[pp.int.general] Formal protest from Pirate Party Australia

[Simon Frew]

Below is an official mail sent to the Board of PPI.

We have yet to receive any sort of acknowledgement that it was received or
discussed by the Board. So in the interests of transparency I thought the
best course of action was to post it to the general discussion list as the
formal means of communication seem to be failing.

Greetings

I am writing on behalf of Pirate Party Australia to lodge a formal protest
concerning the conduct of the previous two Pirate Party International
General Assemblies and the malaise it has caused within our organisation.

The problem is exacerbated by the lack of response to the resignation of
the Court of Arbitration. The CoA should be working to address the root
causes of the in-fighting that is a feature of the PPI discussion lists
over the last months and could provide added insight into these feuds and
to help bring them to a resolution.

The threat to sue the CoA illustrates problems within PPI. The Constitution
is being routinely ignored. The threat itself demonstrates a lack of
respect for the rules governing the International. How can an organisation
function when a body elected to apply the constitution is threatened with
Lawyers when they make a decision a member Party doesn't like?

The Constitution states that only one member be allowed from each country,
yet we have two parties from Spain. From a historical perspective this is
an understandable decision, so it raises the need to address this in the
Constitution as the decision itself is unconstitutional.

The above examples show a disregard for the statutes and decision making
processes agreed upon at the first GA. It is perfectly fine to radically
change the statutes if the current model is not working, it is not fine to
ignore it when its inconvenient. This sort of disregard of due process is
the sort of thing that enables corruption to flourish.

The issues that remote delegates experienced at the last General Assembly
were hard to stomach because it was largely a re-run of the problems of the
year before. Remote delegates were ignored, much of the meeting got bogged
down in process and important resolutions were tabled for a whole year so
celebrity speakers could address the meeting. The organisation is not yet
fully formed and getting through motions with ample participation and
debate should be the first and overriding priority. Everything else is just
dressing which can come later.

Addressing these issues is not a matter of holding a PPI congress outside
of Europe, but actually facilitating better participation by remote
delegates. Personally, I think the motivation for the GA to be held outside
of Europe was to make Europeans take remote participation seriously by
creating a much greater need for it to function. The cost of sending
delegates from Australia would run into the multiple thousands of dollars
and is not economically feasible, with this money being much better spent
on campaigns. This is not a cost we *must* incur; remote participation has
a negligible cost and will help out every single Party unable to attend.

PPAU holds our annual congresses with a large amount of participation
online. Being roughly the size of the EU but much more sparsely populated,
we had to get online participation right immediately or we risked
disenfranchising pretty much everyone not from Sydney or the surrounding
areas. Consequently, we'd like to offer the following advice for
facilitating better participation in the next PPI GA based on our success
at facilitating online participation.

The single most important thing is to integrate online participation into
the GA. Assigning one person to monitor IRC is not adequate. Every single
delegate attending, where they are technically able, should log into IRC
and all participate, monitor and share the discussion raised by the remote
delegates to the real-world meeting.

On the technical side it is just a matter of maintaining the streams, which
need to be easily accessible by people with a low technical
proficiency.For example our congress utili
ses a cheap & simple audio/video stream combined with web based IRC client
in one simple web portal. If possible, a projector showing the discussion
on a screen for all to see would also work well. If there is an issue with
people who are not members participating in votes, a password protected
link for a specific official channel can be sent to delegates before the
GA. Time should be left at the end of each item for lag, people still
typing etc. You can get a sense of the amount of lag by the delay in the
online comments and wait accordingly.

We expect better of Pirate Parties International. An umbrella organisation
for the world's Pirate Parties needs to embody Pirate principles. We expect
the organisation to be participatory, not exclusionary. We expect
democracy, transparency and accountability, all of which seem to be
currently lacking.

If this year's GA is not serious about fixing the above problems,
theNational Council of
PPAU will have no choice but to propose withdrawing from the organisation at
our next National Congress.

Regards

Simon Frew

On behalf of Pirate Party Australia
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