Drafts or final versions of the required reports from the Board, CoA, Treasurer and Lay Auditors will be updated here.
**Summer 2023 PPI Board Report
*Members of the Board
:There are 9 members of the board (Florie Marie-chair, Gregory Engels-vice, Keith Goldstein-secretary, Bailey Lamon-treasurer, Michal Gill, Alexander Isavnin, Julian Häffner, Mauricio Vargas, Maycow Toledo), and 5 alternates (Sebastian Krone, Mia Utz, Raman Ojha, Carlos Polo, and Adam Wolf).
*Board Meeting Attendance
:In total the PPI Board held 8 meetings since the last GA. The board is currently meeting once a month. Recently the Pirate Beer social event is taking place directly prior to the board meetings, enabling the Pirate community and public to interact with the board and provide ideas that can be discussed later by the board. Board meetings are currently held on Wednesdays with a rotating basis for start times between 05:00 UTC and 21:00 UTC.
*Financial Issues
:The board addressed issues with affiliation fees, acknowledging issues with their payment. The board also recognized issues with payment of invoices.
*UN Activities
:ECOSOC Groundspasses were arranged in January, including groundspasses for PPI members at all 3 UN centers. After a 2 year delay due to the pandemic PPI was able to send representatives to the UN. This was a huge success, as we were able to issue the groundspasses at the beginning of the year and send numerous representatives to attend UN events. We attended events about AI, criminal use of the internet, and various meetings about NGO collaboration. Carlos Polo and the team in Geneva made numerous visits to UNOG and a blog was created. Ohad Shem Tov spearheaded meetings at UNHQ. We created a new UN activities email list unecosoc@pp-international.net to receive updates from the UN, addressing previous issues with emails not reaching all members. The SCUBA working group had several meetings on submitting session proposals to the IGF. They proposed sessions with Japanese Pirates and others on topics related to computer ethics and digital totalitarianism, with links available on the IGF website. The proposals passed the first judging, advancing to the second round, but they did not make the final cut of 80 chosen workshops (less than 10% of proposals were chosen). We are currently waiting to see if we can have a booth at the event for which a separate application was made.
*Tools
:The board revised slightly its primary tools. A renewed emphasis was placed on using Discord and Discourse. The board continues to use Wire for its internal communications. The Rules of Procedure were updated to use Discourse, Discord, and Wire instead of Redmine and Loomio. There were concerns raised about using Discord due to data privacy issues.
*Issue with Discourse Admin
There was an issue with the Discourse platform and administrative rights. Cedric Levieux, the IT secretary, explained his decision to revoke administrative rights from some board members. This sparked a heated discussion particularly regarding the proper interpretation of the statutes. The Discourse admin access was removed for everyone by Stefan Thoni and then quickly reinstated following a decision by the board that all board members should be the only admins of the Discourse. Cedric voluntarily withdrew from the IT position. A proposal was made by Mike Gill to revoke Cedric’s membership from the Court of Arbitration. This decision was later referred to the GA.
*Communication Group
:The lack of regular social media content motivated the board to discuss setting up a new working group, a Communications Group, that would ensure regular content posting. This group still needs to be properly established.
*PPIHQ
The possibility of moving the PPI headquarters from Brussels was discussed, with some members considering the advantages of a location change. However, no formal decision was made, and further discussion was proposed for the next meeting. Further discussions were made about the utility of PPI’s separate registrations in Switzerland, but also no decisions were made to change anything. Sebastian Krone discussed tax consequences in Belgium and obligations as a Swiss association. The decision to move would require approval from the General Assembly.
*Other Updates
:Florie Marie shared her experience of being banned from Twitter and proposed filing a complaint against Twitter at an international level in the name of freedom of speech.
:PPI adopted the PPEU Code of Conduct.
:PPI will commemorate Aaron Swarz Day in November (spearheaded by Maycow Toledo).
:PPI provided a memorial message about the passing of David Miranda, a supporter of the Pirate Party in Brazil who was actively involved in their activities (spearheaded by Maycow Toledo).
:The Board reviewed the list of Ordinary, Observer, and Other Contact for members and updated its contact database. More work needs to be done especially with social media. We should also attempt to add more people to the pp-leaders mailing list to ensure that everyone hears about our activities.
:Pirate Party of Australia attended several of our meetings and has expressed interest in joining PPI, but we are still waiting for an application.
:The US Pirate Party attended several of our meetings as a new member.
Fall/Winter 2023 Board Report (first draft)
The Board of PPI would like to thank all of our members for their participation and support. There were 5 Fall/Winter PPI board meeting sessions scheduled (4 completed at the time of writing). We began a once-a-month meeting schedule. All board meetings were announced on our website, by email to pp-leaders, and in various social media channels such as Discord. The board addressed the rescheduling of the GA frequently, as we were unable to reach quorum for the Summer GA. Reports from board members covered activities such as membership fee invoicing, interviews with journalists, and participation in international events. Many of our routine activities included blog writing and monitoring PPI tech. Bastian shared an article on Pirate Times and we discussed the importance of having regular publications there, but this is a project that we need to make more progress on. There are a number of projects that PPI needs assistance with, and we hope that our community will be able to support us with these issues following this meeting.
Two of the notable events PPI attended included the UNODC Cybercrime Convention in New York (attended by Keith Goldstein and Ohad Shem Tov) and the Internet Governance Forum in Kyoto (attended by Alexander Isavnin and Keith Goldstein). Carlos Polo updated us on various UN meetings that he attended and other updates from UNOG. Raman Ojha discussed the COP28 (environmental conference of the UN). We missed registration for this year’s conference, but we are working on getting PPI registered with the UNFCCC for future participation. There is another UNODC Cybercrime meeting in January 2024, as well as numerous other UN events. We will have to issue new groundspasses in January, and we encourage members to let us know if they want to attend a UN Conference.
Additional revisions to the Rules of Procedure clarified the practice of automatic delegation of votes to alternate board members in the absence of primary members. If not all 9 board members are present, then alternates replace them in order of seniority followed by voted rank. We discussed membership applications from the UK Pirate Party and the Pirate Party of Australia that will be discussed at this General Assembly. The relocation of PPI HQ is a recurring topic, as we deal with the separation of the organization between Switzerland and Belgium.
We discussed the formation of working groups for development and design, a proposal for a social media group, and one focused on artificial intelligence. We also discussed organizing a joint SCENE meeting with USPP, but so far it has not been scheduled.
Recognition was given to Bailey and Miles for their noteworthy article in Democracy Technologies. Maycow Toledo informed us about the Aaron Schwarz Day event that he was organizing with the Brazilian Pirates.
The board learned about statements from other Pirate parties on the Israel-Gaza conflict. The board released a statement of its own and communicated frequently with members about publishing statements.
Events like Pirate beer and working groups were less frequently organized. Issues with organizing events and other projects relate with conflicts between board members and difficulties of board members to arrange time. We hope that members of the board will find ways to work together collaboratively and commit more time to improving the functioning of PPI. We also hope that our members will be able to assist further with organizing events and providing human resources.
Sincerely,
The Board of PPI
Treasurer Report
I have been the Treasurer of PPI since January 2023. It is worth noting that this is the first time I have ever held the role of Treasurer in any organization, so I came into this without experience and just learning as I go along which has been fun and intimidating at the same time. Unfortunately due to various personal circumstances this year it was very difficult for me to attend meetings and do very much with the Treasurer role, and I would like to apologize to the rest of the PPI board as well as the membership for not being as present and involved as I hoped to be and in turn, not being a great Treasurer.
I’ve had access to our PostFinance account for a couple of years but I started to have trouble logging in online due to issues with the PIN on my card reader which is needed to login. When I was in Europe earlier this year I spent a couple of days in Geneva, Switzerland and while I was there I went into PostFinance to see about getting a new PIN number, but they told me I needed to request this over the phone. Later on I called and requested a new PIN, they sent me one, and I was able to log in once or twice and then I didn’t for a while and then when I went back later and tried, I started having issues with it again. I think I might be getting confused by the process, I don’t know. But I couldn’t get in there. Thankfully Gregory was able to forward me the bank statements so I’ve been going through those and so I am now able to paint you a picture of what our financial situation looks like.
Firstly, keep in mind that we have two PostFinance accounts, one in Swiss Francs and the other in Euros. I will be mostly dealing with Swiss Francs because that is the currency which most of our statements are in and the majority of the transactions both in and out of the account are in this currency. When I present the budget proposal for 2024 later on in the meeting, it will be in Swiss Francs.
At the beginning of 2023 we had a total of 5035.88 CHF in the account, and after a number of payments throughout the year related mostly to tech costs and account fees, that number is currently at 3133,61 CHF and after one more account management fee at the end of the month, we will end the year with 3128,66 CHF. Additionally, in the euro account we started off the year with 66,09 euros and we currently have 4,71 euros. We need to transfer funds into the euro account to cover future account fees which are only about 5 euros each. We also have 0.01537 in Bitcoin and 0.06905 in Etherium. We have long discussed exchanging the crypto into euros or Swiss francs because it is just sitting there. We also have a Paypal account with 900,66 CHF. I included all of these conversions in the budget proposal.
We did have a few parties who paid their membership fees this year, but not nearly enough. Obviously if you have paid your membership fee or you’ve contacted us to let us know that you can’t pay it this year, ignore this message. You’ve all been sent your invoices so please have a look at those if you haven’t already and if you’re able to pay your membership fees, please do. If you need another copy of your invoice, feel free to reach out to me and I will send it to you. As always, we understand that as political parties you all have your own expenses to take care of so it’s not always possible to pay for extra things like your PPI membership, and that is completely ok. We just ask that if this is the case, tell us so that we know not to bother you about it. Also, if for whatever reason you feel we have made a mistake of any kind when it comes to your membership fee, let us know that as well.
I hoped that this year I would be able to organize some financial planning events where delegates from the Pirate community could come together and share/work on ideas for fundraising, a webshop and things that can improve PPI’s finances and expand our capabilities for financially contributing to the movement. Regrettably, that did not happen. Hopefully it can happen next term. That said, while I will do my best to help however possible, it will not be me leading this effort as I do not plan to continue in the Treasurer position next term. This was simply not the job for me and considering how difficult it was to be present this past year, it was a mistake to go for it (I only did it because no one else would and we needed somebody in the position). We have many talented and financially literate folks in this community, I have no doubt that the right person will take over and be the Treasurer that PPI deserves. 