The Nelaga Territories

I think it’s about time to admit that, while I am extremely pleased that the Nelaga Territories exists for purposes of culture, lifestyle, and general Micras continuity, we have not had an amazingly successful run as a political simulation. I credit the fact that we’re still alive here almost a year later on the hard work of certain, often rotating key citizens, but in the downtimes when nobody has the will or the effort to participate see our activity drop to near zero.

Scott mentioned to me several times that Nelaga was fairly boring because we were doing mostly the same boring things micronations have been doing for the past untold number of years. And while I think he was just doing his usual Scott thing of saying mostly anything to win an argument even if he didn’t really believe it, that holds more than a ring of truth to itself. The proof is here on the boards. We haven’t had any really intense debates or major controversial laws and it doesn’t seem likely that we will any time soon.

Another problem we have is our citizenship base. Over the past year or so, we’ve been slowly bleeding off citizens. That’s natural for any micronation, but in that time nobody new has wanted to join to replace them. And, if you think about it from the big picture, why would they? What does Nelaga offer that most other nations do not have? A democracy perhaps, but that’s not as much of a draw as I thought it was. We’re deficient in many other categories, mostly having to do with the culture and subgroups and off-topic chatter that develops naturally. Thus our catch-22 – in order to make ourselves seem attractive to gain citizens, we need a pre-existing structure that can only be developed by a group of citizens.

In short, Nelaga needs something that hasn’t been done to death in order to attract the interest of new blood micronationalists to keep the country progressing. With these thoughts in mind, I hereby restart the Meritocracy Foundation debates.

If you’ve been skimming up to this point, you should read this next line: the first major change to the Nelaga Territories that the meritocracy would introduce would be that non-citizens would have the power of vote in the country. Yeah. That’s different. Here’s about how this would work:

In my idea of a meritocracy, each participant (I want to move away from the “citizen” concept since that has all sorts of loyalty connotations and anti-dual-citizenship laws built up around it) in the meritocracy would have an individual total of “merit” points, which represent the governments acknowledgment of their good deeds for the country. By themselves, merit points are worthless in the same sense that money is worthless by itself – it is what you can get with the merit points that matters. Participants can use their merit points to buy rights, privileges, and powers from the government that are permanent additions to themselves in the simulation.

For example, here is my proposal for votes:
• The right to vote and 1st vote: 10 merits
• 2nd vote: 20 merits
• 3rd vote: 30 merits
• (Xth vote): X*10 merits

So if you have ten merit points, you can cash them in for the right to vote. If you then acquire 20 more, you can cash them in for your second vote, and so on.

So how do you get merits? Well, as a starting bonus, every single person in the simulation will be given ten merit points, including non-citizens. There merits can be immediately cashed in for the right to vote. People who are current citizens when the rollover happens will get a few “freebie” bonuses that I haven’t fully worked out yet, but they won’t be too major.

After the rollover though, all participants will gain merit based on how much they participate in the country. A new Department of Merit will calculate merit gains on a monthly basis. Here are some of the merit gains I am thinking of. Keep in mind that these are based on a monthly calculation and that ALL of them stack with eachother. In theory, it’s possible to gain every category every month.

• Activity Merits
o Being active at all in the Nelaga Territories (making at least one post): 1 merit
o Filing your own taxes for the month (calculating how much merit you believe you should earn. This will be checked briefly, and if it is on target or close, you earn this bonus): 2 merits

• Legislative Merits
o Voting at least once: 1 merit
o Voting in every proposal of the month (issuing a formal abstain counts as a vote): 2 merits
o Proposing a vote or government discussion debate: 1 merit each (total monthly cap: 3 merits)
o Proposing a vote that passes: 2 merits each (total monthly cap: 6 merits)
o The Department of Merit has the right to discount proposals that are complete jokes that have no lasting use and are pretty obviously designed to simply claim additional merits without benefiting the country.

• Work-based Merits
o Holding a position in the government (speaker, any executive, presidential, judicial): 1 merit
o Providing a significant benefit to the Nelaga Territories at your position in the past month (it must be something that has some lasting power and it must be actually completed within the month, not in progress or speculated): 5 merits
o A full list of government jobs will be on file somewhere sooner or later. And yes, you can claim multiple jobs if you have them.

• Territorial Merits
o Posting in your home territory at least once in the month: 1 merit
o Providing a significant benefit to your home territory in the past month (it must be something that has some lasting power and it must be actually completed within the month, not in progress or speculated): 3 merits

• Recruitment Merits
o Recruiting a participant that earns at least one merit in his first month: 3 merits
o Recruiting a participant that earns merit in every month since joining for three months: 10 merits
o Recruiting a participant that earns merit in every month since joining for six months: 20 merits
o Note that no merit is earned at months 2, 4, 5, or after 6

• Cultural Advancement Merits
o Developing a minor cultural work for the Nelaga Territories: 3 merits
o Developing a significant cultural work for the Nelaga Territories: 10 merits
o Developing a massive cultural work for the Nelaga Territories: 20 merits

Generally, each merit point represents roughly 1-2 hours of work. If you believe a contribution to the country has higher value than it is priced on this chart, you may appeal to the Department of Merit for an exception. The exception cannot be more than double the base value of the accomplishment you are applying for.

Right now the only things you can buy with merits are votes. I have more ideas planned, but I think that’s a good place to test the waters.
Please note that merits can be treated as an alternate form of currency. Individual citizens may trade merit points as part of any private debts or deals they agree to. Note that nobody is under an obligation to accept merits as currency. The government will also eventually to buy and sell merit points as rates determined by the Department of Greed, which can slide depending on the needs of the country to keep the economy stable.

So, in recap:
• Participants earn merits by advancing the country in various, pre-determined ways.
• Participants can then spend the merit on various privileges in the country, with the current one being the right to vote and additional votes.
• Non-citizens can participate in this system in every way that citizens can.

Of course I thoroughly support this. I'll have a closer look at the numbers after I get back this afternoon, but what I read looks quite good.

Looks interesting. i admit that the Nelagan government is fairly boring at the moment.

But with the '1-2 hours work', well, posting once isn't 1-2 hours work. neither is voting. neither is creating a law (well, it can be I guess). does that mean i wont get merits for those things?

The 1-2 hours of work thing is for figuring out how to handle significant contributions such as the work and territory-based bonuses as well as the cultural work stuff.

Perhaps it is the old man in me, but I am hesitant to say I support this. If it is the will of the people, then I will go along with it, but.... it just doesn't even sound like a micronation anymore that way.

I think the beauty of a meritocracy is that, not only is it the ideal government system for a micronation; it provides extra motivation to do all the really amazing stuff Nelagans sporadically do (a motivation beyond people just saying "Yeah, that's cool".) Nelaga as a nation is outputting some amazing stuff; but we don't have enough money to give people bounties for it; and people won't earn much money off it themselves, because its not that sort of thing. But it's still amazing and deserves recognition. A meritocracy provides that.

Now I've had a chance to look at the values more in almost the right frame of mind to appreciate them, I'd say they generally look good. I'd add some more in the territory area (unless cultural works in a territory count under "Cultural Works").

I want to ask about buying votes, however. Is the idea that ten merits gets you 1 vote; 20 merits gets you your second vote (so total 30); 30 merits gets you your third vote (so total 60) etc? And is the idea that the number of votes you have weights your say in the legislature, which will remain a timed democracy?

Yes, that's what I had in mind. The votes you buy stay on "you" indefinitely. And I don't want to change the voting system itself, just each individual's input.


I hadn't considered this, but I don't see why territorial things couldn't also count as cultural works.

You're allowed to dislike it if you want, but... not even a micronation anymore?

This system was inspired by Shireroth's temporary idea that a duke's votes were dependant on how much Erb the duke had. This was interesting but fatally flawed for (I believe) two reasons. One, only dukes could vote, which made money useless to everyone else since, no matter how much they had, they couldn't vote. And two, because since money directly equalled political power, people would be moronic to spend it like money since they'd be giving up their real votes if they spent the money.

I'm trying to fix both problems by making sure everyone in the country can use merit and keeping merit seperate from the economy.

But the question is... did Shireroth stop being a micronation when they adopted the erb = vote system? Nobody would say that; no matter how they handled their voting, they were still a micronation. This idea is mostly the same thing except in a much more planned out, balanced, and controlled manner.

after some reconsideration, I am willing to give this a try.

Nobody else has much interest, and the system only works with moderate populations. I'm not sure it's feasible with a smaller number of people even if we wanted to make it work.

Which of course is the eternal problem with micronational governments. Coping with not having very many active citizens.

We'll get there, someday!

Since lack of meritocracy hasn't been working for us; let's try with meritocracy.

Point of Order: I have no merits, morals or concept of alliteration.

Well, the system has obvious flaws, mostly dealing with the busywork involved to keep everyone's merits straight. I gave it some idle thought but couldn't think of any way to avoid having the whole thing come crashing down if a couple people don't update their merits.

I'm willing to take numerical responsibility for this. I've been around the traps for a bit and think that a meritocracy seems a fairly obvious and even ideal system of government for a micronation. It rewards people for doing what they should be doing to make a micronation work. Makes sense to me. Also plays nicely into my studies as an economist into quantifying the world and utility and stuff.

If you want to try to come up with something based on the first draft, feel free.

Yeah, I think I will later today.

EDIT: Sadly, I've got more uni work than I expected. I'll get to this Sunday or Monday. I'll give it more thought in the meantime.

What I've done is basically taken Harvey's outline, and put it into law format such that we could pass it straight into law. The first bill is the one that founds the meritocracy; the second one is the one that explains it, and the one which would be modified to change how merit is calculated etc.

Important things to note:
- As in Harvey's outline, non-citizens can get merit and vote.
- Merit is awarded a week into each month, for the previous month. In the first week of the month, citizens can suggest what they think they merit.
- The Minister of Merit needs to do his calculations at the start of the month, and leave it in public view for that week. The President can unilaterally change it; and the general assembly can vote to change it. This is to stop him rigging the system terribly.
- All normal laws are passed with merit bought votes.
- Constitutional changes and political mergers are passed as per the constitution, with only citizens voting and each vote counting as one each.
- This law can be changed by only citizens voting, with each vote counting as one each.
- Elections are counted on merited votes, though only citizens can stand for office. This allows non-citizens to vote in elections.
- We still need to determine how best to display and record merit. Ideally, I think, it would be done on the forum under each of our names. Not sure how easy that will be to implement, though.
- There is no allowance currently for exchanging merit between people.
- The foundation bill has merit for Jan/Feb calculated and awarded. This is as a "bonus" for current citizens when we start; as well as a way to practise determining merit. It has the disadvantage that little has happened during that time, except for me doing a whole JASO project, and Harvey doing more CoD 2 (which definitely merits merit).

On the "working out how to display merit" - I did a little digging quickly. On phpBB3 it's easy to add Custom Profile Fields. We could add one for merit and one for votes. We could make both display next to people's names on every pages. The only problem with this is we can either set it so that users can modify it themselves; or it can only be edited by admin. Which could get slightly annoying.

Some sort of points mod may also be possible in phpBB3, which would allow easy transfer between users. It would be a bother to install, though.

So we're looking for an admin to MiniMerit? How about MiniInt?

I'm happy to be Minister for Merit (and am happy to be Minister for the Interior too, for that matter, to take some of the load off Harvey). It wouldn't be hard to set the MiniMerit group to get the specific admin privileges it needs to modify merit in this way - just to be able to modify user details - in fact, I just checked on the Gralan forum - it's possible to give someone just the privilege "Can manage custom profile fields" which would be exactly what we would want to do Merit in the simple way outlined above. If we're doing this once a month, it'll work. It'll just get annoying if people want to be able to transfer merit.

This was passed, so let's get this going. Harvey, do you feel confident to set up a custom profile field for votes and merit; and set up a Department of Merit group with the admin ability to manage custom profile fields (which will let the person with that position adjust merit)? If not, you can always give me temporary admin powers and I can set it up easily enough.