles in the last year, and the judicious and transparent use of power from those who hold those few positions.
It obviously does not make sense for me to continue to manage every aspect of our NationStates presence, especially when we now have people who are interested in sharing those responsibilities and who could do better in those roles than me. But that does not mean we should go back to how things were before and revive a large, sprawling government that puts its members on pedestals. Rather, I believe a flexible, minimalist approach would work best for who we are. Instead of creating power roles we should create responsibility roles, focused only on necessary responsibilities, held by people who genuinely enjoy the work of carrying out those responsibilities and do not need titles or perks to have an interest in those positions.
If it is at all possible, decisions made by the people in those positions should be guided by feedback from interested members of the community, preferably through more informal routes like discussions rather than elections or votes. In my experience in Wintreath, the more informal and laid back an in-character process is the better, and discussions where a consensus is reached by as many interested members as possible is the optimal goal. In this way, people can come together and work toward the best solutions if they are interested, while uninterested people are not pressured to take part for the sake of appearing active. I believe very much that we should run the in-character aspects of Wintreath as if we were housemates and friends rather than politicians.
Beyond the necessary responsibilities, the direction Wintreath takes should depend on what people in the community want to organize. If a few people in the community want to come together and create a magazine (and I have ideas:
https://wintreath.com/forums/index.php?topic=8160.0) or organize a game night or have a contest, awesome! But if nobody wants to do something, or if people get tired of doing something and stop doing it, that’s alright too. Those things aren’t necessary, and they should only happen as long as people are having fun doing them. Wintreath is not a workplace, and nobody should feel like they’re doing a job or a chore.
Applications for The Delegacy
NationStates requires us to have a delegate, and that person has the responsibility to cast a vote in World Assembly matters that has the weight of all the endorsements they have received. Technically, we could allow anyone who happens to have the most endorsements to become delegate, but there’s no guarantee that person would vote with the interests of the community in mind. Therefore, it’s in our best interests to have a chosen person to carry out this responsibility.
The World Assembly has often not been an area of interest to most people in the community, and the delegate usually has much discretion in how they vote. However, if there was an interest in a particular vote, members could open discussions on the #nationstates Discord channel, the NationStates forum, and/or the NationStates RMB. Some regions have votes for World Assembly resolutions, but beyond my belief that discussions are better, I think holding a regional vote on every resolution is tedious, especially when members typically do not have strong opinions either way.
This is a simple example of how a flexible, minimalist approach could work with the delegacy, balancing the workload of the delegate and the interests of the community without creating power structures or formal processes that could distract from the core of what we are in the process.
