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This is a working paper for a package of updates focused on the General Assembly. It's an ambitious project with sweeping changes, so we're seeking community feedback ahead of a final decision.

Please contribute your constructive ideas and thoughts here: GA 2026 Discussion Thread.

Introduction

The General Assembly (GA) is the legislative branch of the World Assembly (WA). Nations don't need to join the WA, but if they do, they are subject to the effects of Resolutions passed by the GA, which have real statistical effects. WA member nations can vote on proposed new legislation, and increase the voting power of their region's WA Delegate by endorsing them.

Over time, the GA has evolved a highly sophisticated set of protocols and legal precedence, which are both tribute to the intellectual rigor with which it operates and an intimidating hurdle to newcomers.

History

When NationStates began in 2002, it had a chamber known as the "United Nations" (UN), which was essentially the General Assembly as it operates today.

On April 1, 2008, the chamber was (suddenly) renamed as the "World Assembly." All 255 passed Resolutions were archived, to be henceforth known as "Historical" Resolutions. The new chamber began with a legislative blank slate.

In early 2009, two new Resolution types were introduced, "Commend" and "Condemn," which could target individual regions and nations. These were ultimately deemed ill-fitting with the chamber's original purpose, and so two months later, the WA was split, with a new Security Council (SC) chamber created with the authority to pass the new resolution types, and the General Assembly continuing to craft international law.

At time of writing, there are 794 GA Resolutions, 553 SC Resolutions, and 244 Historical Resolutions.

The process of passing a Resolution in the GA is:

1. A nation submits a proposal. In many cases, the proposal has already been extensively workshopped in the forums by this point.

2. The proposal's legality is determined. If it is ruled illegal, it is discarded. Originally, "legal" simply meant compliance with site rules (e.g. not spam or obscene), but it has evolved into a large set of protocols for determining that a proposal does not contradict an existing Resolution, among other things. At different times, this task has been performed by moderators and by a panel known as the General Assembly Secretariat (GenSec).

3. WA Delegates may inspect the pool of legal proposals and grant their approval to any or all. Proposals that fail to achieve a quorum of approvals within a period of time are discarded.

4. The proposal enters a queue for the voting floor.

5. The proposal is presented to the entire World Assembly for voting. If a majority approve before voting ends, the proposal becomes a Resolution.

General Assembly 2026: Goals

The General Assembly is one of the oldest continually operating communities in NationStates, and in many ways reflects the core ethos of the site. It is archaic, complicated, ideological, idealistic, pedantic, and distinctly unlike anything else on the internet. Today it houses a 17-year accumulation of legislative work that has been built atop hundreds of thousands of posts, and millions of written words.

This is a jewel in the crown of the site, but with its success comes a drawback: as the collective body of work grows, it becomes more difficult to find ways to improve it, and greater knowledge is required by any participant who wishes to make a contribution.

Today, while there are 18,000 WA member nations, the vast majority's exposure to the GA is:

1. Receiving a telegram notifying them of the passage of GA resolution that affects their nation stats; and

2. Casting a vote in At-Vote Resolutions
   

The majority of GA activity -- the rest of the iceberg -- exists almost exclusively forum-side, and is not well-signposted from the rest of the site. Only a small fraction of WA members participate here; we can presume many or most are unaware of its existence.

The GA has not received significant new features or targeted UI improvements for a long time.

This project was tasked with developing methods of achieving the following goals:

1. Lower barriers to entry for nations interested in participating in the GA

2. Increase the visibility of GA debate and discussion

3. Improve the accuracy of stat changes on all WA members caused by passed resolutions

4. Expand the scope for legislative changes

5. Encourage and grow the GA's roleplaying culture

Proposals

Below are six proposals on which we're seeking feedback. These may be considered individually; one is not a prerequisite for another.

This call for feedback exists to help unearth issues and opportunities -- not to run a popularity poll. It is well-understood that a proposal may be viewed very positively or negatively depending on the player's preferred playing style, as it differently affects how different people like to interact with the site. We are aware of the relative sizes of these communities, and don't seek to count one up against the other. We do seek individual feedback on how your day-to-day enjoyment of the site could be affected.

Proposal 1: Blank Slate of General Assembly Legislation

Target Improvement: With almost 800 GA resolutions passed over 17 years, players can find themselves restricted to niche topics, and be frustrated when attempting to make meaningful change. A blank slate allows for new legislative efforts under the same framework that are not currently possible due to contradictions with existing law.

Timeline: End-date announced six months in advance, so authors have time to prepare & pass final legislation, and to prepare for the reset.

Actions:

1. Archive General Assembly legislation: Following the same model as Historical Resolutions from the original United Nations in 2008, GA legislation will be archived, i.e. remain accessible but no longer considered in force.

2. Archive forum threads: All threads in the General Assembly forum to be archived, excluding those that players request to retain as relevant post-reset.

3. Blank slate: No existing international law is considered to be in effect; new proposals need not comply with pre-reset rules.

4. No sunsetting of resolutions: As now, passed resolutions will remain in effect until repealed. (Sunsetting is an alternate proposal to achieve the same outcome of expiring legislation.)

Why Not?: Although a legislative reset has happened before, this would be a very large change, and close the chapter on a 17-year collective effort to refine international law. While it may create new opportunities, it would certainly disappoint some previous authors and contributors who would rather their legal efforts remain in force. The current set of GA Resolutions is a major achievement, of a kind found nowhere else in the world, and archiving it would reduce its relevance.

Proposal 2: Simplified proposal rules

Target Improvement: The existing proposal rules derive from the initial rules written by Moderators nearly 20 years ago to cater to a largely roleplay-based group that operated on the at-arm's-length Jolt forums. They suit those after a complex legislative environment with extensive lawyering around proposal legality matters; however, they also require an extreme amount of knowledge to competently enforce - particularly with contradiction and duplication rules necessitating encyclopaedic knowledge of hundreds of passed resolutions.

They are a substantial barrier to participation in the General Assembly, with the result that periods of legislation are dominated by a very small number of repeat authors.

A further problem is the proliferation of legality challenges, particularly last-minute ones, which can result in authors seeing their work thwarted at the final hurdle by legislative rulings that were difficult to foresee. Such rulings were originally a simple moderator function aimed at filtering out spam, but today are almost as big a part of the process as composing and passing well-worked legislation. This shifts power to the body that determines whether proposals are legal, away from Delegates who decide whether to approve a proposal's passage, and the wider GA body who vote on it.

By contrast, the Security Council rules are relatively simple to comprehend and comply with, even for inexperienced authors, and legality challenges are only occasional. This means WA members have more say both in the result of individual legislation and in the general direction of the greater body.

Actions:

1. New simplified ruleset: As detailed below, with the headline changes including the removal of the rules against duplication, contradiction, and on veracity of repeals.

2. Moderators enforce rules: The Moderator team will continue to enforce the new ruleset.

Why Not?: The existing ruleset has been refined over a long period of time, and found solutions to countless issues and corner cases. While it may not be universally accessible, many find it an enjoyable challenge to navigate the current restrictions, and the result is that proposals that do reach WA Delegates for consideration are of a high standard, which helps to maintain a coherent body of work. If the ruleset is less stringent, WA Delegates may approve poor proposals, which could be voted into law.

Proposal 3: WA Secretariat Voting Recommendations

Target Improvement: Despite its impact on thousands of nations, most have little awareness of the General Assembly's main affairs, including any relevant debate, history, or discussion of At-Vote Resolutions. They lack ready access to information on the merits of proposals or on wider legislative agendas at play, and there is no frictionless pathway for drawing them into it.

By bringing debate directly into gameside WA pages, more players can be invited to explore the GA's depths. By establishing a process for electing Secretariat members with the right to post on those pages, we increase general interest in General Assembly affairs. Having convenient access to Secretariat voting recommendations will provide WA member nations with a new level of reasoned opinion to help guide their vote, and may decrease their tendency to follow whichever way the voting happens to be going, leading to more interesting votes.

Actions:

1. World Assembly Secretariat: Create a new group of five positions, including Secretariat-General and four regular members, who have the power to embed dispatches directly into At-Vote Resolution pages. It is broadly intended that these dispatches will lay out the case for or against (or both), but the WA Secretariat will have significant scope to determine their own protocol, e.g. a majority opinion plus a dissent, or something else.

2. Elections:

   • Elections are held every 6 months for five positions on the World Assembly Secretariat. The candidate with the most votes becomes the Secretary-General, and the second most the Deputy Secretary-General. The remaining three are regular WA Secretariat members.

   • The election mechanics used in previous Secretary-General elections will be used, reduced to two rounds of 24 hours. After the first round, only the top 25 get through. In the second round, the candidates are listed in order of votes received in the previous round; candidates eliminated in the first round (or who did not enter it) may not enter at a later stage.

   • Nations are eligible to run if they are World Assembly members, five endorsements, and submit a campaign bulletin.

   • Only World Assembly member nations with a population of 30+ million may vote in the elections.

   • Each member of the Secretariat can provide a voting recommendation on each proposal that reaches the voting floor, prominently listed beside the proposal. This can link to a dispatch. The Secretary-General's recommendation is the most prominent.

   • An "Events" telegram filter will be introduced for telegrams campaigning to avoid the previous challenges from regular WA Campaign TGs being blocked en-masse.

   • Regions may "boost" for a candidate, to show their support for their campaign.

Why Not?: Any popularly elected candidate may be motivated by factors other than their altruistic love of high-quality legislation. Poor or inactive candidates would not be able to be replaced quickly. Moderators or staff appointees such as GenSec could do the same job.

Proposal 4: Encourage roleplay within the GA forum

Target Improvement: Roleplaying is a major part of NationStates, with a significant portion of players enjoying the color and richness it can bring. Within the forum community, the General Assembly has a long history of roleplay, although not all participants choose to engage with this. Today it is largely restricted to proposal threads and the Strangers' Bar. Occasionally site staff have discouraged attempts at roleplaying in other threads. This limits the depth to any roleplaying, and well as impacting its appeal, as it can be subsumed by politicking in voting threads.

Actions:

1. Encourage roleplay threads: Players are permitted to post relevant roleplay threads in the General Assembly forum, even when not about a specific legislative effort.

Why Not?: Those who don't like roleplaying may not want to see the GA forum cluttered up with threads of no interest. When RP and no-RP threads exist in the same forum side by side, there is inevitable leakage, as players don't notice which one they're in, which can be destructive to immersion, and require additional moderation.

Proposal 5: Bespoke statistical effects

Target Improvement: Today, GA proposals must select from a very limited set of statistical effects, which straightjackets what authors can cover in their proposals. The effects of proposals are not coded in a consistent manner with issues effects, which sometimes causes hostility from players who encounter stats changes they don't feel were fairly signposted by the text of resolutions. Category effects also lack finesse, and therefore only vaguely reflect the legislative intent of the author.

As an example, under this proposal, a resolution that implements a universal healthcare system will enable the nation policy "Universal Health Care" -- today, this is not possible via a General Assembly resolution covering the same topic.

Actions:

1. Removal of category system: Allow authors wide-ranging freedom to cover a broader range of topics, as well as to author proposals that cover multiple fields.

2. Bespoke statistical effects: A staff team will craft statistical effects for each proposal. This team will be composed primarily of Issues Editors, supported by the Tech team. We are open to recruiting additional General Assembly experienced players to assist with these duties.

3. Display effects of resolutions: A new page will allow players to review recent stats changes in their nations, whether from issues or General Assembly resolutions. This shows the same depth of changes as players currently get immediately after answering an issue.

4. New quorum procedure: The coding of stats will begin when a proposal reaches quorum, and can be finalized at any time between then and when a proposal reaches the voting floor. It is anticipated that proposals with a low likelihood of attaining quorum will have their stats coded later or not at all.

Why Not?: This proposal adds significant overhead to the process of passing a Resolution, which may prove difficult to sustain. It creates potential tension between proposal authors and those who codify their stats. It may create uncertainty, with WA Delegates not wanting to approve a proposal until they know what its stats will be.

Proposal 6: Reworked user interface for WA pages

Target Improvement: The in-game World Assembly pages are amongst the oldest parts of the site. Lists of resolutions and proposals were designed for a much smaller set of content. It is a challenge for players to identify which resolutions are in effect, and to find out what areas have been covered by legislation already. There is no obvious pathway between resolutions and related forum discussions or dispatches, which constricts and fragments debate and discussion.

Actions:

1. Resolution Search: Allow gameside World Assembly resolutions to be searched by keyword.

2. Resolution Filters: Allow displayed resolutions (either all, or search results) to be filtered based on repealed status, and author.

3. Forum links: Allow authors to enter a topic ID for submitted proposals to link to their existing forum thread; if one is not entered, then auto-create a forum discussion thread upon the proposal being deemed legal. The link to this thread is displayed clearly on gameside pages for all legal proposals.

4. Dispatch links: Auto-create a Dispatch tag for all new (legal) proposals, so that relevant voting recommendations on a proposal can be tagged with this, and be accessed via a gameside link adjacent to the proposal.

We are working to the following timescales that allow for full consideration of our proposals as well as achievable development time:

• Aug - Sep: player feedback on this working paper

• Oct: internal discussion and final decisions

• Nov: final announcement

• Dec - May: implementation of agreed changes

• Jun - project concludes with implementation of "Blank Slate".

(Note that these are subject to change depending on the package of changes that it is decided to implement.)

This Working Paper is the result of sustained development by many people, and its proposals exist because we believe they will make significant positive changes to the General Assembly. We are running a lengthy period of player feedback to surface issues and ideas we haven't thought of, and to modify, rework, or even drop proposals accordingly. As such, at time of publication all of the above should be considered planned but not set in stone.

Please note development decisions are not based on perceived popularity nor the intensity of any objections, but on the merits of arguments made.

GA 2026 Discussion Thread