I. Incorporation

Required Information

An Organization's incorporation document must provide the following information in order to be regarded as incorporated by the state:

A. Name

  1. The incorporation document must have your organization's name.

B. Founding Members

  1. A list of founders must be provided.
  2. There should be at least 3 founders for an organization.
    1. A founder can be an individual or another incorporated entity, including the state.

C. Vision

  1. A vision statement is a declaration of an organization's objectives, intended to guide its internal decision-making.
  2. The founders must provide a one-sentence vision statement describing the clear and inspirational long-term desired change resulting from the organization's work.
  3. The following are the appropriate traits of the vision statement:
    1. concise: able to be easily remembered and repeated
    2. clear: defines a prime goal
    3. future-oriented: describes where the organization is going rather than the current state
    4. challenging: not something that can be easily met and discarded
    5. inspiring: motivates employees/volunteers and is something that employees/volunteers view as desirable
  4. Your vision will be used as the chief descriptor of your organization on the public list.

Sources: 1, 2

D. Mission

  1. A well-developed mission statement is a great tool for understanding, developing, and communicating fundamental objectives for the organization, and should be expressed in just a paragraph or two.
    1. If read out loud, it should take about 30 seconds.
  2. The mission statement should answer in clear terms the following questions:
    1. What do we do?
    2. How do we do it?
    3. Whom do we do it for?
    4. What value are we bringing?

Sources: 3, 4

E. Values

  1. An organisation's values are its guiding principles which apply across the organisation and underpin how its work is carried out.
    1. An organisation's values are its basic beliefs about what really matters, which guide how things should be done.
  2. Values are ultimately up to the organization to define. For example:
    • If an organization is a political party:
      • Values may reflect a party's political ideology
    • If an organization is a for-profit company:
      • Values may reflect a drive for innovation or profit maximization

F. Key Metric(s)

In order to ensure an organization's success, key metrics need to be defined and subsequently measured. While these metrics are open ended, they should also be relatively quantifiable.

Boilerplate metric options will be provided for the following types of organizations:

  1. For-profit corporation or cooperative (profit, as defined by the currency of choice)
  2. Political party (membership numbers)

The purpose of the boilerplate options isn't to pigeon-hole an organization. Rather, it's to remove work from the plate of someone trying to incorporate. If a predetermined organization type such as "for-profit corporation" is specified, then the founder doesn't have to do any added work figuring out a metric they want to see measured. An organization's management may always add extra metrics later on.

Optional Information

The following is not mandatory, but are recommended 'best practices' that will help your organization sustain itself in the long run.

G. Constitution

If you are not a for-profit organization, a well built constitution can provide a governance structure and allow an organization to live on even once its founders dissipate. For example, it can outline value-added roles and responsibilities, processes of how things work, or rules of succession in times of missing leadership.

Conversely, a constitution can also wrap red tape around your organization, and make it exceedingly difficult to react to surrounding changes as time progresses.

A well written constitution provides enough structure to keep an organization focused and working to fulfill its vision & mission, without choking the organization with internal rules and regulations.

H. Public Forum or Chatroom

To make it easy for a player to join your organization, clear lines of communications are recommended. Consider the player's perspective: sure, they may join a city, but they want something to do. The route to involvement with the city's institutions would require them to make an ask, and that's made easier when they know exactly where to go in order to ask to join.

Organizations with a public forum or chatroom will have the privilege of having their link displayed within the nation's documentation.

Organizations are free to use the nation's official Slack in order to create channels.

I. Jobs Board

With the single-alt policy, and with new anti-botting rules, automation will be limited. This leaves a severe handicap on individuals who may not have project management experience. A jobs board is the easiest way to let people know what work requires to be done.

The simplest jobs board layout is that of a Kanban Board, which is a chart with a minimum of three columns:

  • To Do
  • Doing
  • Done

You separate larger goals and milestones into smaller tasks that lead up to them, which are then placed under "To Do". When someone takes up a task, they place them into the "Doing" column. When the task is completed, they place it in the "Done" column.

The easiest tool to use to set up your own custom Kanban Boards is Trello.

Here is an example of a jobs board. As you can see, there are more than the 3 designated columns. The columns you wish to use ultimately depends on your organization's internal processes.