On October 12, 2017 we celebrated Founding Day. One of the featured offerings on founding day was the infographic that looked back at some of the things that Asgardia had achieved and some of the things that were in progress and in my founding-day address I said that it had been a great year but there was still “A lot to do” and that we needed to make this a “great year for Asgardia.”

It came to mind that on traditional ‘new year’ events, it’s a time for reflections and resolutions and while it’s become a bit of a running joke that people don’t follow through with their resolutions, I think that it’s a helpful exercise.

And so for the next year ahead of us, there are my Asgardian Resolutions:

1. Start an Asgardian not-for-profit business.
2. Run for a position in Parliament.
3. Continue with my plans to learn and develop Virtual Reality.
4. Continue to volunteer for Civic Asgardia

My resolution is to continue to work to make Asgardia a success and for it to be taken seriously. I want to organise people and inspire them to continue working. I don’t want our prototype space nation to fizzle out and I certainly don’t want someone to beat us to our goals.

What about you? If you have any reflections or resolutions, why not leave them in the comments section below.

I am currently running as a strategist, please take a couple of minutes to look at my candidate profile and lend me your support.

By Ross Cheeseright, Parliamentary Candidate | November 11, 2017

Introduction

All around the world campaigns are used as a way for the many to pick the few. The purpose of a campaign is to connect with those many people and help them to understand why you should be chosen to represent them.

The purpose of this article is to help you prepare a successful campaign and to give you a checklist of things that you must do in order to achieve success.

Know the Requirements

When you enter into a campaign race, there will be certain requirements that you must meet in order to be eligible such as a minimum age, pre-existing support or nationality.

Asgardia’s requirements for running for parliament are as follows:

1. You do not need to physically reside in your electoral district, but prospective MPs are required to have fluency in the language of the district they are representing.
   1. Language proficiency will be assessed by the Central Election Committee.
2. You must have a fully completed campaign profile which you clearly describe your platform (we’ll talk about this later.) and the goals that you will try to accomplish.
3. Campaign profiles can be edited for 30 days prior to the conclusion of the elections, if a candidate changes their profile, voters will be notified and will have the right to give their votes to a different candidate.
4. You must provide a headshot photo
5. You must provide a CV/Resume
6. You must supply a copy of an official identification document
7. You must provide two recommendations.

You can learn more here: https://asgardia.space/en/elections/

Be Serious

It almost goes without saying that you shouldn’t be running in an election for fun . Should you achieve a positive outcome, you will be expected to work and to make good on the promises that you made to those that voted for you. You should be running only if you have a genuine desire to use your skills to help your community achieve incredible things.

Your campaign platform.

If you plan to run, then you must have a platform . A platform is a political plan on which you will base your campaign.

Step One
You need to identify the audience that you want to connect with. Is it a specific niche of voters? Is it people that strongly believe in something? Is it a certain Age group?

Step Two
You need to understand your audience and create a message that will resonate with them. Something that will speak to your audience and help you connect with them. For instance, former US President Barack Obama pushed his platform on ‘hope’ to people tired of the way things were and change with slogans like “Yes we can.” And “Change we can believe in”

Step Three
Find out which of your principles suits that message – find the commonality with what you want to achieve and what your target audience wants. For instance, if you want to focus on bringing education to the population and you’re targeting young voters you might find a lot of synergy there.

Step Four
Find a way to articulate your message in a way that is both specific enough to attract an audience but don’t get bogged down in being too precise or technical at this stage. Leave some room in your platform to make amendments and have positive debates.

When you write up your platform you should make sure that you're putting thought into it. You should take time to write it well and ensure that you're sharing the key values that you believe in and the key actions that you will take for your supporters.

This is your chance not only to share your platform, but also to show the world and the elections committee that you are a serious candidate.

Building Momentum

Now that you have a campaign, you know your target audience and you have a message or slogan that you can use to build up support, it’s time to get down to work.

Building campaign momentum and gathering support and votes is the hardest part of the campaign race and having a strategy on how you will do this is very important.

Here are some ideas of how you can build momentum:

1. Use Social Media to share messages of your campaign, connect with your audience and share your ‘message’ or ‘slogan’. Doing this will help people to become familiar with and build up trust. The more they trust you, the more likely they will be to vote for you.
2. Listen to your audience – As a candidate, it will be your job to represent your voters, of course you’ll need to put your message across, but you’ll also need to listen to their needs. Schedule sessions with your supporters to hear what they want.
   1. Make it easy for your voters to get in touch with you.
   2. Set up a Q&A session.
   3. “Go live.” On Facebook and invite people to come and ask you questions.
3. Meet people from your community and discuss matters with them on a personal level. That one person that you connect with could later bring you 10 voters.
4. Be active! People need to see you out there, being active and working. If they can see that you’re hard at work, then they’re more likely to believe that you’ll work hard for them.

Get support

You don’t need to run your campaign alone and you have finite energy to give. A great way to run a successful campaign is to have help from volunteers or staff. A good network of people to help share your message, get people engaging in the conversation, keeping track of everything, taking messages, gathering up questions will help you take your campaign to the next level without completely draining yourself.

It’s important to know your limits. Pushing yourself during a campaign period is normal, but don’t push yourself so far that you risk your health.

And that's about it for the basics! So get out there and start shaking hands and kissing babies as you make your way along your own campaign trail. If you have any questions, you can post them in the comments section below and I'll be happy to discuss.

Here are my qualifications: I am an Environmental Engineer. I have trained over 2,000 Farmers across 7 villages in 3 languages on new and improved Forestry techniques in West Africa. I am currently a project manager on multi million dollar projects.

Let's make the dream of Asgardia a reality!

Hello Asgardian, I am Mr. Kohinur Guha representing the Space Nation Asgardia from New Delhi, India. The responsibility towards building of this space nation in every aspects is a challenging task. But I believe if everyone participate and contribute their few time, we can make this nation a heaven for our future generation. I have a vast experience in project management as an Engineer. So I believe that my experience will be very helpful for every Asgardian to lead their dream in right way. If I elected, during my term I will try to contribute towards youth education, research, bringing more space related project from worldwide to create job for everybody and revenue for nation. A free internet access for all Asgardian in near future.

We passed the first elections to the Parliament, but we all passed and remained candidates, as announced before the elections. Some of us, about 60 people from the past to the Parliament, have united on a temporary platform allowing to engage in joint debates and discussions.
But all our work in fact has not yet a legal basis, because we have not finished before the elections, and the inauguration of the chapter in Vienna and the approval of the composition of the Parliament. Yet we are encouraged to discuss the first three laws that will be considered by Parliament at the first session at the end of June,
As you may have heard or know, most laws are initiated from below, either by initiative groups, by lobbyists, or by executive power. On this, I would like to know the opinion of our voters, as you think, what bills we need for asgardii. Express our dear citizens. I would like to understand your needs and wishes. It is very likely that your initiatives would form the basis for drafting the first 3 laws or bills of Asgardia.

Help me to reach 2nd position <3 I will vote for you back <3 Im to young to deserve a place as a goverment, but also believe in myself that in the future I can make everyones lifes equal and do everything for Asgardia to become true. As much as I believe in you all... let me know and I will vote for you!! Per aspera Ad astra!! through hardships to the stars <3

I was thinking I know we won't get to space in my lifetime as a whole county but for the future of our children, who will likely achieve our goals of independence from Earth, their bodies wouldn't take the stress of eating Earth food, e.i. Hamburgers and stuff to processed food from Agricultural farms up there, if we could start to develop plans to make that food available now we could alter our diet to a more course mix of fruits grains, nuts and a lil meat so our bodies can adapt to that and our DNA for that will carry over. Make it easier for them to thrive. But this is all food for thought* I'm not a scientist or anything like that. Just a concerned Asgardian.