January 25th, 2014 Issue Meeting

Jamie, Kendra, and Steve attending.

Net Neutrality. Telephone companies are considered common carriers; why not make ISPs common carriers? These days, a lot of voice traffic is carried via packets, and there's not a lot of distinction between telephone and data traffic.

In other countries, broadband service is cheaper than what we have in the US, with much higher bandwidth. Our ISPs could provide much better (and cheaper) service than they're currently providing. Why is this the case? What can we do about it.

March 21st Fundraiser. We're holding the fundraiser on a Friday evening. Note that Libre Planet is the following Saturday and Sunday.

We'd like to have a range of ticket prices for the fundraiser: from $10.00 all the way up to $500.00. We don't want to turn people away, and we don't want to discourage those who might contribute more. We need to figure out what the levels are, and what to call them.

It would be nice to set up some kind of web form, to collect OCPF data for cash donations. (Steve will look into this.)

The fundraiser will be held at the Democracy Center. Kendra and Steve will tour the site on Tuesday 1/28/2014. The Democracy center won't allow us to serve alcohol, but we can serve snacks and non-alcoholic drinks.

Upcoming events:

• 2/8 Security Conference
• 2/9 Cryptoparty at Northeastern
• 2/17 Airport demonstration

Pirate conference. Perhaps we should hold the conference in September (i.e., later in the year). College students will be back then. Delaying the conference would also allow us to devote more energy towards getting signatures for 2014 electoral candidates.

We could use the conference to discuss and vote on planks of the pirate platform. Holding the conference in September would give us more time to work on our platform.

Nation Builder. We have several goals for Nation Builder. First, we'd like a way to send email campaigns that doesn't depend on one person. We'd like to maintain a database of supporter information. We'd like to host our own petition and campaign pages. For example, instead of having to tell people "go sign this ACLU petition", we could host the petition ourselves. Nation builder gives us access to MA voter registration lists (so far, we've had to jump through a lot of hoops in order to get this information from the date).

During the next IRC meeting, we should pick three campaigns to focus on during the next six months. For example: NSA, TPP, and Joe's campaign. (This list is for illustration; we should make the final decision as a group.) We can work on other things during the next six months, but we'll focus on the primary issues first.