State of the Nation - February 2011

Greetings all,

As of this month Byzantium Novum is one year old! February of 2011 has been a productive month and it is good to see business continuing in spite of the poor weather where many of our Citizens reside.

Byzantium Novum is now up to 150 official Citizens, so we've reached a fairly milestone number! We currently have 1,786 Facebook "friends" which also gives us an increasing public forum for announcements and publishing information.

Advertising efforts on CraigsList and other forums seems to have lagged somewhat, but efforts will continue in March to find new Citizens for our community. The online ads DO work, and the new Citizens do seem to be coming from where advertising has been done. Once again, we ask our Citizens to please keep up posting ads - this is the ONLY way Byzantium Novum is currently growing as we've had to step down on paid Internet marketing!

The big news this month is that we've been *very* fortunate to have ten Citizens volunteer to officially serve Eparchs in the new Provincial territories! This is excellent news in that it will give us ten real-world areas where people are working for local recruitment and organization. The vote on this is almost complete in the Senate.

I'm also proud to say that Byzantium Novum also has in the works the founding of our first Provincial Colony... an area where there are enough Citizens living locally to each other to set up real world local meetings and such. This is a wonderful sign of our international Byzantine community growing to the point of local participation!

A handbook for local Provinces is still in progress so there will be plenty of information on "what to do" as more of our Citizens can meet and work on rebuilding Byzantium in the real world.

As we enter March 2011 we begin our first month of our second year. I just want to thank everyone again for making our first year a success. We are continuing to set a great foundation for a real revival of Byzantine civilization!

-Marcus Cassius Julianus
Senate President
Byzantium Novum