Refugia Update 2
An’eth’ara, na lethall’en!
Welcome to the second irregularly-scheduled Cultural Report! It feels like the entire world has turned upside down since the last time I was here giving you all an update on things, and there’s a lot to get to. But first, I want to re-iterate my position that this region and its government absolutely should not be a bunch of privileged people talking at you, the members. You all have important voices in this system and I would love to see you use them, whether that’s by running for government, posting in the RMB, submitting proposed amendments to the Refugia Revised Statutes (RRS), or just in sharing fun dispatches you’ve written! There are so many ways to interact with us and be involved, so that we can get closer as a community.
Anyway, there’s a lot to get to in this edition. The last edition of the Cultural Report was November 7th, which means we’ve gone more than two months without an update as to what’s going on in the world around us! I’ve separated today’s topics into two subjects- updates about our region, and updates about the wider scope of what we do.
On November 7th, 2019, Refugia was a very small region. We’d hovered at approximately the same amount of members for eight months, with only two or three of us having been here from near the founding. We were a small group of friends, focused on just doing the things we were interested in, but unfortunately most of those people weren’t interested in Nationstates, leaving us with a small group plus whoever might have considered us a better option than the region in which they had until that point resided.
Point being, we had 19 nations on that date. While I’ve been writing this dispatch today, we’ve crossed the 90, 100, and 110 marks, which is insanely exciting! When Refuge Isle and I wrote up and put into circulation the recruitment telegram in November, I don’t think either of us could have fathomed the concept of Refugia making it to this point.
One hundred nations being attracted by a message of inclusiveness, environmentalism, and community means a lot in a time when hate is the primary way of dealing with one another and on a site where people espouse harmful views because they think it’s funny. There are very few large regions with environmentalism as a central policy, and that means that we get to be an important voice at that table.
We couldn’t have done this without all of you (literally), and I’m excited to see where the future takes us!
There’s a lot to get to regarding the wider community of Calamity Refuge. The first and most important thing to announce is the indefinite suspension of the CalRef forums. I’ve been asked to comment on this a few times and I wanted to save the main bulk of my thoughts for here. CalRef has been around for a very long time, with the forums first being established on July 16, 2008. In that time, the interests and focus of the community have shifted drastically. It’s gone from RPs to Minecraft to Nationstates to Astro Empires, and away from some of those things as well.
At the moment, there was very little interest in the forums, and too much pressure on making them a shining central monument to CalRef’s reputation. The community we’ve had, which is very small, has been spread out a little too thinly between a Minecraft server, a Nationstates region, and a few forum RP threads. And most of the members were disinterested in participating in anything beyond lurking in a lonely place. So we shut down the forums. I stress that it’s an indefinite suspension because, if the wider community becomes interested in doing forum-based things again in the future, we’ll bring it back. But until then, we can do more good focusing on building a community of friends here on Nationstates.
Calamity Refuge has always had a few central conceits, namely privacy, open-source software, and safety. That last one is pretty important (not to say the others are unimportant). It's the main thing that I've been focusing on as a staff member within the community these last few years. It's not just physical or mental safety, where your doors have locks or your demographics information won't be sold to Amazon for ten cents. It's the emotional security of feeling like you're part of a community that cares about you. Making friends with the people who share this online space with you, sharing your thoughts and feelings with them, and knowing that they feel the same way about you as you do them. I've made a few friends since joining CalRef, and I know Refuge has as well, but it's been a lot more fraught recently. So I would like to focus, through Nationstates, on making us a community. We have 100 people, surely that means that 20 are interested in actually participating in the community and being friendly, right? So let's do things together. Let's play games together, or chat about nonsense, or write intricate roleplay trade deals between our nations. Let's be friends!
The second major announcement is that Refuge Isle is resigning the delegacy for the region. Given that our WA delegate is not an executive position, this doesn’t mean she’s stepping back from her duties as Arch-Administrator of Refugia, but she is needing a little more time to work on her own projects and to focus on her health. I’m in the process of drafting an amendment proposal for the Refugia Revised Statutes to define the parameters and expectations of the office. It won’t be an elected council position like Culture, Ops, or Foreign Affairs, but rather something that can be changed at any time through mass endorsements.
From now on, I’m going to be trying to include more local events and interesting updates within the Cultural Reports, and more specifically within this section. Regional Goings-On is meant to be a collection of things that are not only happening within the higher-level regional government (such as elections and polls), but also events that are going on within the various nations that make up Refugia. The best way to get included here is to write your news down into dispatches, which you can publish by clicking the third icon from the left on your nation page. From there you can select a variety of topics, but ultimately you can type about whatever you want. And I'll totally read them. Share your dispatches by linking to them on the RMB!
- Currently, there is a poll to amend the RRS in a fashion that makes the Council seat descriptions clearer and easier to understand. Go vote on it!
- Polis Diamonil has been writing up a series of dispatches about all manner of things, from narrating the issue-based goings-on within their nation all the way to meta-commentaries on their real-life views on various subjects. I find the latter the most interesting, but I’ve made a note to check into the dispatch list now and again and to continue reading on. I highly recommend checking out this in-depth and highly impressive project!
- Member states are nations that have registered for the World Assembly and been in Refugia for more than seven days. Member states are able to run for office within the region and vote on official polls. It’s the best way to make sure your ideas are being discussed!
- After the untimely disappearance of our Councillor of Operations, the seat is now open. Any member state is free to stand for this seat at any time. This is probably the easiest way to get started in government. The Ops Councillor is responsible for leading our nation during site-wide events (N-Day, Z-Day, etc), being aware of new nations joining that might be bad, and keeping an updated list of member nations.
- Our map is slowly but surely getting filled in! Take a look at the Map dispatch and let me know if you would like your nation to be included!
Sule tael tasalal, dar'eth shiral.
Sylh Alanor