<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>I feel this is a mistaken way to deal with a symptom, not a root cause.</div><div><br></div><div>Yes, there are too few women in the pirate movement. There are also too few older people, too few poor, too few ethnic minorities.</div><div><br></div><div>These people are not in the pirate movement not because of a failure to 'mainstream' or 'empower' or any other jargon words that might be spoken by a New York Professor of Sociology. They are not in the pirate movement because the pirate movement makes too little effort to appeal to them. In short, we do not try to explain our policies in ways that appeal beyond a audience that is predominantly young, male, white and reasonably privileged.</div><div><br></div><div>The worst thing we could take is to take women, or any other group, and place them in a 'special interest' faction. Instead of modifying the policy message to make it more appealing to a wider audience, they will just be pushed into creating 'special interest' policies. I dislike the idea of that intrinsically, but more importantly, that approach never seems to work in politics. Voters can see through it and it does not appeal to them. In short, if you cannot come up with a political philosophy with a core message that is appealing to women or any other subset of society, you cannot address that by creating specialist policies around the edges. People can innately see the special interest policies do not fit with the philosophy and so become sceptical about them, and rightly so.</div><div><br></div><div>If we want more women etc in the movement, the right place to begin is not by creating a ghetto for them. The right place is to look at ourselves and ask what is in our behaviour that is a barrier to inclusion. It is not hard for me to see examples of behaviour that leads to exclusion from the pirate movement.</div><div><br></div><div>When you talk to fellow pirates, it is extraordinary how often the conversation ends up in narrow techno-jargon. Well, there is nothing wrong with that in itself. Young white men from a certain kind of background like talking about that kind of thing. Problem is, it probably does not appeal to others so much. If you do not understand what somebody is talking about, chances are you will lost interest in listening to that person. Similarly, pirates often explain their motives using analogies that once again draw on narrow knowledge that not everyone would appreciate or understand. I'm a man, and I can hold my own in debates where phrases from formal logic crop up, or where people talk about an aspect of Microsoft's business model, or concerning the merits of STV versus AV, or where someone uses internet slang. But not everybody will want to participate in such a conversation. Some will just run from it as fast as they can.</div><div><br></div><div>The real challenge here is to recognize that people like to be around and to form communities with other people with a similar outlook. There is nothing wrong with, say, young people wanting to canvass the support of other young people, and being proud when they win their support. But this is the kind of behaviour that can so easily limit the horizons of who the party talks to and appeals to. So if we want to help the party to appeal to and engage more women supporters, we should not push them into a special faction where they disconnect from the rest of the party, or are given enhanced 'visibility' because of their gender instead of merit. If we want to help the party to appeal and engage more women, and any other group in society we fail to reach, then we should sit back and think for a while about our own behaviour, and how aspects of it might exclude others. We should listen to the concerns of people who are not like us, and think about what we say that is of relevance to those concerns. If we can all learn to modify our language when appropriate, think more of others, put ourselves in their shoes, and engage with their concerns in terms they relate to, then we really will reach out to more people and help both them and us. That needs every pirate to be more open to engaging the support of every person on this planet, whatever their gender, race, class or whatever. I would rather see every pirate moderating their own behaviour and engaging more widely, than the creation of a special interest faction with the movement.</div><div><br></div><div>Best regards,</div><div><br></div><div>Eric</div><br><div><blockquote type="cite"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br></font><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">"Bogomil \"Bogo\" Shopov" <<a href="mailto:bogo@piratskapartia.bg">bogo@piratskapartia.bg</a>><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">2 May 2010 12:26:34 BST<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);"><b>To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Pirate Parties International -- General Talk <<a href="mailto:pp.international.general@lists.pirateweb.net">pp.international.general@lists.pirateweb.net</a>><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;"><b>[pp.int.general] Women Pirates project</b><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);"><b>Reply-To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Pirate Parties International -- General Talk <<a href="mailto:pp.international.general@lists.pirateweb.net">pp.international.general@lists.pirateweb.net</a>><br></span></div><br><br>Hey again,<br>Here is some ideas and tasks for a project called WOPI. I am looking forward to see you participating.<br><a href="http://int.piratenpartei.de/User:Bogomil/Projects/WOPI">http://int.piratenpartei.de/User:Bogomil/Projects/WOPI</a><br clear="all"></blockquote></div><br></body></html>