[pp.int.general] Next PPI Conference in Brussels!

[Hans Häggström]

I too agree that we should decide on the purpose and focus of the PPI
organization first, as it can help suggest how it is best to organize.

Patrick has a good list of goals that are related to internal
communication, sharing best practices, and helping new parties form.

Another very important function is outward communication - telling the
world what the pirate ideologies are, and what different pirate
parties are doing and what their status are (so both up-to date long
term progress information, as well as day to day blog updates and
press-releases from different parties).  This part should also be
relatively press-friendly, with free-to-use pictures and persons that
can be contacted for interviews (where applicable), but also be in
blog form, with (possibly moderated) comments, RSS feeds, etc.

In addition I think PPI could help the work of the pirate parties by
organizing, hosting, or just collecting links to fact digging about
various transnational (and maybe national) law proposals, reports, or
law making processes.  E.g. list the different repressive surveillance
laws in different countries / EU that we are trying to stop or
reverse, or beneficial laws that we are trying to push, and our
success and current status with them.  The fact digging may be best to
let happen as a swarm work in various places, without too much attempt
at central direction, other than encouraging, finding, indexing and
collecting it.  Although much of this is specific to one country and
maybe can best be done by the specific pirate party internally, at
least in EU there are a lot of common work, as well as with
transnational proposals such as ACTA.

Technically, those functions can be implemented with a blog, wiki,
mailing list, IRC, and regular off-line meetings.  The last three we
have, while the current site could be split into a separate blog and
wiki (and possibly forums, although they seem to have been unused for
some time).  The role of the PPI teams would then be to maintain the
infrastructure, encourage updating of status information that seems to
have gone outdated, forward blog updates from their parties, and
organize the off-line meetings.  Different groups of people could of
course take care of each type of task.

Looking at PPI like this, it becomes more a facilitator of
communication and collector of information than a policy making body
(as, in the end, each party anyway decides on their policies on their
own).  Hence, PPI could be set up more like a knowledge collecting,
site maintenance, and conference arranging organization.


-- Hans
Finnish Pirate Party member - the expressed views are my own though,
and do not necessarily reflect the views of my party.



On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 9:43 PM, Patrick Mächler v/o
Valio<valio at visionsinteractive.ch> wrote:
> I absolutely agree with Eric.
> But I'm not sure whether the mailing list is the way discuss this issue.
> Maybe the message board is better suited for that?
>
> Anyway...the main goals of PPI in my view are:
> 1. Guarantee communication between all pirate party members and
> affiliates around the world (we already have that more-less with this
> list and the message board)
> 2. Guarantee communication between all pirate party board of directors
> to all members (let them report in a cyclic manner, collect those
> reports in a regular newsletter)
> 3. Organize regular opportunities for delegates [in RL or VL] to
> establish common goals across nations
> 4. Evaluate best practices across nations for party work (such as
> finding new members)
> 5. Coordinate development work with established parties for nations that
> do not have an established party yet.
> 6. Having a database with people, that are very specialized and which
> are hard to get (famous celebrities?)
>
> But point 6 is actually the least important for me; e.g. according to my
> experience, most translation work can actually be done in national
> parties, so I doubt whether it's of that much importance.
>
> cheers
> patrick
>
> Eric Priezkalns wrote:
>> Guys,
>>
>> A word of advice.  One mistake that voluntary organizations make is to
>> focus on things like governance (who gets to attend, who gets to vote,
>> how often you meet) at the expense of purpose (what you intend to achieve).
>>
>> For this reason, before this conversation goes much further, I would
>> like to ask anyone interested to clearly state what they think a PPI
>> committee, a PPI conference, and any other PPI entity/organization/event
>> is intended to achieve.  Can we generate a common agreed list, that
>> briefly and clearly lists somewhere between four and twelve goals to be
>> satisfied by the PPI?  I say this now, because people being unclear
>> about what is meant to be achieved is a common and fundamental reason
>> for why activities like this fail in practice.  Identifying the purpose
>> is also something that can and should be resolved at the very beginning,
>> before other planning takes place.  That way, you can plan to fulfill
>> the purpose.  Choices like who to invite and how decisions get made will
>> probably be different for different kinds of goals.  However, I am
>> currently very unclear about what the PPI is meant to achieve.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Eric
>>
<snip older conversation>