Join the new world

Almost everyday there will be new reactions on articles or in debates about things nobody seems to really understand. There are a lot of opinions and people who are reffering to old debates or rules. There seems to be an ethos of common knowledge and habits. Information is not needed, because everyone understands the common, usual things. This is called experience, and I do have some of that now, but not everything is clear since I'm back. For someone new (again), or someone who does not follow all the debates, it is hard to understand a debate and to participate. The aim of this column is to create order in this chaos. This seventh article in the series will focus on the Plato Foundation Project.

I started this article series when I just started playing and it was primarily meant for myself. In writing about something I don't understand, I force myself into understanding by reading, asking questions and writing the answers down. And why not share what I learned? Maybe others can learn too. I think most people who weren't away for 1,5 years will know exactly what it is, but I didn't know what the Plato Foundation was. With the recent success of the addition of 'the Flying Dutchman' to the Plato Foundation Project, it is a great time to further explain what it exactly is.

The Plato Foundation Project is an official game mechanic, however it's a special one. It was implemented on the 7th of august 2017. The idea is that communities or individual players can request gold from Plato in order to achieve something for the community. When I first heard of the existence of this, I was completely suprised. It doesn't sound like a new fighter pack design, but rather like something for people who don't have to be neccessarily fighters. How does it work? If you have a plan, you can submit this plan to the Plato Foundation Project, like the Ministry of Defence has done last week. The Plato Foundation Project consists of 2 community officers, 3 erepublik volunteer moderators, and 4 independent high profile players. This is called the 'Board of Trustees' and the members of this board change every month according to the official rules. They started very transparant with publishing their boards every month on the forum, but nowadays it's very hard to find who is part of the board. After asking I know now that the board exists of:

2 community officers: Gucio and Adinushk
3 eRepublik volunteer moderators: Curlybear, rainy sunday* and Gyantse
4 independent high profile players: mittekemuis, Khotko, Huey George and n0s3

*Not sure if the categorization is correct. It's an estimation based on the 8th board of trustees.

Then the application fase. If you have a project, you can present it to the board by writing an article where you explain how it works, what the goal is of the project and what the impact is supposed to be. The more details the better. They also look at what the community thinks about the project. Comments of citizens are important to judge if a project gets funding or not. Last step is to officially submit the project to the Plato Foundation Discord. The board discusses the proposal and every week they vote on the proposals they have received, or the ones which applied for continuation. The weekly budget is 1500 gold, the monthly budget 6000. The first one can be reported to the following week, the latter can not. There are grants (max 500 gold) and one time sponsorships (max 1000 gold a month).

Our own project 'The Flying Dutchman' will get 130 gold this week from the Plato Foundation Project. This means the rewards for participating in the flying dutchman are increased!

The Plato Foundation Project seems to be a good thing especially for smaller countries that want to increase the activity. The transparancy of the projects is very important for the PFP, so it will also help to give citizens more insights in what is happening. I have looked into the projects chosen by the PFP and sadly most of them are fighting related (air programs). I would like to see some different projects as well, so the no-fighting community could also taking advantage of this game mechanic. I'm excited the Flying Dutchman is approved as PFP, and i'm curious to see how it works out and how everyone will experience this. I would like to invite everyone to share their opinions if you have them. This article is written by me personally, based on my perspective on the topic. I would like to repeat the small letters in the header of my newspaper: The truth cannot be guaranteed. Please correct me or add things if you think I missed something to get closer to the truth.

Spir Tus
A Bastion of Truth