Wittenberg

Legally, the Immigration Minister is supposed to report to the Ziu "the number of any immigration applications received since the last report which did not proceed because failing to fulfil the requirements of this section."  This has typically happened "on the fly," but that's a fairly significant burden for the Minister of Immigration.  And if doing this stuff is hard and annoying, then it's going to burn people out or make them resent their service.  So I've tried to come up with a new approach, and I'd like Ziu feedback.

Because the new system outputs to a spreadsheet, there's a lot of automatic stuff we can do with the data.  One of those is summarizing any given month.  So the system is now configured to produce the following with a single click:

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For the month of: December 2025
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Incomplete: 2
No Wittenberg: 4
In progress: 1
No petition: 0
Total applications: 7

'Incomplete' refers to those applications which were not filled out correctly or completely, and which were returned with an explanation.  Further details are available on request, but the most common ommission is social media information.  'No Wittenberg' refers to those applications which were complete, but in which the applicant did not go on to make an account on Wittenberg.  'In progress' refers to those applications from the month which were complete and in which the applicant is still being considered.  'No petition' refers to those applications which were complete and considered, but for which no petition was received.  Neither 'no petition' not successful naturalizations will appear for the current month or last month.

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All of this is automatically assembled, including the BBCode for formatting.  This makes it very easy to get a snapshot of immigration in any given month.  The above report is for the last week of December (when the system was updated and this information became available).  We can also get a snapshot of a larger span of time.

The next step will be to integrate all of this into Infotecă so that it's all automatically updated regularly, the same way the basic information is available, but for now, we want to make the Ziu aware that this information and equivalent will now be easily available to them.

So here's the current state of things for last month.  (Although I need to adjust colors for the chart.)

As you can see, we had a good number of applications, but almost half of them never followed up on the next step to create an account on Wittenberg.  Thankfully, many did, and we had nine proceed through the process and one has already immigrated.  It seems likely that January will eventually have yielded four new citizens, which is pretty great!

Of the three incomplete applications, two left out proof of life and one was just too young.  The youngster says he will try again in May, and begged us to let him immigrate anyway -- another enthusiastic immigrant on the way!

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(https://imx.talossa.com/i/30b04bcb-22e7-416f-97f3-46e8fe7c61ad.png)

For period: 1 January 2026 to 31 January 2026
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Incomplete: 3
No Wittenberg: 11
In progress: 8
No petition: 0
Successful: 1
Total applications: 23

'Incomplete' refers to those applications which were not filled out correctly or completely, and which were returned with an explanation. 'No Wittenberg' refers to those applications which were complete, but in which the applicant did not go on to make an account on Wittenberg. 'In progress' refers to those applications from the period which were complete and in which the applicant is still being considered. 'No petition' refers to those applications which were complete and considered, but for which no petition was received. 'Successful' refers to naturalizations completed.

I am not sure about my availability tomorrow, so here's the immigration report.  February is shaping up pretty well.  Three rejected applications as incomplete; two for lack of social media verification, and one for lack of other info (although that one was also filled with slurs so to hell with that guy anyway).

For period: 1 February 2026 to 28 February 2026
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Incomplete: 3
No Wittenberg: 11
In progress: 7
No petition: 0
Successful: 1
Total applications: 22

'Incomplete' refers to those applications which were not filled out correctly or completely, and which were returned with an explanation. 'No Wittenberg' refers to those applications which were complete, but in which the applicant did not go on to make an account on Wittenberg. 'In progress' refers to those applications from the period which were complete and in which the applicant is still being considered. 'No petition' refers to those applications which were complete and considered, but for which no petition was received. 'Successful' refers to naturalizations completed.


Looking back at January, now that those applications have been processed, we can see that it ended up being a very good month!

For period: 1 January 2026 to 31 January 2026
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Incomplete: 3
No Wittenberg: 10
In progress: 4
No petition: 0
Successful: 4
Total applications: 21

'Incomplete' refers to those applications which were not filled out correctly or completely, and which were returned with an explanation. 'No Wittenberg' refers to those applications which were complete, but in which the applicant did not go on to make an account on Wittenberg. 'In progress' refers to those applications from the period which were complete and in which the applicant is still being considered. 'No petition' refers to those applications which were complete and considered, but for which no petition was received. 'Successful' refers to naturalizations completed.


Looking at the data, actually, it's interesting to see that we had a sharp concentration of four successful immigrants who applied during a single week: 17 Jan through 23 Jan!  Now here's something else astonishing... this is when I made just one post to Reddit to promote the country!  I haven't done it since, since I wanted to see if there'd be any similar pattern for other reasons.

Obvious caveats apply:

• This is just a one-off, and it's hard to say if it's not just a big coincidence.  We'll know more when we try other things.
• No one at all mentioned Reddit, so it would have to be a sort of trickle-down effect.
• This would be a surprising level of effect even if it was real, so we might not expect it to replicate.

Still, this is very good news... and it bodes well for the Progressive strategy of just trying some new stuff!  We'll keep exploring as we do other Reddit posts and some promotional videos, but I think we can say that this is a promising route to go down, even if it's too early to say anything else.

In addition to this good news, I'll also just mention that we've done a few other changes to the process in the last month.  All old threads are now in an archive, so people can look at a glance to see who's currently under consideration.  I've also started introducing everyone by reference to their country of residence.  We'll soon restart the TalossAssistant program to build on that a little more, as well.

I've had a little less time recently, but I have been able to make some more structural updates. at this point, it's clear that the new immigration infrastructure is working well, with essentially no major problems since it was put into place. I've transitioned it to a new account. I've also moved over all of our records for Infoteca, and I spent some time updating how that information is presented. Our data portal now has a natural language summary at the top that is automatically updated, several prettier charts, and overall just a better presentation. I also took the time to add in any additional data we had from the past, and to put everything together in one organized spreadsheet. I am going to get together some notes and documentation as well, so that anyone who needs to fix things in the future will be able to find exactly what has gone wrong and understand how all the parts work together.

I know this stuff isn't glamorous and there's not much that's changed on the front end for most people, but I'm trying to keep things updated so everyone is aware of what's been happening.

As always, suggestions or error reports would be very welcome! If you think of other information it'd be valuable for people to have, please let us know! It has to be fairly easy to keep updated, though I've tried to make it a rule then it should take no more than 5 minutes a month to keep everything completely updated, that way there's never any excuse for ignoring that task.

Check out the updated Infoteca here: https://talossa.com/infoteca/