December 7th, 2014 Boston Planning Meeting
Meeting held at E5.
Stats
Who supports us? Jamie examined twitter, Facebook, and our email announcement list. The number of email list subscribers has stayed mostly flat in 2014.. The number of twitter and Facebook followers have grown. Most of our (twitter?) followers are male.
The open rate for our email newsletters is around 15-20%, which is above the industry average. Our click-through rate is around 3%.
On twitter, our audience overlaps with that of the EFF and YourAnonNews. About 50% of our twitter followers are in US, about 50% in other parts of the world.
On Facebook, 72% of our fans are male, and 28% are female. Most of our fans are in the 25-34 age range. Among women 45-54, we're more popular than average.
Compared to other MA political parties, we're #3 on twitter (behind Mass Democrats and Mass Republicans). On Facebook (according to the number of likes), we're #7. The MA Republican party is #1 and MA Democratic party is #2.
On website, there was a big jump in page views and visitors during November 2014 (according to wordpress analytics). This was our second most-trafficked month on record.
Things we wanted to do in 2014 but didn't accomplish:
- Cryptocurrency donations.
- Media contact lists
- Issue development process
A lot of things have happened this year: police violence, republicans taking control of the house, austerity, militarization of the police. How do we defend a society that's supposed to be upstanding when it's become hypocritical and dishonest?
There are limitations to the political system. Could someone from the Pirate Party run for (say) Boston city council and win?
As an outsider, I love some of the things that the pirate party stands for, and that really resonates with me.
Movements vs parties. Ultimately, we want to get people to run for office. But we still do movement things. In Canada, the Greens run a candidate in every election, even if they only get 1% of the vote. In MA, most elections are uncontested. With Noe, we did a lot of flyering. Joe participated in debates, and got a lot of media attention.
What legacy are we going to leave behind? We can't go back to the new deal; we only got that because of the great depression, and because the new deal was heavily predicated on capitalism. Since WWII, it's taken longer for the economy to get back after a recession. For the 2008 recession, it's been over 70 months. Business are concerned with cutting costs, but not with creating jobs.
Is internet access/access to information the big issue, or is a symptom of a larger problem (e.g., wage stagnation and inequality making internet access unaffordable).
We'd like to get people to run, but we have to support them. It's too hard for candidates to run by themselves.
It's hard to get people engaged when they're actively discouraged by the political system.
If you don't have people on the ballot, then you're ceding a really large battlefield.
Objectives and Tasks for 2015
We brainstorm some ideas:
- Net Neutrality (all packets treated equally), Municipal Broadband
- Replacing white supremacy with justice
- Third party coalition building
- Addressing racial inequality, government secrecy
- Do things that make measurable changes to people's lives. Tangible changes that people can feel and see.
