Smoke signal perhaps?

[xpb]

To the Civil Service,

While talossa.proboards.com has been retired, might it be possible for one posting to be placed there about the current election and again to encourage joining these forums as only about half the electorate has registered here some 18 months after changeover?

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

To the Civil Service,

While talossa.proboards.com has been retired, might it be possible for one posting to be placed there about the current election and again to encourage joining these forums as only about half the electorate has registered here some 18 months after changeover?

That's a banner on the top of the old forum, so I don't think anyone can miss it.

[xpb]

To the Civil Service,

While talossa.proboards.com has been retired, might it be possible for one posting to be placed there about the current election and again to encourage joining these forums as only about half the electorate has registered here some 18 months after changeover?

That's a banner on the top of the old forum, so I don't think anyone can miss it.

But does a post within those forums trigger any messages for some percentage of the accounts that have have triggers for things such as a weekly digest?  Things that may remain white listed for email where later messages might not?

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

To the Civil Service,

While talossa.proboards.com has been retired, might it be possible for one posting to be placed there about the current election and again to encourage joining these forums as only about half the electorate has registered here some 18 months after changeover?

That's a banner on the top of the old forum, so I don't think anyone can miss it.

But does a post within those forums trigger any messages for some percentage of the accounts that have have triggers for things such as a weekly digest?  Things that may remain white listed for email where later messages might not?

You can't post there, since it's locked up.  I don't think anyone could try to post there without figuring out that the forum has moved.  I think it's much more likely that almost all of these people have lost interest in Talossa.

I was actually thinking about one possible phenomenon: we have many longtime citizens who are utterly silent but reliably vote.  These sorts of people are going to tend to accumulate over time.  And only a handful of people ever come back from a long hiatus, and they're almost always the sorts of people who were active a lot before.  That is to say, we have almost never succeeded in enticing people who never really "got into" Talossa to do so, after the blush was off the rose.

This makes new citizen engagement critically important, perhaps more than anything else.  But we never, ever seem to focus on it.  The focus is usually on some big touchy reform that everyone fights over, while the real problem gets the attention (or lack thereof) of the less-active ministers.

[Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC]

This makes new citizen engagement critically important, perhaps more than anything else.  But we never, ever seem to focus on it.  The focus is usually on some big touchy reform that everyone fights over, while the real problem gets the attention (or lack thereof) of the less-active ministers.

Mark it on the calendar: this paragraph, I 100% agree with. The big issue is I'm sure the Baron and I have diametrically opposed ideas about how to go about new citizen engagement, so we'll have to see how the election shakes out.

In fact: short shameful confession here, that one of the reasons I stepped aside from party leadership was because I knew that I didn't have a master plan for new-citizen-engagement, so I should give way to others to take the lead on that.

[anglatzara]

This makes new citizen engagement critically important, perhaps more than anything else.  But we never, ever seem to focus on it.  The focus is usually on some big touchy reform that everyone fights over, while the real problem gets the attention (or lack thereof) of the less-active ministers.

In fact: short shameful confession here, that one of the reasons I stepped aside from party leadership was because I knew that I didn't have a master plan for new-citizen-engagement, so I should give way to others to take the lead on that.

I think what is needed is some kind of interesting, easy-to-engage-in, ongoing project tailored to prospective citizens, that catch them and involve them. I'm not sure what that project could be, but I think an activity trumps just conversation.

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

We know a few things don't work, at least.

• Contests don't really work.  That has been established exhaustively with graphic design contests, art contests, poetry contests, etc.
  There's just very little prestige involved with something like that, and trying to tack on extra prestige doesn't really work since it ends up seeming cheap and inauthentic.
• Offering low-level positions doesn't really work.  The modern civil service has been around for a very long time now, ever since Owen Edwards and I agreed on a compromise to put it in place, and I think exactly zero people have been motivated to do stuff.  Some folks have served, but they all seem like they would have been just as happy to do so as a deputy or whatever.
• The new citizens' page on the wiki (and I guess there's a packet somewhere?) has worked somewhat, since it has pointed people to some common next steps like claiming arms, and they have advanced through them.  But there's not a lot of stuff for anyone to do, so there's only so much orienting that will help.

I think if the Zuavs got some real buy-in, it's a model that can work.  No criticism on anyone, but it needs to be the real focus of a Government with support and energy from the Cabinet if it's going to be sustainable.  The same energy that made the wiki-work-for-PD program effective would work here, but could scale up even more, since it could be goofy fun, but also actually productive competition.  In a couple of months of the start of the efforts, we saw actual things being produced -- Epic wrote a whole academic paper for it! -- and that could happen again with the organizing energies of more than one person at work and the imprimatur of the Government.

Instead, we are once again all mostly talking about big constitutional changes, like we do every year, and that's where most of the effort and time will go.  And because these arguments are so bitter, with deeply personal attacks and often outright insults, they poison the well of future cooperation on the real priorities.

As so often, we see a macro-world problem in our country.  It's a coordination problem -- the prisoner's dilemma.  It's in the interest of each party to focus overwhelmingly on their topline big constitutional issue, since that excites their partisans more than workmanlike effort on new citizen engagement.  But an even better outcome would be for everyone to agree on focusing on new citizen engagement.  Unfortunately, there's no mechanism by which the parties can coordinate, so they must voluntarily agree and trust each other not to defect.  We see the same dynamic in macro-world politics all the time.

[Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP]

Ever since I started offering my Talossan translation services for free, not one person actually came and asked. That's weird to me, considering how literally every party in existence has had more widespread use of the language in their manifestoes, and the government originally wanted to pay me a couple hundred USD to translate stuff. What am I doing wrong?

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

Ever since I started offering my Talossan translation services for free, not one person actually came and asked. That's weird to me, considering how literally every party in existence has had more widespread use of the language in their manifesto, and the government originally wanted to pay me a couple hundred USD to translate stuff. What am I doing wrong?

Nothing.  But in my opinion, the Government should be issuing official statements in both English and Talossan, maybe even requiring ministers and officers to do so.  This is not a criticism, since I know that's a big ask.  I have been working as a sort of secretary to try to do so with His Majesty and another person for the royal pronouncements, for example.  That will increase visibility sharply, up from approximately zero.  If we can get some casual Talossan phrases to become more common in use, it will help matters significantly, too.  I have a sheet of common phrases I'm going to get translated (since my own efforts are excruciatingly slow and bad), which might help.

[xpb]

Ever since I started offering my Talossan translation services for free, not one person actually came and asked. That's weird to me, considering how literally every party in existence has had more widespread use of the language in their manifestoes, and the government originally wanted to pay me a couple hundred USD to translate stuff. What am I doing wrong?

I am remiss in being in contact for your services.  I was waiting until we had at least 10 homesteads on Cézembre to issue certificates (we had 6 initial and 1 more has come in) and thought that would be a good time to ask, however, perhaps it is appropriate to issue the entire homestead proclamation in Talossan (and perhaps French and or Breton)
https://wittenberg.talossa.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=677.0;attach=242

That document is derived from the USA Homestead Act, May 20, 1862 which opened millions of acres of the public domain to settlement and cultivation. This Act was open to anyone who met very basic and progressive requirements, including women, immigrants, and, beginning in 1868, African Americans. Eventually, homesteads were found in 30 states and covered 270 million acres.

[Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC]

Ever since I started offering my Talossan translation services for free, not one person actually came and asked.

Er, every time I talk to you about doing language stuff (not translations), you say you're far too busy with university work!

[Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP]

Ever since I started offering my Talossan translation services for free, not one person actually came and asked.

Er, every time I talk to you about doing language stuff (not translations), you say you're far too busy with university work!

My workload isnt evenly spread throughout the week, or the semester (which is a bad sign for me). The private message you sent to me asking about doing language stuff was from early April, a week before the 2021 Summer Semester was about to begin. I don't know why my semesters are seemingly totally backwards compared to everyone else's, but that's how it is.

But that doesn't explain why ever since I posted this thread back in February, when the 2020/2021 Winter Semester was winding down and I started to have more free time, no one asked me to translate anything. Again, the Government originally planned to pay me actual real US currency because you thought the issue was one of motivation and that I had to be bribed (I guess) into doing glheþ stuff, but I can't do glheþ stuff if no one asks for my assistance, which I am offering for free!