[Beta] Domestics: Onwards & Upwards!

Day 1,871, 13:59 Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom by Betafoxtrot


Hello and welcome to the domestic side of my manifesto! If you missed it, you can see my announcement article by clicking here! As I said in that article, I have spent about half of my time within the eUnited Kingdom in the Ministry of Home Affairs so it’s fair to say that the domestic side of things is something I’m both experienced and interested in and that is doubly important.



So before I go straight in to my policies and what I’d like to accomplish and change during my term I think it’s fairly apt to talk first about the divide and the recent events seen on the forums over the last few days. Change is often a good thing. If you didn’t hear recently Kumnna (the person who owns the forums and is owner in #eUK) recently removed Dan Moir and Talon Karrde as admins both of which, in my opinion, were two of the best admins the forums have seen. I have to admire Kumnna’s decision; not only was he under no obligation to do this, he has also probably single handily healed the rift in party politics more than most people in the eUK has for a while despite not even playing eRepublik for a long time. I have to say, while I may not agree 100% with the decision, I am completely behind doing things that bring the community closer together and I think that the forums acts as the (almost) perfect catalyst for developing such a thing. There’s a reason every country has a forum after all, we’re just lucky enough to have someone pay for and maintain one!



So, on to what I’d like to accomplish.

During my time as Minister of Home Affairs I’ve probably been most known for my guides. As I hope everyone else is, I’m a big advocate for educating new players in order to get them to start up within eRepublik so that they stay around longer. In other words, education often leads to retention (though doesn’t create retention in itself). A couple of the projects that I have done during my tenures are The Library Project and the Guide To…s. If you click on both the links you’ll notice on both accounts an attempt to create an easy to browse “hub” of tutorials so that you can provide one link to a new player and they can easily find what they’re looking for, but perhaps more importantly I’ve made them so that they stay 100% within the game. There’s no other websites to need to go through and no accounts need to be created and it should appeal to anyone in the game, old or new. One of the things that didn’t happen that I’d have liked to have done is had it so the tutorial was everywhere, over every government article and at every opportunity.

Because of this, over the course of my month I’d like to see more guides jointly by the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Health in the style we’ve seen recently by Joshua Whelan and put into a format like The Library Project with an aim to get the link everywhere over as many articles as possible. Of course I hope to make it so that it appears on every government article but this only gets us so far. To add, I’d like to add a reward system for people who put the link in their own private articles with a prize of weapons, food or perhaps cash to people who include it and perhaps a referral prize too in some form where someone who is lead to the “hub” article via person x will say so and net them both some extra goodies. The “hub” article itself will not just include guides but will also have helpful information such as government papers, who the ministers are with links to their profiles and links to IRC, the forums and the NHS.



On the Ministry of Health, it’s seen a rocky time the last few months after the departure of Blue and Evil. It certainly takes a lot of time and effort to do and so I think it’s apt to spread the load over a couple of deputies who the Minister will manage alongside of supplying people in the NHS. While I respect the amount of work needed, I’d like the Ministry to also contribute to guides alongside the Ministry of Education so that some guides can be tailored towards the kind of people under their care. Generally the Ministry of Health has been getting on quite well and I have no qualms with the way it is run. I’d like to see some headway made towards starting a mentoring kind of program, but it depends on how hard these guys are already working.



Finally on the domestic front is the talking point of the month, the Ministry of Legislative Affairs. The last month has been a fresh new direction this month with an aim to make it so that things are more accessible for congress members not on the forums. While I still believe that the debates and proposals of congress should be hosted on the forums, I’m certainly all for making congressional matters more accessible in game for members of congress and the public too. Having everything ran in-game means there’s been a lack of transparency as the PMs have had to be split into two sections due to the fact we have more congressmen than can be added to a messaging list and also that means people not friends with the Minister cannot get involved. Something else that needs to be addressed is the way citizenship applications are handled. I think it’s safe to say that there are not really many people that actually know how it works, and that certainly should be cleared up. Finally I’d like there to be plenty of debates on policies across the board that all parties and all people can be involved in to see if we can’t come to some kind of conclusion of how the country can be ran.



Cabinet applications are now open for business! If you have any interest in any of the positions below, please message me in game or on the forums with what position you’d like, why you’d like it and any information you think is relevant to your application. Everyone is encouraged to apply, even if you don’t get the main job I’ll find somewhere for you on some level.

The positions available are;

Minister of Education
Minister of Foreign Affairs
Minister of Health
Minister of Finance
Minister of Legislative Affairs
Minister of Defence



Thanks for reading, my article of foreign affairs is out tomorrow!

Betafoxtrot
Presidential Candidate