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

[hyazinthe at emailn.de]

*read* *fav* ;) ...

--- Ursprüngliche Nachricht ---
Von: carlo von lynX <lynX at pirate.my.buttharp.org>
Datum: 03.01.2015 19:58:30
An: Pirate Parties International -- General Talk 	<pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net>
Betreff: Re: [pp.int.general] Pirate Party Italy, you're doing well !

> 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
> ____________________________________________________
> Pirate Parties International - General Talk
> pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general
>