[pp.int.general] Pirate Party Italy, you're doing well !

[carlo von lynX]

Well, thanks for the flowers.. happy new year to you, too!

I'll dare to take a dive into replying to you since we are
so few now, we stopped yelling at each other when somebody
takes an initiative..  ;)  Still the problem of legitimacy
is more aware then ever and changes are coming.

Just two days ago the new statutes came into power, although
we haven't written down many of the regulatory details yet,
so we are in a phase of transition just now.

There's a lot to be said about these statutes and we had a
plan of writing up a long explanatory document with practical
historic examples of where things went wrong and how the new
statutes would address such issues.... but we are currently a
bit out of breath.. collectively.


On Sat, Jan 03, 2015 at 05:11:07PM +0100, hyazinthe at emailn.de wrote:
> Why ? Because any kind of decisions you take you don't leave up to single persons voted into a federal executive board or parliament, but
> leave it to your party basis by eDemocracy tools – at least more than other pirate parties. I know, that this has advantages but also disadvantages,
> but from my experience it has one huge advantage, which is worth it to head for this direction of a party basis ruling into classical power points:
> You don't want your representatives to take up positions, which differ from the consensus of the party basis or even the pirate party manifesto;
> if this happens, it creates scandals, a huge drop of motivation in the party basis, distraction from political work, etc.

Actually we've had the same kind of scandals and drops of
motivation issues as most other PPs have experienced as well -
in fact we lost 80% of the people that we had in 2012 -
but at least we didn't carry our internal troubles into
the general public - so the brand is still viable in Italy -
and we DID achieve one thing: All the time since we launched
the permanent assembly we have never had a factual leadership
person, just a dozen of eccentrics, me included, acting more
or less visibly in the name of everyone. So we failed at a lot
of things except for avoiding serious hierarchical structures.

> If you don't set up your representatives as a 'proxy server' of what the party basis decides, there is no way to avoid this critical point.
> What do you want to do instead ? Ask the person 'will you live or pirate party manifesto in every detail of what you're doing as a pirate representative ?' ?
> Of course, all asked persons will say 'Yes, I do', but that won't keep them from doing what they want, even if it is not in consensus with the pirate basis or
> pirate party manifesto. They will say 'I'm a free representative; that's important for a functioning representative democracy. I'm just making use of
> my independancy.' . In theory, this standpoint is totally true – I've had this standpoint for a long time – but when you see people with this theoretically
> good standpoint failing in practice, because they dare one fuck-up with everything, which is important to the pirate party basis, after another, then you
> see, that this standpoint might be a good one theoretically, but not practically.

Indeed. The only time I stood up for candidacy was in 2010 for
the now Berlin parliament, and I "campaigned" on the idea that
I would always trust the collective intelligence of the piraten
and only apply my own opinion in case of visible failure of the
collective intelligence mechanism. Even though LQFB had worked
extremily well and provided us with the amazing programme that
led us into the Berlin parliament, the consensus at the time was
to trust the individuals to use their own heads. In practice,
Berlin pirates chose to trust the old representative democracy
model more than its own principles of innovation. Our parliamen-
taries soon after entering the parliament even developed this 
broken ideology of representing an entire slice of the population
and thus not being solely representatives of the pirate party.
That is humbug, since the people elected them not as single
individuals but as representatives of the pirate party - and
exactly for the promise of doing politics differently.

So yes, I would say we missed the opportunity to do politics
differently then everybody else. We could have put more trust
into the collective - LQFB only started to bring in bad results
*after* the preconditions for its proper use had been compromised.
The moment we started disregarding LQFB votes and rather vote
something else at the large assemblies, we kicked our innovation
potential into the rear. No surprise motivation dropped and
results were no longer as strong as in 2010.

In Italy we also messed with the quality of LQFB by allowing
for people to register their friends for as cheap as 10 euros,
then have them delegate their vote and not contribute a single
gesture of interest in the pirate movement. That led to quite
some dramatic problems of democratic balance for a few years.
We took some provisions in the new statutes to ensure people
actually do contribute before they are entitled to take
decisions. The other problem our LQFB had was that we never
reached at least a thousand participants. LQFB needs large
numbers to really rock, at least concerning creativity and
competence on issues.

> If you have problems with your strongly basisdemocratic eDemocracy structure, Pirate Party Italy, then work on it. Don't just
> consider yourself as a web user of a fancy eDemocracy tool, be a developer. Or if you can't code, then be the one who does all the
> work around the coding, so that the coders have a free back for focussing just on coding.
> Be critical but also optimistic in your work, because what you do is the peak of democracy development of the complete human history – so, big and important stuff.

Wow, now that is a strong statement. Thank you. I hope
we're not off-balance to assume there has never been a human
organization with a statutory architecture like ours before
in history, so again we are venturing into new territory.

The new statutes introduce a complex system of checks and
balances with new organs checking up on each other. We hope
it will not become too bureaucratic. Essentially we have 
split the job of a traditional board into many separate
organs. Here a rough list:

- Council of Integrity, in charge of ensuring the decisions
  of the permanent assembly are legal according to its own
  regulations and having the last word on the interpretation
  of assemblary decision texts.
- Coordination group, in charge of looking after all the
  many specialists that took on some job on behalf of the
  assembly and making sure things do actually get done.
  No decision-making power however, just glory on success.
- Vibes watchers: wherever more than two pirates work together,
  be it in an online medium or a physical meeting, they have
  to elect a person which is in charge of keeping the working
  atmosphere positive. It is their duty to suspend anyone who
  counteracts this, for example by kickstarting a shitstorm
  on Twitter.
- Council of Arbitration, treats cases when pirates feel they
  have been treated injustly by any of the other organs.

That's a hint at how we try to relaunch the PP-IT. With the
current crises of both the left (Tsipras) and the Five Star
Movement there are once again a lot of smart political youth
looking for a political home. This can be a huge advantage
compared to the situation in Germany. If the PP-IT can offer
a pleasant professional ambience to do political work and
at the same time be totally uninteresting for people who
like to dictate policy onto others, given the bureaucratic
hurdles to imposition, that would be quite a neat hack.

So getting back to the representivity problem, while in a
traditional political party the board and the electeds
interpret assemblary decisions at their discretion and,
unless pluralism has been slashed down by strong leadership
figures and a culture of sacking anyone who dares to speak
up, communicate their view of things also to the media,
in our constellation the Council of Integrity has the last
word on the interpretation of the assembly and thus there 
should no longer be boards and electeds throwing opposing 
views of reality at each other in public.

We seperate the ones doing the talking from the ones having 
the last word. We'll see how it works out. Maybe it's just 
the next generation of utter madness.  ;)


-- 
	    http://youbroketheinternet.org
 ircs://psyced.org/youbroketheinternet