Ministry Of Community: Win Q5 (No Entry Fee) and See What We Have Planned

Day 657, 17:23 • Published in Ireland Ireland • by The Irish Community

Dear eIreland,

After much reading and discussion with Cun and Edana I've come up with a short starting list of aims for the Ministry of Community in this coming term. There have been so many good ideas around MoCommunication that it's actually hard to let some of them go (for now) but I decided to start small and manageable, because I'd rather know that when I say, 'This is what I'm going to do' that it's got a very high chance of getting done than make fantastic but unachievable promises from the outset.

Is deas an rud an beagán ach é a dhéanamh go maith - Little is best if done well (Gaelic's not my strong point but I knew there was a phrase for it, praise google).

Once my primary aims are on the roll and I've had a chance to talk a little more to the eIrish people as a whole this basic list will hopefully be expanded to include more of what you - and I do mean you, the individual reading this - would like to see here. If you have suggestions, questions or comments I'll be all too happy to hear them, either PM the Community Org or einberliner (where I have the extra storage pack) and I'll get back to you as soon as I'm able. I can't promise to please all of the people all of the time but I do promise to listen.

And now on with business, lol.

Purpose of the Ministry of Community

MoCommunity exists to promote activity and growth within the eIreland community and to help get people involved and participating. To that end there is some overlap with the New Citizens and the Education departments and, as Cun and Edana have said in their own articles, we three ministers met on IRC last night to make sure we were all clear on who was taking care of what, what each of us hoped to achieve and where our opportunities to excel and co-operate were. The meeting went very well and I believe the three of us will have a strong working relationship through our term as ministers.

Initial Goals For My Time of Service
♣ Firstly, though the department isn't one for which excessive spending should be an issue, I have already started a google doc to keep a record of any changes that may occur in the account here that I will keep as up to date as I possibly can. I will make this available to the Minister of Finance, Nogin, at any time she may wish to see it. It will also, naturally, be made available to President Patton and VP GordonGekko should they wish to have access. Not that there's much to see yet. This spreadsheet should be easy enough to transfer to my successor when the time comes.
♣ The eIreland Wiki is somewhat out of date and has, in the past, been maintained in part by this Ministry. I'll be honest, I've never edited a wiki in my life, but I've applied for an account there and I'm hoping to update the info as best as I can. Cun-Bo-Dawex has already been working on this so the task shouldn't be too mammoth and I've spoken to Donovan Thomas (Ministry of Information) about it. He and I are both going to start working on getting things up to speed there so that the information is current.
♣ It was LR who originally suggested community awards, complete with a badge to display in your forum signature for those who win and a mention in the media (this paper, most likely). His initial suggestions for categories were as follows:

Irelander of the Month.
Most Trusted Politician.
Best Acclaimed Publisher.
Most Celebrated Soldier.
Most Reliable General Manager.
Most Infamous Citizen

I quite like the idea of a community awards and as some of you may know paintshop and I are firm friends. I am now, officially, announcing that I am open to suggestions as to what the categories should be. If you can see something he missed please don't be afraid to suggest it. I will, in the early part of the week beginning 14/9/2009 post the official categories with a request for people to nominate eIrelanders they feel fit the bill. For now any suggestions you make for categories can be posted here, on this article, or sent to me via PM at this org or at einberliner.
♣ There will be, as there have been before, competitions and prizes on this community. This is in part as an incentive for people to subscribe to/read this paper, which will hopefully contain useful information on a regular basis but mostly for fun. For now I'm by-passing anything resembling a lottery for what I'm sure are obvious reasons and the various activities will take different forms, so hopefully there'll eventually be something for everyone. The first of these will launch in this edition and the details are below. It'll also likely be the quickest and easiest of them all but the prize is pretty great.
♣ In order to fund the prizes and such I'm also going to launch, probably this week, a fairly straightforward fundraising initiative. Again, this won't be a lottery. No bribery or emotional blackmail, I only want people to donate if they can afford to and for the time being no prize incentive will be offered for donating. If a very large amount of money is raised then the excess funds would be transferred to another Ministry that has more use for it, which Ministry that would be I would defer to the cabinet as a whole to decide.

For now those are my focuses. As I said before I'm very open to suggestions (made here or via PM) as to other things that could be put into motion. I'll expand this list of five as we progress and things occur to me/are suggested by others.

A Quick Word On Health, New Citizens and Education Ministries

Just in case you missed them there were a couple of things I wanted to draw your attention to.

Firstly, gordongekko will be running the Health Ministry during this administration and Englebirt Humpydink will be his deputy. He will be continuing the two wellness schemes already in operation, and the schemes can be accessed here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHl0SWlOTlN1VnJQamFpY1ZDTjViMXc6MA

The Ministry of New Citizens will be run by Edana Savage, who is going to work to locate and help new citizens, helping them to find the forums/mentoring schemes etc. so that they can learn about the game and eIreland and get more involved early on. You can see more about that here: http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/monewcitizens-defining-this-ministry-929401/1/20#comments .

Which brings us last, but by no means least, to Cun-Bo-Dawex is now running the Education Ministry. His primary aims during his term are to encourage the teachers to be more active, to publicize the university and create extra curricular activities for it and to run the mentoring programmes. His detailed article can be found here: http://www.erepublik.com/en/newspaper/university-of-ireland-195834/1

And Last, But Not Least, The Competition

Like I said, this one's simple. Because this article contains a lot of information that could be useful to people, and because this is the Community newspaper I would like as many people as possible to see it. All you have to do to enter is to use one of your shouts to link to this paper and encourage your friends to come visit it. Then either reply here to let me know you have, or PM this org or einberliner, and once I've verified that you did indeed shout it out for this article your name will enter a prize draw. Last entries will be taken at 00.01 eRepublik time (8.01am GMT) Friday morning. At around 11am eRep time (7pm GMT) later that day I will draw one name at random from the submissions (using the scientific names out of a hat procedure).

The winner will recieve one week's worth of Q5 bread, which I'll send in instalments if they don't have the inventory space for it all at once.


Thanking you for your time and patience,

einberliner, Minister for Community

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