State of the Nation - June 2010

Greetings all,

Here is the Byzantium Novum status report for June, 2010:

Although the Summer months are traditionally the slowest for the Internet, Byzantium Novum is continuing to do well.

We currently have a total of 65 Citizens, which is an average of 11 Citizens per month since our official founding. That number is well above average for micronational projects. With that number of citizens and our stable and growing infrastructure (including a professional web site, active forums, and professional advertising) we're easily already in the top 25 percent of the most successful MicroNations in world history. Not bad for our first six months!

Our biggest success in the last month has been Citizen participation in advertising Byzantium Novum in their local area on Craig's List. This has raised our public profile considerably and we've gained several new Citizens as a result. THANK YOU to everyone who has been willing to participate! Byzantium Novum will continue to grow if we continue to do this... :)

We have continued to advertise in other places as well, and as of this morning Byzantium Novum has 1,090 "friends" on Facebook. We're doing what we can to get the word out that Byzantium is coming back to life!

There will be at least some small updates to the main website shortly, and I'm working on getting a map up to show where we now have Citizens all over the world.

In other good news we have Citizens working on forming at least three Provinces now. Effort is continuing to bring Byzantium Novum into the "real world". Local, face-to-face Byzantine community is crucial to all of this so it's great to see interest in building locally. It is my sincere hope that by this time next year, local gatherings and meetings will be happening regularly in some of our Byzantine Provinces!

In closing I'd like to give my sincere thanks to everyone who is participating, and just as importantly, to everyone who is continuing to be patient as Byzantium Novum grows. We grow and become a bit stronger every month... but we're still in a precarious position. Our community still exists mostly on the Internet, where "instant gratification" is the standard. It has been wonderful to see that folks here understand that building a community takes time and regular participation. Thank you all! :)

-Marcus Cassius Julianus
Senator