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Happy Birthday, Wintreath! 🎂
I know, I'm late, I got tied up in offline life ;-;

On October 17th, Wintreath turned 11 years old...on that day in 2013, a small group of friends founded a community that promised to be cooperative, inclusive, and fun. While we have sometimes fallen short of those ideals, with plenty of examples in our history of those failings, we continue to strive to become better...to become a community where everybody can be comfortable being themselves and sharing who they are.

Right now, our community is in transition...it's becoming. We've emerged from the somber emergency period following the last community split in February 2023...we've transformed into a new and special community, new generations of Wintreans joining our remaining veterans to become a more vibrant community than ever before. But we haven't quite finished transforming yet, with plenty of thought and work left to better define who we are and what we do...questions I believe we'll have answered by next year when Wintreath turns 12.

With that in mind, I thought it would be a good opportunity to both look back at the past year and forward to the future to see where I feel we are in that transitions right now.

On the Community
Last year at this time, we were still a wounded community...we had begun to rebuild with new members, but there were still plenty of quiet, somber times in our community. But in the last year, we've grown into our own once again...in some ways we're quite different from our prior community. We're more interested in chatting and having fun with each other, and less interested in the sorts of duties and responsibilities involved in a typical NationStates-based community. In this day and age, people only take on responsibilities because they have fun doing them, and people do them at their own pace. In that regard we've become a more laid-back community.

We've also zeroed in on what makes parts of our community unique, with particular focus on our LGBTQ+ and furry communities...these our parts of our community that we proudly promote in our NationStates recruitment telegram, and have their own active and successful Discord channel hangouts. The hangouts system, introduced in 2023, has been an important success in giving portions of our community their own space to talk amongst and be themselves, and it stands ready for any other group in our community that needs that kind of safety and comfort.

But what that might be, who knows? We can create the conditions to cultivate our garden, but we have no idea what will bloom. Perhaps we'll focus on other groups that we'll proudly promote a year from now, or perhaps people will come to Wintreath for games and fun, or perhaps we'll see a revival of some other thing from the past. Or maybe some event will change the direction of our community in ways we can't even predict now. But I hope in time our community will become an even more close-knit place of cherished friends, a place that's both an escape from the troubles of the outside world and a place our members can rely on to provide support and care through their dark times, as Wintreath once was.

On Governance
Obviously, for the last year and a half most of the actual work in Wintreath has been focused on improving leadership and moderation...a year ago we had rebuilt our rules from scratch, created an appeals/complaint process for moderation actions and decisions, created a detailed investigation and reporting process for when regular members leave due to moderation actions or are banned, and seen our Regional Stability Squad transition from an all-powerful emergency government to an OOC oversight body.

Since then, we've further refined our rules based on observation of events elsewhere and with the input of the community, including rules explicitly banning the glorification or promotion of fascism, denial of historical atrocities, and vilification of fellow Wintreans when debating each other. And we've been quicker to point out rule violations and enforce the rules than we might have been before.

We've also recognized the power inequalities in Old Wintreath and how they contributed to various conflicts and crises in the past, such as the rise of a ruling clique within leadership structures, which then often lead to an us vs them attitude and dismissive responses during conflicts and toward critics. In both OOC and IC governance, we've become a more egalitarian society, where those who carry positions of responsibility try to do so based on the input of the community as much as possible.

Speaking of IC governance, we took our first steps toward establishing a new way of community governance first outlined in my post On In-Character Governance and Considerations for the Delegacy. After definitively deciding not to restore the Monarchy in November 2023, my thinking evolved over time. First, I was thinking of a home-based governance...if roommates living together had to figure out how to do things, what would it look like? Then over time that evolved to the minimalist government I talk about in my post, which over times has focused more on community consensus. Combining those elements, we have in principle determined that we want our governance to be informal, streamlined, and participatory.

Since that post, our community selected its first post-split delegate (The Age of Dystopia), made several NationStates foreign-affairs decisions such as its recent decision to close relations with Roses Without Thorns. We are also slowly putting together new policies on foreign affairs and potentially reversing the decision made by the RSS in 2023 to eliminate requirements to maintain Citizenship.

Despite all the progress made in the last year, this may be the area where we're most in transition...far from where we were but not quite where we're going yet. In the next year I imagine we will aim figure out how new moderators will be hired and trained (we have not brought on any new moderators since Michi rejoined in December 2022), as well as continue the transition of the RSS to reflect its status as an oversight body rather than an active government body (for example, possibly removing the RSS from RO positions on NationStates as we bring on new moderators).

Because we're in transition, I know that the governance of Wintreath is confusing to even established members. I expect over the next year we will better define how things are done, with the final product more closely resembling an organization's bylaws than the regional constitution we've had in the past. I also believe we'll better empower the community to better take on roles that were once held by a regional Cabinet, especially when it comes to culture.

On Gaming
Speaking of culture (which is basically fun and games), this is the area of Wintreath that has been understandably most neglected since the split. Early on, we established "Things We Do", namely being Minecraft, NationStates, and the forums, but haven't touched this area since then. We have not really had a real forum game since 2022, and the last significant decision made was to split Werewolf between Wintreath games and Mafia Universe subforum games...a decision that further reduced our activity, but was the right decision given that the MU and Wintreath playstyles were often incompatible to the point of upsetting each others' players.

If I'm able, I would like to make a concerted effort to look at each game in Wintreath's library and determine whether it could and should be revived and in what capacity. In some cases, it may involve removing the game from the forums and just having it on a webpage (or Discord) for easier access. It may involve deciding that some games should be closed for good for lack of interest. It may involve spinning off some of my custom games into its own website where I can focus on my dream of developing games. It will depend on my own time and ability, community interest, and the right fit for each game, but I hope we will have at least some games in Wintreath over the next year.

Finally
And that's it. Of course, it's hard to plan out anything long-term...Wintreath's long history is full of twists and turns, and our journey has often been winding, so I'm not even trying. I'm just expressing where I feel we are in the journey from where we were to where I can hope we'll be. Ultimately, as always, our journey will be some mix of the intentional efforts of each of us in where we want things to go and trials and opportunities that we can't even imagine right now.

But I hope my perspective and insight in celebration of Wintreath's 11th birthday as someone who has been here for it all has proven to be illuminating, or at least worth the long read. Either way, happy birthday Wintreath! May the next year in our community be even better than the last!

-Winter