[pp.int.general] Democracy in PPI

[W Tovey]

Thank you for your comments here; PPI certainly welcomes any feedback 
and (constructive) criticism and I will attempt to answer as many of 
your points as I can. As you are aware (but for anyone else reading this 
thread) I was also actively involved in founding PPUK but have since 
focussed more on PPI.

Communication:
PPI is doing everything it reasonably can to communicate with PP 
leaders. Looking back through my email history I see direct discussions 
with the leadership of at least 9 parties within the last week alone. As 
I hope this reply demonstrates, we do read the list, do respond to email 
and (dare I say it, unlike the majority of the PPUK board) are 
frequently found on IRC. I understand your concern over actively talking 
to party leaders ourselves and to that end we have established a mailing 
list of Pirate Party leaders and international coordinators that has 
been fairly successful. We have contact details for about thirty parties 
on it, although only two-thirds have been confirmed so far. We have been 
using this list to send information to and seek input from party 
leaders. Unfortunately, this list is only as good as the addresses on 
it. Certainly the initial list had several inaccuracies (it was compiled 
by me spending a weekend hunting through all the pirate party websites I 
could find - and in some cases, IRC channels - to get contact details) 
but we are gradually improving it. Hopefully once we have statutes and 
are in a position to set up an official member list we should be able to 
establish more concrete contact details. For now though, I think the 
most important point on this is as follows:

**If you are a party leader and have not been hearing from PPI over the 
last few weeks, please contact me directly as soon as possible.**
**If you are a party member and do not think your party leaders have 
been hearing form PPI, please talk to them and point them towards us.**

One particular worry is that our messages are being marked as spam. 
After being surprised not to here from Andy (PPUK leader) I contacted 
him through the PPUK forum to check if he was getting our emails and it 
turned out they were being spam-filtered and/or automatically deleted. I 
hope that has now been fixed; in particular, he should have been getting 
all the emails since then. If he has not been passing that information 
on to the other PPUK exec committee (which may be the case) that would 
seem to be an issue beyond PPI's control. I recently talked to one 
member of the committee about this and hopefully it will be looked into 
at the next meeting. Unfortunately I can't go through every pirate party 
in this way, so I would like to re-emphasis what I said above. In some 
cases, pirate leaders have been too busy to respond to PPI emails, in 
which case, we strongly recommend establishing some form of 
international coordinator but if that is done, it is important that you 
try to let us know (and I am grateful to those parties who have done so).

**I would advise all pirates, especially pirate leaders to consider 
adding @pp-international.net to their spam-filter white-lists.**

Currently only the five Coreteam members and a couple of supporting 
pirates have accounts on this domain and if people are receiving spam 
from it, let us know and we will do what we can to fix the situation. I 
am aware that the current methods of communication between PPI and 
pirate leaders is not perfect, but we are improving the system all the 
time. In order to improve this, we do need active help from within the 
individual pirate parties.

Conference scheduling:
The mailing list above was used to discuss the date for the conference. 
We received feedback from about a dozen pirate parties (PPUK was not one 
of them) and decided on the date in April based on those responses. 
Obviously this date may be problematic for some individual pirates or 
parties, but I am sure you are aware of the problems with finding any 
one date that everyone can make. With the UK, this is likely my fault; I 
had assumed that our general election would be in May or June (with the 
government trying to hold on for as long as possible and hope the 
opposition screw something up) in which case, a large, press-friendly 
event a few weeks before may help the campaign. As was mentioned in the 
original announcement, PPI hopes to offer significant funding for the 
delegates, although we have yet to get all the details. As with all PPI 
involvement, I suppose it is down to the individual party to decide 
whether sending delegates to a PPI event is a suitable use of their time 
and resources. PPI cannot, does not and will not force involvement 
either with the conference or PPI.

Point of the conference itself:
There are many reasons for (and against) holding a "real life" 
conference, many of which you are likely aware of from the similar 
debate within PPUK recently. Several PPI conferences have already taken 
place over the last 3 years and were found to be useful - although none 
was on the scale we are hoping for. Being old is not automatic grounds 
for dismissal. I am aware that Europe is not the centre of the world but 
(as much as I'd like to from a scientific point of view) we cannot hold 
the meeting at the centre. Brussels contains the headquarters of several 
international organisations and is easily accessible from a large number 
of countries (including the UK; it takes less than two hours to get 
there from London on the train). PPI is aware that travel costs may 
discourage pirates from more distant countries from attending and are 
actively looking into obtaining funding for them. Having said that, we 
have received interest from pirates in Canada, Mexico and Australia. It 
is also worth considering that Europe likely holds the most dense 
concentration of pirate parties. Obviously, we will do whatever we can 
to ensure that any member party not represented in person at the 
conference is able to participate as much as possible (including being 
able to vote) but I hope you are able to see that there are more reasons 
to attend in person that just to vote. It is likely that the majority of 
votes on PPI issues will be carried out online. [On a more general note, 
there is already a "Pirate Party of Europe" and "IberoPanamerican Forum" 
within the pirate movement.]

Delegate allocation:
I think that do some extent you answered your own question here; there 
is no easy way to fairly assign 'value' to member parties. By giving 
equal power to all member parties, we avoid the issue. If we went on 
population size, then we would have a PPI controlled mainly by the US 
and Russia (neither of whom seem to be particularly active on the 
international level at the moment). If we go by member size we have bias 
creeping in based on membership requirements, local laws or even 
foundation date. The current Coreteam feels that the equal-votes system 
is sensible - if individual parties feel that this is not the case and 
can offer a better method, we (and our successors) will certainly be 
willing to listen. Personally, I feel that this system is sensible as, 
in its current form (or planned form), PPI will be of most help to the 
smaller parties; the larger ones will have greater resources to solve 
problems on their own without help from PPI. The more powerful parties 
may also have greater indirect influence over decisions so I think this 
system is suitably balanced but I will welcome any suggestions. It is 
also worth remembering that PPI (in its current form) is not a political 
or authoritative organisation; to use a rather UK-centric analogy, I see 
PPI as working more along the lines of the Commonwealth of Nations than 
the UN.

Summary:
While I understand your reluctance to get involved with PPI, I think it 
is important to realise that PPI can't benefit national parties unless 
some effort is put into it. At the moment PPI is in a very early stage 
(it currently consists of five people and a website) but I hope your 
experience with PPUK and with the pirate movement in general has shown 
that even from small beginnings, a large difference can be made. 
Ignoring affairs on the international level could be seen as a 
particularly UKIPian approach and I hope that was not what you wished to 
imply. PPI has already got at least one extra vote for PPUK - I only 
discovered the UK party through PPI - but I think that we must remember 
that no one country can achieve many of the goals of the pirate 
movement. International co-operation between parties will be crucial to 
combating the various treaties and organisations (such as ACTA and the 
WIPO) that are behind current laws. Even if PPUK were to somehow win the 
upcoming general election, I think it would find it very hard to achieve 
its goals of drastically reducing copyright without serious consequences 
(fines etc.) from WIPO and the EU. While each individual country has its 
own laws and issues to deal with, I think it would be naive to ignore 
the global issues. As another (UK-centric) example, it is entirely 
possible that the pirate movement as a whole may find itself with more 
MEPs than any one UK party at the next European election and so would 
arguably have more power over the country. For these reasons I have 
decided to focus my personal efforts on establishing a strong, 
functional and effective PPI, rather than focussing entirely on PPUK 
(although I do wish I could do both and regret not being able to put as 
much into PPUK as I would like).

I hope that I have answered or cleared up most of the issues you have; 
if you feel otherwise or have any further points, I will gladly continue 
this discussion. PPI is actively seeking input on a number of issues 
from all pirates (and others) and we are always happy to hear from and 
respond to queries and suggestions.

Will Tovey
Chief Administrative Officer, PPI
http://www.pp-international.net