Under El Lexhátx C.1.1, as Minister of Technology, I recommend to the King that @Lüc da Schir be appointed to the following role:


Permanent Secretary in the Office of Backend Admin, Ministry of Technology

FURTHERMORE, I notify the Crown and the Nation that the following terms of contract have been agreed between the Ministry of Technology and the recommended Permanent Secretary:

(i) The Permanent Secretary in the Office of Backend Admin shall be responsible for all back-end maintenance on the Kingdom's National Webspace, including talossa.com and TalossaWiki; including performing system backups when required, assisting in troubleshooting of system errors and any other tasks required by the Ministry of Technology in relation to the ongoing upkeep of the Kingdom's web infrastructure.

(ii) The Permanent Secretary in the Office of Backend Admin shall be responsible for maintaining at all times the passwords to the National Webspace and to the national social media accounts, and granting/removing access to these websites and accounts for the Seneschal, the Minister of STUFF, and such other responsible officials as may be named by the Government, as and when necessary.

(iii) The Permanent Secretary in the Office of Backend Admin shall also take on the role of Wittmeister, responsible for all back-end maintenance of Wittenberg as described in El Lexhatx J, under the direction of the Chancery.

Estimats cüncitaxhiens!

When the current Government was formed, I didn't particular want to take on the triple burden of Justice, STUFF and Technology. But the labour shortage among the Coalition parties was of such an extent that I had to. Thankfully Senator Plätschisch at least stepped in to make sure that I didn't have to be Seneschal as well.

My priorities as Minister of STUFF were:

• We will issue physical ID cards for those who successfully pass the Talossan Civics Test (to be conducted in an automatic online format).
• We will return to active production of Talossaware, including national flags of all sizes, passports, and lapel pins.
• We will organise a campaign to bring TalossaWiki up to date.
• We will simplify and update the content of the National Webspace.

I have achieved 3 out of 4 of those goals to my own satisfaction. The subject of Talossaware was left in the hands of my Deputy, Mic'haglh Autofíl, who did such a great job getting ID cards organised. The ongoing duties of STUFF are to maintain the content of the National Website, and to administer our social media. I have to admit that these are areas in which I am plumb out of energy and enthusiasm. To give an example; we removed the menus leading to many of the "informational" pages on talossa.com because the "iframe"-based technology which mirrored information from TalossaWiki had broken. Lüc da Schir has now fixed that. But that means it is now my responsibility to figure out how - or whether - to restore those pages. And I'm fresh out of ideas.

I feel the time is right to enact the content/admin split which was always envisaged when we split the Ministry of Technology from the Ministry of STUFF last year. To be precise: I announce my intention to resign as Minister of STUFF, and to recommend to the Seneschal to name Mic'haglh Autofíl as my replacement. I am happy to retain my other portfolios of Technology and Justice.

As to Technology, as many have heard me say before, I'm no tech expert, and I hope to be able to name a Permanent Secretary with more skills in that area sometime soon. The "Permanent Secretary" system - which allows those with the skills to do the work without having political responsibility, in consultation with elected politicians who set policy and answer the Terps - is one of the best reforms in Talossan history, IMHO, and is criminally underused at the moment.

Grült méirçi.

WHEREAS it is part of the incumbent Government's programme to simplify legislation and "cut red and green tape" where-ever practical;

AND WHEREAS certain inefficiencies and dead-ends were revealed in the Kingdom's budgeting process due to the recent unavailability of the Burgermeister of Internal Revenue;

AND WHEREAS a read-through of the appropriate legislation suggested other fixes for readability and sense, in particular separating out the functions of the Royal Treasury from the Ministry of Finance;

BE IT ENACTED by the King, Cosa and Senäts of Talossa in Ziu assembled that:

1. The following new paragraphs shall be added to the end of El Lexhatx C.1.5:

Quote1.5.5. audit the reported financial condition of His Majesty's investments at any time.

1.5.6. provide, upon request of the Minister of Finance and any other time stated in law, a Financial Report containing the following information:
1.5.6.1. the amount, location, liquidity, and availability of all funds held by or for the Royal Treasury,
1.5.6.2. a detailed list of all changes in the account balances of the Royal Treasury since the last Report,
1.5.6.3. a balance sheet which clearly lists all expenses linking them to the relative sheet items in the budget bills approved in the Cosa,
1.5.6.4. the total amount of louise and postal items in circulation;

1.5.7. All accounts and other monies held by the Royal Treasury shall be held in the name of both the King and the Burgermeister, in such a way that the King shall be able to perform the functions of the Burgermeister in case of the Burgermeister's absence, on his own initiative or upon request of the Minister of Finance.

2. El Lexhatx D.2.8.1 is amended to read in its entirety (all subsections to be deleted):

QuoteThe Ministrà dal Finançù (Ministry of Finance) is responsible for setting and implementing the economic policies of the Kingdom, for drawing up the national Budget, and directing the Burgermeister of Inland Revenue as to the investment of that portion of the Royal Treasury set aside by said Budget.

3. In El Lexhatx D.2.8.2.4, the misspelled word "demonination" shall be correctly spelled as "denomination".

4. El Lexhatx D.2.8.2.8 is deleted, as contradicting El Lexhatx D.2.8.1.

5. El Lexhatx D.2.8.2.9 is deleted, its provisions being reinstated in the new El Lexhatx C.1.5.5.

6. El Lexhatx D.2.8.2.10 is deleted, as redundant and repeating provisions contained in El Lexhatx D.2.8.3.

7. El Lexhatx D.2.8.3.1 is amended to read:

Quote2.8.3.1. a Financial Report as provided in El Lexhatx C.1.5.6;

8. The following new subsection shall be added to El Lexhatx D.2.8.4:

Quote2.8.4.1 The Ziu hereby authorizes the annual and ongoing expenditure of 60 louis by the Burgermeister of Internal Revenue for the specific and sole purpose of paying for the annual domain name registration of talossa.com and for associated webhosting services as selected by the Seneschal or their designated representative.  All payments made under direction of this authority should be reported as according to normal procedure by the Burgermeister.

9. The existing paragraph, currently duplicatively numbered El Lexhatx D.2.8.9, which reads:

QuoteThe Finance Minister shall create a Register of Talossan Enterprises, available to all Talossan citizens. Any Talossan who produces goods and services, whether commercially or as a hobby, may provide a description, no longer than 100 words, of their enterprise together with their contact details, for the purposes of advertisement and information. An enterprise shall be removed from the register at the request of the registrant; or by a determination by the Finance Minister that the enterprise is no longer active, or not of a character with which the Kingdom of Talossa wishes to be associated. Such determinations shall be subject to judicial review.

shall be renumbered D.2.8.10, and amended to read:

QuoteThe Finance Minister shall create a Register of Talossan Enterprises, available to all Talossan citizens. Any Talossan who produces goods and services, whether commercially or as a hobby, may provide a description, no longer than 100 words, of their enterprise together with their contact details, for the purposes of advertisement and information.An enterprise shall be removed from the register at the request of the registrant, or by a determination by the Finance Minister that the enterprise is either no longer active or not of a character with which the Kingdom of Talossa wishes to be associated. Such determinations shall be subject to judicial review.

Is this now good to go?

The Government in its Coalition Agreement committed to "return to active production of Talossaware, including national flags of all sizes, passports, and lapel pins."

The Ministry of STUFF is hereby seeking expressions of interest for people who wish to produce Talossaware, on how to get Official State Seal of Approval, and also from potential consumers on what kind of Talossaware they would be most interested in buying. Let me know.

We all know that KR1 borrowed promiscuously from all the major Romance languages (and others) when creating the Talossan lexicon, but he also seems to have concentrated on three minor Romance source languages: Occitan/Provençal, Romansh, and Western Lombard.

my question is: does anyone have any better online resources for these than Wikipedia?

WHEREAS it is the policy of the incumbent Government to promote live interactions between Talossans, via technological means where necessary or appropriate;

AND WHEREAS heavens knows how long it has been since the last Living Cosa, i.e. a real-time meeting of our legislature;

AND WHEREAS the Ministry of Technology has got tentative support from the Chairs of both Houses of the Ziu for the concept of a Living Cosa with Senäts participation through teleconferencing technology, and an offer from the Mençéi to organise the technological aspect of this;

AND WHEREAS this seems to be the procedure as outlined in OrgLaw IV.11 and El Lexhatx H.20;

BE IT ENACTED BY THE COSA OF TALOSSA that a Living Cosa will be held, via teleconferencing, during the month of November this year.

The Government's Programme has stated that "we will work with SIGN to create new Talossan language learning materials and to create both translated and original literature." Yesterday, in my capacity as Deputy Minister of Culture for Language Shenanigans, I talked to the SIGN leader about how we might start the process of building "Talossan 101" materials for people who're just absolute newcomers to language learning.

We agreed that the best thing we could think of was to revise the existing "master document" for the current iteration of our national language, Las Recomendăs - not for content, but for making it easy to understand for beginners. Obviously neither cxhn. Tafial nor I are the right people to do this ourselves, as "language nerds" who can tell a verb mood from a verb tense and an enclitic pronoun from an emphatic pronoun. If we want to get the broad masses of the Kingdom interested in learning, we need to find out ways to express this in "normal human being" language.

So what I am suggesting is: everyone with an interest in learning Talossan, and in particular those new to language learning or linguistics jargon, please read through Las Recomendăs and tell us - what is confusing for you? what do you need explained in words of one syllable?

¿Toct clar?

Under El Lexhatx D.2.9.3, the Ministry of Technology appoints a Talossan Web Registrant to act as registrant for our national web hosting and domain names - i.e. be the name of the "owner" as far as our hosting service is concerned. For the last few years this office has held by the Burgermeister of Internal Revenue, to simplify the process of making payments to maintain our web hosting. I'm convinced that this is a good tradition and we should keep it up.

Therefore, given that the handover of the office of Burgermeister has just been completed, I have just made the arrangements to also transfer the office of Talossan Web Registrant to @Dr T. dal Nordselva. As some of you will remember, Dr Nordselva's appointment as Burgermeister is only a short-term one, and when we (or a future government) find a permanent occupant for this role, then the question of whether they should be Web Registrant as well will be re-opened.

A plugin which I uploaded on talossa.com to attempt to delete the thousands of spam users who signed up to the now-defunct Talossan Job Centre appears to have malfunctioned and deleted a portion of our websites' content.

I've got Deputy MinTech Brad Higgs working on it, and I would like to appeal to ALL Talossans who know anything about Wordpress setups, cPanel, or in particular whether we have any backups of our data, to help.

WHEREAS El Lexhatx D.2.9.2 currently reads:

QuoteTalossa.com and Kingdomoftalossa.net are the property of the government and shall be operated by the Ministry of Technology.

AND WHEREAS it is currently the interpretation of the Ministry of Justice that this requires the Government to own both of those domain names;

AND WHEREAS spending on domain names came under scrutiny in the last budget round;

AND WHEREAS we don't necessarily need to jettison kot.net, but we should value Ministerial discretion over legislative micromanaging;

BE IT ENACTED by the King, Cosa and Senäts in Ziu assembled that El Lexhatx D.2.9.2. be amended to read as follows:

QuoteThe Government shall own the domain name talossa.com, and may purchase and maintain any other Talossa-related domain names as they see fit, following normal budgetary procedures. These domain names and their associated webhosting shall be administered by the Ministry of Technology.

As part of my commitment in the Justice portfolio, my next step on legal reform will be a spring-cleaning of the Finance section of our law (El Lex D.2.8, C.1.5. and similar). The need for this was brought up in June/July, when it became clear that our budgeting procedure as set down in law was not sufficiently flexible to deal with last-minute changes in prices from our Internet provider. An additional need for this has arisen given the current Burgermeister's apparent personal problems.

Before I go too deep in writing a draft, I suppose I'd better call for public input. Two major questions:
- does the current budgeting procedure provide the correct balance between making sure no money is spend without democratic accountability; and making sure that money *can* be spent for necessary items without too much red tape? (One major issue is that emergency spending can currently only happen through a PD, which requires that the King actually be paying attention.)

- a major, major flaw in our procedures is a lack of safeguarding over the Royal Treasury. At the moment, the Burgermeister of Internal Revenue is the only person with any actual authority over the Royal Treasury - i.e. he's the only name on the bank accounts and on the PayPal account. It's increasingly becoming clear that this is a potential catastrophic point of failure that needs to be legislatively amended. Could the answer be as simple as to require the King to be a co-signatory on all Treasury accounts?

Comments?

WHEREAS the principle of the Royal Civil Service, including the Chancery, is that it should be free from political interference, and yet still responsible for its performance to the elected representatives of the people;

AND WHEREAS when the Royal Civil Service was established, this principle was put into effect such that the Secretary of State should be responsible to the chairs of the Two Houses of the Ziu, as well as to the Seneschal;

AND WHEREAS the current situation is that any one of those three persons can effectively dismiss the Secretary of State;

AND WHEREAS this is a little bit too responsible;

BE IT ENACTED by the King, Cosă and Senäts in Ziu assembled that El Lexhatx C.3.1 be changed to read as follows:

Quote3.1 The Secretary of State is appointed by the King on the recommendation of the Seneschál, and removed by the King on the recommendation of any two of the Seneschál, the Túischac'h or the Mençei for professional misconduct, inability to perform their duties due to incapacitation or failure to perform their required duties.

Okay colleagues, give me a heads up on this: I've posted the substantive text of a bill here, but not yet the "fluff", preamable, "whereases" etc.

Does the 10 day countdown before I can bring it in here start from Aug 5, when I posted the "meat" of the bill, or doesn't it count before I put the "fluffy stuff" on? My reading of El Lexh H.6.4. suggests that the "legislative proposal" needs to spend 10 days in the Hopper, which I think means the essential text of the proposed law or amendment, which suggests the more permissive wording.

The Ministry of STUFF would like to respond to and clarify certain statements made in the partisan press of the Talossan National Congress, to whit:

QuoteIn three successive issues of the official Government news, L'Chronica, they inexplicably failed to mention their own blockade

1. The name of the Government's official news sheet is La C'hronica.

2. La C'hronica is prohibited by law from publishing articles referring to political parties by El Lexhatx 1.2.2.5.2, which would prohibit the SoS from distributing any issue which contained such articles. (The previous Secretary of State, Glüc da Dhi, rejected certain articles for La C'hronica on precisely this point).

3. Talossa has a fine tradition of a partisan press, and a not-so-fine tradition of a press which tells outright lies for partisan benefit. It would be embarrassing if the latter were coming back, and I hope the TNC's honourable members will not support it.

4. The apparent surrender of the TNC's Anti-Monarchy Reform Blockade is a more pleasant topic that will be dealt with later.

While looking for that picture of me taking the oath of citizenship on OldWitt, I came across this epic website, set up by certain members of the Talossan Republic who didn't "provisionally bend the knee" like we reviensadeirs. Good times. Wish they were still around.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on August 04, 2022, 07:59:20 PM
pretty recently my own office of Túischac'h, an office elected or removed by simple majority of the Cosa (ie, the Government) was granted the power to manage and/or fire the Secretary of State.  It's not like some giant thing or huge disaster, and obviously I'm personally never going to abuse it, but I do think that probably it's a mistake that could be abused.

Well, I see you're backpedalling from your claim that the Goverment (defined as the Seneschal and Cabinet) "control" the Chancery, to pointing out that the elected leaders of the Houses of the Ziu have power to recall the SoS. That's a bit embarrassing for you, but forget that for a moment - I agree you might have a point that it's somewhat "unbalanced", on reflection. If I remember right, the original suggestion was that the Seneschál having sole right to hire and fire the SoS really would "put the Chancery under Govt control", and we added the chairs of the Houses to indicate that the SoS would have to account to the Legislative as well as Executive Branches. But I have, independently, wondered whether that's going too far.

If you want to change that - to perhaps a system where you'd need two or maybe even three of the Seneschál and the two Chairs of the Ziu to dismiss the SoS - then I'll write up the draft bill this very day. Or you can do so and I'll get the FreeDems in behind it.

So I remembered this good idea which was raised at the time we were struggling to get the domain names paid:

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on June 30, 2022, 06:37:40 PM
We get a good deal on hosting from DoRoyal, compensating for how much were overpaying for domain names, but we might want to think about lodging an official complaint about how this was handled.

Well, I did raise this idea in Cabinet, and Cabinet agreed that it would probably be a good idea. But when I went to the DeRoyal site to find out whether there were formal "complaint raising" procedures, I found that the Burgermeister had had a further issue with the billing at DeRoyal - namely, that they'd charged him double for the talossa.com domain name that was supposed to be included in the hosting.

The owner of the company apologised for the error and thanked Istefan for pointing it out, and gave us credit on future domain renewals by way of an apology. So given that I'm not sure that adding an additional complaint about the previous billing drama would add any value. I would like other's opinions on whether to just leave it there, including the Burgermeister's.

It is my pleasure to announce that new citizen @Bråneu Excelsio has stepped up to be Deputy Provincial Secretary of State, with responsibility for keeping Fiova's Wiki pages up to date.

At an appropriate moment, it is my intention to pass on the Provincial Chancery after Allà-soleu-säp how many years, and I hope to be able to put a candidate before the GA before the next election.

WHEREAS one of the ugliest facets of Talossan history has been a xenophobic attitude towards micronations, or other Talossa-like entities;

AND WHEREAS the blanket ban on Talossans being involved in other such entities was removed early in the realm of King John by the current provisions A.9 of El Lexhatx, which restricts sanctions to a "blacklist" of bad micronations;

AND WHEREAS this blacklist has not existed for some time, if it ever did;

AND WHEREAS the incumbent Government has the joint manifesto commitments of simplifying El Lexhatx, and of opening Talossa to the world of micronations;

AND WHEREAS this bill is unlikely to have much practical impact, but acts as a symbol of international friendliness;

BE IT ENACTED by the King, Cosa and Senäts in Ziu assembled that sections A.9 and D.2.6.5 of El Lexhatx are hereby deleted in its entirety.