Winter Conference
We are working on the conference recordings and will post them as soon as they are available.
Our Winter 2025 conference was Sunday, January 19th at the ROOTED Armory Café, 191 Highland Ave., Somerville. The conference started by 10am and ended before 4pm.
The ROOTED Armory Café is wheelchair accessible, has free parking in the back, is on the Route 88 and 90 bus lines and walking distance from the Gilman and Magoun Squares MBTA Green Line stations.
Registration
The conference was free, but we requested participants register in advance. We encouraged attendees to mask to protect everyone’s health. We had masks and COVID tests for attendees as well as air purifiers. We live streamed it for people who cannot attend in person.
Schedule
Our conference schedule and session descriptions.
| Time | Session | Speaker |
| 9:00am-10:00am | Setup | |
| 10:00am-10:15am | Opening Address | |
| 10:15am-11:00am | How to navigate your local government | Steve Revilak |
| 11:00am-noon | Protect your privacy | |
| noon-12:30pm | Lunch | |
| 12:30pm-1:30pm | Planning for after January 20th | |
| 1:30pm-2:30pm | How to help make Massachusetts more transparent | Maya Shaffer |
| 2:30pm-3:30pm | Running for local office | |
| 3:30pm-4:00pm | Closing Address | |
| 4:00pm-5:00pm | Clean up |
Conference Sessions
How to navigate your local government
Steve Revilak, a Pirate town meeting member in Arlington and our First Officer, discusses how town government works and how you can bring change to yours.
Protect your privacy
We will go over tips, techniques and apps you can use to protect your privacy.
Planning for after January 20th
An open planning discussion for building a Pirate future in the face of Trump 2.0. What threats do we face and how we can deal with them to build our party.
How to help make Massachusetts more transparent
Maya Shaffer will share her years of experience navigating Massachusetts public records law. She will walkthrough the public records law using the example of her request for a recording by the Quincy council on aging director made using some of the thousands of dollars the director is accused of stealing from Quincy. She will show how she worked around impediments to the public records law and demonstrate ways you can deal with pitfalls to accessing public records.
Running for local office
Town elections are starting soon and city elections will finish in November. Now is the time to learn what offices you can run for and how to get elected.
Want to Help?
If you can help with the conference, please take a look at our conference pirate pad and put your name down for anything you will do.
Spread the Word!
We had a PDF conference flyer. If you wanted to come up with a better version, you can download the editable Scribus original. Scribus is a libre desktop publishing application similar to In Design, PageMaker or QuarkXPress. You can download it from scribus.net.
If you want to create your own in another desktop publishing application, the original images are at:
You can view recordings of our 2024 conference.
Thanks to our friends at Agaric for hosting Community Bridge.