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Almost everyday there will be new reactions in debates about things nobody seems to really understand. There are a lot of opinions and people who are reffering to old debates. 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 not have it. For someone new, 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 time it is not about a specific debate, but about the area of debating itself: the forum.

In every introduction of this series (Order in the Chaos), I stated there seems to be an "ethos of common knowledge" in our community. The last couple of months, I found out that since my first article, I take some things for granted, which they aren't. I see a lot of ingame comments on articles, ingame messages, and feed posts where people say they hate the forum and even question the authority of the decisions made on the forum. As Minister of Home Affairs right now, I think it is my job to give you some more information about how the forum works, why it is important for our country to use it and why it is very important to have a lot of people using the forum.

There are a lot of functions ingame to provide information, to communicate with each other, but it is very limited. The only way to provide information to all the citizens of the eNetherlands is by publishing articles. But this is very one-sided information and communication is sometimes very unclear. Ingame articles, especially from the government feel like authoritarian. With this I mean it is a top-down way to "communicate" with other people. Primary communication on the same level is possible on the forum. There is room for giving your opinion, inform others and just talk with each other. But to be honest, the 'normal' communication on the forum is very low.

The primary function of the forum is political. Every voting ingame, is debated on the forum. The forum is our parliament, the place where we can discuss with each other and give our opinion about everything. Without the forum, there is no way congress would have control on the government and so every form of democracy would be impossible. To give congress more power and the government less, a law book is made a very long time ago. These laws are related to the game itself and are approved by congress in the past. Every congress member and other citizens should know the existance of the law book, and not question the authority. The people of the Netherlands have the power to choose a congress which approved the law a long time ago, so the law book is a legal source of rules. These rules will help us to be a stable country and prevent a rogue or authoritarian government. This doesn't mean you can't question the laws in the law book. All the time congress improves or changes laws. Debates which are related to these laws are also on the forum, as well as all the votings for these debates. There are possibilities to question and check the government too.

These are not the only functions of the forum. There is also room for soldiers to discuss MU related stuff, the current world order and ways to improve your fighting. Sadly this part of the forum isn't very active at the moment. The forum is the place for new players to get information about our community, to learn about the game (tutorials, registration bonus) and to discuss the elections with your fellow party members in the special debate area of the political parties.

A big advantage of the forum is that everyone of the eNetherlands is able to contribute in debates. It is all open for everyone who registrates on the forum. So you can see what the government and congress is doing and how this will influence your ingame experience. You can even influence this yourself by just giving your opinion, your perspective and your experience about different things. Debating is very pleasant on the forum, because ingame there is no way to do this. Some say we could use an ingame group message, but these messages will disappear after some time. So noone will know what we have discussed before. Another advantage of the forum is the limited access. The debating area is only for ingame dutch citizens. So we can give our opinion about everything without having to care about what our allies, enemies or other countries will think about this. This means there are for instance agreements on the forum which are only available for dutch citizens.

Some people don't like the so called 'elite'. This is the group of people who decide everything in our country. These are the politicians and they are just the people who use the forum. The less people there are on the forum, the more power this elite will have. To be clear, the elite is not a group who always agree with each other. In fact they are opposing each other regularly. There is more activity right now on the forum then there ever was since I was born (June 2014). But there are still people who have an opinion, but aren't on the forum. This is very unfortunate and I hope they will join the forum some time. With more people on the forum, we will have more opinions and are able to see things differently. With more people, we can improve our country in a better way, with everyone agreeing.

I hope this article is clear and if you don't agree with me I would like to hear from you in the comments. But to be clear, your opinion doesn't have any value if you aren't on the forum yourself. Unless there are congress members who are willing to listen to you if you're shouting ingame (but there aren't that much CM's who are doing this). With my articles I try to build a bridge between the forum and ingame, because I understand that some people don't like the forum and there is still information needed about what's going on. I try to find my own way in giving you my opinion, not only on the forum, but also ingame by publishing this kind of articles.

Spir Tus
A Bastion of Truth