PPI Board Report December 2020
The PPI board has been very active this year organizing a number of activities and working groups with different purposes. You could say that our main goal for this year has been to increase communication and involvement from our members and helping PPI to become a more open, membership-driven organization. We have also tried to bridge the gaps in communication between the board, our members and the public as well as sort our financial roadblocks.
One of our main initatives this year has been launching working groups around various topics such as inter-party cooperation, finances, conferences and UN work, PR/campaigning, as well as online social gatherings. They have mainly taken the form of meetings where delegates from our member parties give insight into their practices in order to find common ground, compare their differences and in general, share knowledge and advice about what it really means to be a part of the global pirate movement. In some cases, this has resulted in real, tangible ways to support the movement and provide resources to our members.
The following working groups were formed and met at least once this year:
- Standing Committee on Universal Liason on Party Labour (SCULL):
Focused on inter-party cooperation and empowerment. In other words, the ways in which Pirates actually do their work on a day to day basis, what is needed for that work and practical ways to support each other.
Topics: IT, graphics and design, democracy tools, internal party structure and management
Graphics Vault came out of this committee, which everyone is welcome to use: https://nextcloud.ppi.rocks/login?redirect_url=/apps/files/?dir%3D/%26fileid%3D70621
As a result of the IT discussion, we had a look at our current tech resources and found that there is a lot we can provide to our members and new Pirate Parties, such as website domains, mail servers, Mumble servers, etherpad and other tools that Pirates often use.
- Standing Committee on Usual Requisition of Various Yields (SCURVY):
All about the money! These meetings dealt with financial issues; how parties manage their finances as well as raise funds, in addition to the issues surrounding transparency, privacy and accountability that come up when dealing with money.
Topics: Finance management, fundraising practices, crowdfunding, state subsidies, membership fees, donations, transparent bank accounts, GDPR
- Standing Committee on External Networking and Engagement (SCENE):
This committee only met once and we intended to do so again, but end-of-year madness got in the way. The focus here is everything to do with our relationship to the public, getting our messages out there and gaining support during elections and in between.
Topics: Social media practices, editorial plans/schedules, press practices, press relations, newsroom, imagebank, election campaign practices, street campaigns, advertising, public events, campaigning during covid-19
- Standing Committee on UN Bureaucratic Activities (SCUBA):
As you know, PPI has special consultative status with ECOSOC. The SCUBA committee is focused on the work surrounding ECOSOC, UN and various other conferences.
- Pirate Beer:
Not exactly a standing committee or working group, but an online social event that has taken place every 3 weeks. It is completely informal, unstructured and a fun way for Pirates to connect in a more relaxed atmosphere. Pirate Beer happpened 17 times.
Besides those meetings of the standing committees we also had a whole lot of internal meeting including 18 meetings of the board (see minutes here https://wiki.pp-international.net/wiki/index.php?title=PPI_Board/Board_Meetings )
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Pirate Summer Camp
Desipite Corona pandemics we had been able to conduct the international Pirate Summer Camp in Poland with 15 participants from 4 countries - and it could have been more, if EU borders had been open at that time. Because of the corona we actually extended the originaly planned duration of nine days up to whole fortnight.
The Pirate Summer Camp 2021 is also happening (2021 July 18th - August 01st) and is open for registration https://ps21.eventbrite.com -
ThinkTwice Conference
We had a ThinkTwice Conference planned to happen in Prague in April, but had to cancel it entirely due to COVID-19 restrictions. We are currently evaluating the options to hast a whole digital ThinkTwice next spring. -
online GA in May
We had an online PPI GA in May at which new members were admitted, namely PP of Chile as a member and another PP of Japan, as an observer member for the meantime, before the “Japanese question” gets solved at the December GA.
Events: ECOSOC - We have submitted a written and oral statement for the 2020 High-level Segment (HLS) of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) including the High-Level Political Forum on sustainable development (HLPF). Due to the COVID situation they just published the statements. The statement is available at this link:https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/26614Written_Statements_NGO.pdf
We submitted at the IGF in November where we had hosted a virtual booth and hosted a Workshop of Digital Integrity of a Person as a new Human Right with almost 60 participants.
WTO - We had been registered to participate in the WTO ministerial conference in June, but the WTO MC got postponed to next year.
Online Bar Camp during the Summer Camp
We had online Bar Camp with three paralel tracks, one on “Fundrising”, one on “Pirate Research Organisation and Pirate Parties for Dummies”. and one on “Activism and BLM and other protests”
On some other projects that GA has tasked the board with:
There had been work done, predominantly during the Pirate Summer Camp, on the “Pirate Manifestor for PPI” and we have a working text that includes every policy text that had been agreed upon between multiple pirate parties, including the PPEU Manifesto. This, however is still a work in progress and further meetings needs to be scheduled for the beginning of the year.
We have evaluated different source code control systems and have settled on GitLab to host on our servers to fulfill the last GA’s decission. This is currently also work in progress.
