[pp.int.general] 120 Days Left for Utah in the USA

[Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet)]

Hi Ray,

seeing that we had 60 days and still pulled it off (in 45), I certainly
think it can be done - but not without serious effort.

The key is to get attention. And we don't get attention in mainstream
media, that's just not going to happen. Mainstream media reports when we
have already built momentum elsewhere.

You mention that you can gather signatures electronically, but that
3,400 signatures are required. Does that mean you can gather them on a
website? If so, I'd like to point you to this excerpt in the Wikipedia
article for inspiration:

The website for the Pirate Party was opened January 1, 2006 (at 20.30
CEST), starting the foundation of the party. Six phases were presented,
with phase one being the collection of at least 2,000 signatures (500
more than needed) to be handed over to the Swedish Election Authority
before February 4 (while the absolutely last date would be February 28),
so that the party would be allowed to participate in the Swedish general
election of 2006, which took place on September 17. Fewer than 24 hours
after the opening of the website, the party had collected over 2,000
signatures (2,268 at 16.05 CEST).

By the morning of January 3, the party closed the signature collection.
In about 36 hours, they had gathered 4,725 signatures.


This is in a nation with nine million people, and the word of mouth just
spread like wildfire.

You can also gather signatures physically, but it's much harder work.
Our best people could gather about 50 signatures per hour in a city
center. It took the whole organization five weeks of concentrated effort
to pull it off altogether.

My advice for getting the necessary attention to electronic signatures
would be to try to get the story out ("Utah Pirate Party needs your
help") on Digg or Slashdot, once you have the registration mechanism up.
Or maybe even TorrentFreak.

Rick



On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 09:18 -0600, Ray Jenson wrote:

> Hello, Everyone!
> 
> I'm needing a bit of help, and I hope that you can all assist me.
> 
> Today marks a very important day. Today marks 120 days from the deadline
> in February to have all of the signatures ready and counted for Utah to
> be permitted to form the Pirate Party of Utah.
> 
> However, there is a problem. In spite of our attempts to gain some
> measure of attention with the press, it simply hasn't happened. We're
> simply not making enough of a wave to gain the kind of attention we need
> to get people interested and aware. I'm still running into people
> regularly who have never heard of the Pirate Party, or who think that
> we're actually a lobbying group without much in the way of support. We
> aren't making a stir, and so the media just doesn't care. The perception
> is that we simply lack support (though the supporters I have found tend
> to be rather excited-sounding about the idea of there being a political
> party as long as they personally don't need to do anything more than join).
> 
> Truth be told, we are indeed lacking in signatures. We announced 60 days
> ago that we were looking to collect signatures to petition the
> government for political party status. It has not happened yet, and at
> the current rate we're not going to qualify.
> 
> What I need from everyone are some ideas about how to generate enough
> publicity to make this happen. I'm completely out of ideas, and the
> press just is not interested in publishing stories, because all of the
> press in Utah is currently owned by members of one or the other major
> parties. Except for my own newspaper, which is not yet publishing due to
> my lack of money, but which I hope to be having soon.
> 
> I hope to hear any ideas soon, as this second 60 days needs to move
> much, much faster. Official count on the signatures has not yet reached
> 50 out of 2000 needed. If we go with electronic signatures, we need
> 3,400 instead of 2,000, according to the current Lieutenant Governor's
> rules.
> 
> Thank you, anyone and all.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Ray Jenson
> Interim Administrator
> Pirate Party of Utah.
> ____________________________________________________
> Pirate Parties International - General Talk
> pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.pirateweb.net/pipermail/pp.international.general/attachments/20071017/e22d4a02/attachment.htm