I hope to see some good entries this year!

Estimats cünpartizaes,

As most of you are aware, the aftermath of the last election was a bit of a blessing in disguise, as it showed that the URL is the Party of Talossan Democracy. With this better-defined identity in mind, we have set about over the first half of this term working to define just what a more democratic Talossa would look like in order to know what paths we should prioritize and the directions in which we would like to move as a united party. To that end, I submit to you now that agenda for the Party's endorsement.

The following is something that I have drafted based on the summary of ideas in this post, but is still ultimately open to amendment, as I cannot singularly speak for the party as a whole. As a result, all items are currently open to proposed amendments to their wording (including re-arranging them in a different order to show our priorities). Once our Convention prepares to adjourn, we will move to adoption of each item as it then exists.

Quote

LAS TOCĂS DEMOCRÄTICI DA L'URL

THE DEMOCRACY AGENDA OF THE URL

We, the members of the Union of Free Reformists, the Party of Talossan Democracy, in order to not only safeguard Talossa's fragile democracy, but strengthen it, hereby formally adopt the Democracy Agenda. This package of reforms will bolster the democratic nature of Talossan government, granting actions taken by the state even greater legitimacy. It is intended to show the Talossan people, in plain terms, our intentions in both this Cosă session and in future sessions, particularly those in which they see fit to grant us a Cosă majority.

• Cosă Size: With the passage of 62RZ09, the Democracy Agenda has already succeeded in right-sizing the Cosă to 20 seats. The URL's aim here going forward will be to defend this change, and prevent future Cosă sessions from undoing it.
• Electoral Method Reform: In the interest of lessening the power of party bosses, increasing the power of the voters, and improving the ability to hold individual MCs accountable, the URL supports transition to a form of personalized proportional representation -- any method that combines proportional representation for parties with voter control over which candidates actually receive Cosă seats. We support further debate on the specific method to be adopted.
• Party List Reform #1: The URL supports legislation to prioritize party lists, ensuring that "off-list" candidates can only receive seats if no "on-list" candidates are eligible, in order to improve transparency and allow voters to better judge the intentions of the parties on the ballot.
• Party List Reform #2: The URL supports legislation requiring candidates to confirm with the Chancery their consent to appearing on a party list, in an effort to further lessen the power of party bosses.
• Upper House Reform: Taking into account Talossa's unitary nature and the requirements of responsible government, the URL supports the transition of the Senäts' role to that of a "house of review" in the vein of the British House of Lords, the Canadian Senate, or the Japanese House of Councillors. This reform will retain Senators' ability to critique and improve legislation on behalf of their province's citizens, including a veto on Organic amendments, but will allow the Cosă to insist on its decision on standard legislation if there is sufficient democratic support.
• Public Ballot Reform: The secret ballot is one of the cornerstones of free and fair elections. We support the continued right of Talossans to publicly declare their electoral choices, but believe the polling process on Wittenberg should be reformed so that public ballots are only published after polls close.
• Parliamentary Reform: The URL supports codifying and strengthening the powers of the Tuischac'h and Mençei to allow them to better maintain order and enforce parliamentary procedure within their respective chambers.
• Royal Veto Reform: The URL supports reforming the power of the Crown to veto legislation. This would involve a "suspensory" veto, in which the Crown's veto still serves as an opportunity for the Ziu to reconsider legislation, but can be overriden by a simple majority of both houses. In parallel to this, we support reworking advisory opinions to allow the King to consult with the CpI on a bill's organic Compliance.
• Reform Org.XII.4: This organic provision makes some parts of the OrgLaw almost impossible to amend, anchoring the country in ways that are not justifiable in a democratic nation. The OrgLaw already has a rigorous amendment process for normal amendments; there is no good reason to have such onerous additional requirements.

I am submitting Fora Talossa's new show, Abbavilla Digest, which is preparing its third episode this month. Posting has been regular on r/micronations and apparently has at least one non-Talossan viewer who mentioned liking it in a comment.

La C'hronică  – Fevraglh XLVII / February 2026

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Government News

• El List del Seneshal sent to all citizens
  The Seneschal has sent out a public service announcement to citizens, notifying them about the new format of El List del Seneschal.  This announcement will describe the new features of the page, since it's centralizing so much useful information for the first time.  It already had a list of all the Title C and D offices, but now the updated page will list the contact information for everyone, in a single accessible place, provide lists of all staff members in different places in government, notify people about important policies, and list job openings in which people might be interested.
  Read here
  
  
• Government statement on Iran
  Our Seneschal has issued a statement regarding the Trump Administration's Recent Military Attack on Iran, condemning actions of war taken without authorization from the United States Congress
  Read here
  
  
• New Clerk of Corts
  King Txec has appointed our recently immigrated citizen Marcüs Causch as the new Clerk of Corts. The Clerk of Corts helps in setting up trials : if someone wants to file a lawsuit, he posts it, randomly assigns a judge, and notifies everyone involved.  When the trial is over, the record of what happened is added to a wiki page.
  Read here
  
  
• First days of observance for wiki editing
  Following the numerous contributions he made to the TalossaWiki, Citizen Barclamiü da Miéletz chose two days of observance : 8 Jan 2027 will be a Road Sign Day of Observance, and 12 Feb 2027 will be a Number Plate Day of Observance.
  Read here
  
  
• Feedback requested for government promotional video
  The government has produced a promotional video for Talossa!  It's in contemporary TikTok style and 50 seconds long, and we think things like this have a chance of going viral again.  What do you think of it ?
  Watch here
  Read here
  
  

General News

• Talossan ID cards
  The Directorate of STUFF, an office of the Royal Civil Service, has announced that they are accepting requests for Talossan identification cards.
  Whole process is explained here.
  
  
• Announcements & Promotions among the Zouaves
  On February 23rd, Capitan Txec dal Nordselvă has awarded Tric'hard Lenxheir a promotion to Private Second Class within els Zuavs del Altahal Rexhital, in recognition of his work as organizer of the 25-26 Hockey League.
  Read here.
  
  
• Talossan radio station plans continue
  An exciting project started by some interested citizens! Many technical and legal issues to solve before we can listen to the first radio shows, all help on the subject is welcome
  Read more here
  
  

Immigration News

During February we received 8 immigration applications (Alex, Gabriele, Hanon, Claudio, Filipe, Rahul, Moinul, Marek)
We already announced 3 new citizens for the beginning of February

• Ethan Smith, 599th naturalized citizen, since February 1st
• Halén Bozogularis, 600th naturalized citizen, since February 5th
• Heinrich Elisa, 601st naturalized citizen, since February 8th

And we are pleased to welcome also :

• Crement Itravilatx, 602nd naturalized citizen, since February 16th

and for the first days of March :

• Moinul Moin, 603rd naturalized citizen, since March 6th

Our Minister of Foreign Affairs @xpb has opened the competition, by innocently displaying our website page in a computer store  --->

Quote from: Béneditsch Ardpresteir on February 21, 2026, 10:39:27 PM@Mximo Malt, I am not in favour of starting with a Purpure. Please think of any other hue that appeals to you.

I wonder if we've had any progress, here?  Mximo is being very patient, but I'm sure he'd love to have his arms figured out.

-SVA

Welcome Moinul! Glad to have you with us.
Just a heads-up, when I joined I also displayed a Coat of Arms on my profile, and I was quickly reminded to follow the regular process to be granted one by the King. Read this to know how to request your Arms!

Members of the Ziu:

I have been working on some background changes to make our data more useful and accessible, and there's a few interesting points to note.  I thought I would report them to our legislature, and this data might be the basis for new policy changes or simply informative for the future.

There are a couple of trends to notice. 

Population and Activity Trends

First of all, our total population over the last twenty years.



As we can see, this was once much higher... I think our high-water mark was 258 citizens.  Currently, we have a population of 139 or so.  And I think it's interesting to notice that this is because of two trends:

• Three-Strikes removal of inactive citizens
• Generally decreased interest in Talossa

These are separate trends, and I think we can see that in the numbers elsewhere on Infotecă.

The first trend is the striking out of citizens who neither vote nor respond to a census over the course of two years.  From 2015-2016, the Three Strikes came into real effect and we saw purges of inactive citizens.  These were people who hadn't voted in years, and very few of them have ever shown any interest or returned in the years since.  I don't know if our civic life lost much when they were purged, and the current system might be a better reflection of who's really a Talossan.  So the total number of citizens shrank dramatically.

At the same time, we also can see that people were just becoming less interested and active in Talossa, generally.  In 2021, we got into a serious existential crisis... there were months when there were 10 or 20 total topics posted on all of Wittenberg, with less than 200 total posts. 

This problem is also reflected in the voting numbers.  The Jun 2021 election had only 73 voters, with 50% turnout -- and this is after nearly a hundred non-voting citizens had been removed from the rolls!  The total voters dropped precipitously over the course of a decade, landing down at double digits in 2019 for the first time in a long time.

If we look at naturalization records, we can see there are long spans with zero naturalizations from that time.  At this point, we weren't just shedding citizens who'd been inactive for a long time -- the country was shrinking in a very real way.

Those of us who were around at the time can remember this time, and how eerily quiet and dead everything was.  Very little was happening, and there was very little interest from anyone.

I think it's safe to say that we were in serious danger at this time, and we might be lucky we were even able to pull out of that nosedive.  It's easy to imagine the country losing the ability to appeal to others: a handful of hardcore citizens exchanging offices and talking into the void.  How long could that be sustained before people just gave up?  Or before someone seized effective control and just remade the place in their own image?

Fortunately, we seem to have mostly plateaued, and now our task is going to be to build our way up into the future.

The Virtuous Cycle

So then, when we look at the data, I think it's reasonable to say that strong Witt activity and naturalization numbers are a decent window into national health.  They're not perfect and not complete, but they're real.¹  What do we see when we take a look?

• Interestingly, posts and threads are almost perfectly correlated -- we might think that there could be months with a lot of discussion on just a few things, but the data shows that's not true.
• But as we might expect, Wittenberg activity correlates decently with naturalization and retention.  Terms with higher activity levels in general tend to have fewer people depart for inactivity at the following election.
• That effect doesn't reverse: there's no correlation between the number of people who get purged for inactivity and the activity of the next term.

Overall, there's a virtuous cycle visible in the data: Wittenberg activity becomes applications (not perfectly, r is like 0.4 - 0.5 cumulatively²), and then applications become naturalizations (again, not perfectly, r is about 0.4), and then naturalizations weakly feed back into Wittenberg activity (naturalizations affect future Witt topics at r = 0.31 – 0.37).

The caveat here is that these correlations are all real but not super-strong.  This is what we'd expect, because the whole thing is a little noisy.  There's no variable that tracks "hey we went crazy viral for two days but in a group with very low English proficiency," but that happened and it led to a month with sky-high applications but with a surprisingly low conversion rate.  That doesn't have much to do with anyone's choices, and the effects can be pretty big since our community is pretty small.

Conclusions

Overall, I think this tells us a few things.  First of all, this stuff isn't all random.  When we're active, more people tend to immigrate -- and when more people immigrate, it tends to make us more active.

Second of all, that means that interventions that boost any of these things will have positive consequences for the rest of them.

And because of those consequences, it also seems clear that policy decisions and governance can have a real impact on these trends.  That trend isn't immediate or perfect, and luck plays a big role.  But it's real.  When you vote, your choice matters for the future of Talossa.

I know we have some other folks who like numbers around, so I hope some of them will chime in.

Notes
1. These numbers could be "gamed," and that's important.  If we were to take them as gospel, that'd make them too easy a target to mess with (cf Goodhart's Law).
2. "r" (formally called a correlation coefficient) measures how closely two things move together, on a scale from -1.0 to +1.0.  So if two things have an r of 1, then they happen in lockstep: if A, then B.

Happy International Day of Women to all female Talossans (and non-Talossans)!

Absolutely!  Welcome!