Then came the CEI and suddenly we had huge groups that were not (or barely) involved in Colonia before being given the chance to create a bubble 2.0.
Or were they?
The early CGs to rescue Jaques had ten thousand participants. CCN at the time had maybe a thousand people on the discord server, most of whom wouldn't consider their primary loyalty to CCN itself. The other ninety percent? A lot of those will have been associated with groups which later became part of the CEI. A substantial portion of CCN's membership were from groups like SEPP, Galcop, etc. Those people hauling hundreds of tonnes of low-supply rares 22,000 LY were doing it because [1] - like we did - they believed in Colonia, its potential, and its future. Many of the CEI factions ran their own expeditions and events - Eol Prou Group organised the Hyponia Horizons expedition, taking advantage of Colonia's location to map the edges of that mysterious sector, for example.
The diversity of the CEI is certainly imperfect - as you say, there's no real forum for independent individual Colonia residents to speak up about the direction of travel, but then, there never really was (not that it stops either of us, of course) - but it is a large improvement on the more limited diversity of the CCN. When I've suggested ways that Colonia could be developed further in a player-led fashion, I've always been careful to leave room for independent residents to contribute to the direction for that reason.
The Jaques Accords (by which I mean the political events around their creation, not the largely irrelevant text of the document itself) replaced the attempted hegemony of the original CCN with a more limited scope CEI. CCN's projects like the mapping project, expeditions, events, etc. could all have in theory continued entirely unaffected by that, but in practice CCN's other projects were already starting to collapse because
1) CCN's leadership [2] were too focused on a futile and entirely unnecessary attempt to "keep the peace between the CEI groups" [3] and not focused enough on what
else CCN could valuably bring to the region as it had in the early days.
2) CCN's insistence that it was "a network" and not "a player group" while simultaneously having more roles, ranks, committees, diplomatic relationships, etc. than most people could count and in all practical respects acting like a player group ended up being fatally self-destructive over what should have been the very simple question of "is it okay for CCN's members to brutally murder each other?". Actual player groups who admit that's what they are either answer 'yes' or 'no' to that question very quickly and move on [4] ... CCN spent weeks publicly and self-destructively debating the question (much to the amusement of the group doing the shooting, I'm sure), narrowly voted "yes", then immediately launched into a second round of debate because the losing side felt that the question hadn't been framed properly / the murderers themselves shouldn't have had a vote / they still didn't like being shot at.
There wasn't a lot left after that ... but it wasn't the fault of the CEI groups, who have collectively done a lot for the region since then. I've hauled alongside members of pretty much every CEI group at the various CGs which established and developed the region ... the badly-needed Whirling Station only happened because Galcop pushed for it and made the narrative around it interesting enough for Frontier to pick it up ... the Tenjin Pioneers Colonia put their takeover of Kojeara on hold for weeks to avoid interfering with a CG there ... members of multiple groups contributed alongside many independents to the initial engineering projects I coordinated ... various expeditions and events and so on.
We all have different views on exactly how the region should develop, both in terms of direction and in terms of method of determination of that direction (and I doubt most of the CEI groups agree with
each other on a lot of that). But we are all here for Colonia, for a new settlement free from the old superpowers.
[1] Well, okay, except for the one obvious exception
[2] To which I had recently been appointed. The reason I know just how badly the leadership were messing things up was because a few of those mistakes - with the best of intentions, of course - were mine. I foolishly attempted to reconcile CCN's multiple competing visions for itself into something at least internally consistent ... and the act of actually writing that down just exposed the contradictions and blew the whole thing up.
[3] The phrase "you and whose army?" wasn't used during that discussion, as far as I recall, for sound diplomatic reasons. But it was, essentially, the key point of debate.
[4] Mostly "no", of course.
![[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos](https://d2aefvhu2f0gi9.cloudfront.net/data/avatars/m/234/234580.jpg?1612617334){kind=avatar}
to the future, whatever it may hold.
