Infrastructure: the people deserve support for their ideas

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

Infrastructure: the people deserve support for their ideas

Talossa is an amazing place.  It's small enough that you can make a difference, but big enough for your contributions to actually matter.  If you strike upon an idea that's decent, you can make a lasting impact on Talossa for years.  Our history and culture and government are filled with examples of ideas that have outlasted even their creators' involvement in Talossa, or that have become traditions in their own right.

But it can be hard to make this happen.  An initial blush of enthusiasm might be enough to get people going, but sometimes it takes months or years before you can realize your vision.  And if it all depends on your energy, then you can burn out on what seems like a thankless task.

The Government should take some common-sense and easy steps to make things easier.  It's too much to ask that the Government lay the foundation for every single initiative, but that doesn't mean that they can't provide a few shovels to help people out.  We should be giving people the tools to help themselves.

Provide hosting.  Both the national website and the wiki use software which are designed to allow people to easily contribute.  They have WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interfaces that are widely used, with a ton of tutorials available to people.  In the past, when we had much more difficult web services, the Government still went out of its way to ensure that people had access.  Let's bring that back.

Brief introductions can be assembled without a lot of effort so that people can easily make their own pages about their new plans or ideas.  Either the national website can have a subsection for your initiative, or possibly a wiki page.  The Government should help create something for others to build on.  Your archery game club?  Your fantasy league?  Put your initial burst of enthusiasm into making a home for them, and then others can help raise the walls in the future.

Establish a resource library.  We have a lot of images and designs that people have made over the years.  Some of them exist in a Google Drive that I created for a past government, and which is now used as a common depository.  It wouldn't take much work to set up similar things for the people, so they have easy access to helpful images and files.  Why do people need to reinvent the wheel to learn BBCode for putting fancy headers on their posts?  Let's stop making everyone do everything, and help people start cooperating!

Develop starter kits.  There have been five or six fantasy leagues over the years, and some of them have been wildly successful (like the Talossan Cycling Association Tour).  But it's a lot of work thinking through things.  It would be worthwhile for the Government to create one-page starter kits to help people with suggestions and possible paths.

Notice how these plans all have synergy, building on each other: the infrastructure access can be described in the start kits, which can reside in the resource library.  And they're all one-off: make these and they'll only need the occasional rare update.  These are concrete plans to make Talossa better and more successful.  Vote Progressive, so we can all move forward!


The Progressive Alliance will make access to government infrastructure easier, promote a repository of useful files and images, and create starter kits for everyone to use.