Outgoing Minister of Human Services

Day 1,903, 06:45 Published in Australia Australia by Arcaian

One thing that even the eAus community can agree on is that this has been a very busy term. No matter what side of the politics you're on, you can agree that many things have happened during the term.

The department of Human Services has been no different. It started out as a department that controlled what was previously the Department of Education and the Department of Information - by the end of the term, it had effectively split into three departments. The Department of Information, the Department of Centrelink and the Department of Education. I stayed as the Minister of Education, and others headed the other departments (here I must commend Vyrin the First, who did an excellent job of refinding, restarting and continuing work with Centrelink, an initiative which hopefully can carry on under his leadership next term). This article will cover the basics of the Department of Centrelink, and the more indepth details of the Department of Education.

The Department of Centrelink is in charge of distributing resources to new eAustralians who need help - the resources can be funds, weapons or food. It was an old initiative, but the department was refounded by Vyrin the First, who has continued it's work throughout the term. It involves messaging all new players in eAus, referring them to tutorials and other helpful articles, and to keep in contact with them - showing them to the MUs that give them resources, and giving them resources if needs be. Hopefully the government can afford to keep this initiative going for some time, however this may not be possible with the economic system functioning like it currently is.

The Department of Education is really the area that I enjoyed the most, and the area where I spent the most of my time. Xavier Griffith and myself have spent practically the enitre term setting up this webiste:

http://dhs.auserepublik.com/

It is not 100% complete, as I had hoped it would be by the end of the term, but it is more efficient than all previous websites that eAustralia has had. The basic idea of the website is to compile eAustralia's history, useful links and tutorials and guides into one location, so that new players can understand what is happening in eAustralia and eRepublik in general more easily. Most of this information is available somewhere. But that is the problem - it is scattered. There was a babyinfo website, the Help and Information subforum, the eAus wiki and the eRep wiki. This website takes all the information available and compiles it in a single location.

Making it involved transferring all information found elsewhere from eAus onto the website, then reading through it all to make sure it is up-to-date. Most of it was not, and almost every article moved had to be either updated or replaced - I have written at least 15,000 words in the last 30 days on these tutorials, and spent many hours fixing images and positioning from previous articles, as well as taking new screenshots if the old images were outdated. This has taken a tremendous amount of time, and I'm afraid that it took mostly all of the time I am ready to devote to eRepublik on a regular basis. It was taking upwards of two hours a day, and I could easily maintain this for the first 20 days of the term, however real life set in the last 10 days and I have simply not been able to work on it as much as I wanted to in those 10 days.

I'm the first to admit the mistakes I have made, and these mostly involve not getting the information that we now have available into eRepublik. I have published only one article in the official Department of Education newspaper, and one from my own newspaper. My plan was always to do this in the remaining 10 days - I ran out of time, and had the term been longer I would have done it. Life is life, and if I were to do it again, I would prioritise the dhs website just as much all over again. I do regret not getting the information out, but now that the dhs website is nearly done, the future Departments of Education will hopefully have a much easier job of doing so.

I do believe that the Department of Education was and is a needed area of politics that is so often ignored by both the CPs and those in ministerial roles. All I ask of the next cabinet is to not throw away the hard work done this term - simply keep the information up to date, keep the website running and publish articles. This term was thankfully a rare occurence in the amount of work needed - don't be put off by this. In this way, I am glad that Mr. Crumpets has chosen to put Vyrin back in the Department of Human Services again, as I am sure that he will continue my efforts well. Tim_Holtz has not released his cabinet members for the Department of Human Services, so I cannot comment on those in the role in his cabinet.

On a personal note, I will not have a large amount of time devoted to eRepublik for some time now, so I will hopefully fade back into obscurity and two-clicking, for the time being, but I will be lurking none the less. I want to thank Xavier Griffith for giving me the opportunity to work in this department during his latest term as CP, Vyrin the First for his excellent work at both the start of the term in the DoE and later in the term in the DoC. I would also like to thank all in the cabinet and ARP who have helped me look over the website and spot potentional errors, especially Louise Brooks.

I now fully appreciate the amount of work needed for many of the roles in the cabinet, and I wish the next Cabinet the best of luck, whomever you may be. This may be the end of a brief but hard-working stint in the Department of Education, but I do truly hope the Department will be successful for many terms to come.