January 24th, 2015 Worcester Planning Meeting

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Meeting held at the Worcester Public library.

Participants:

  • James O'Keefe
  • Noe Kamelamela
  • Steve Revilak
  • Lucia Fiero
  • Jason Fiero

Agenda

  1. 2014 Review
    1. Campaigns
    2. Events
  2. Objectives and Tasks for 2015
    1. Goals
    2. Organization
      1. Rick Falkvinge's Swarmwise book recommends a particular organization.
    3. State Reorg?
      1. Currently the Pirate Council is made up of the Captain, First Officer, Quartermaster, and 3 others.
      2. Perhaps we should define roles for the 3 other Pirate Council members and expand their number: PR/Media, Activism, Swarmcare and Web/Info.
    4. Establishing Regions?
      1. Swarmwise suggests dividing into 20-30 regions.
      2. Jason worked on a first draft of a map which Jamie has expanded with this Region Proposal.

Notes

Campaign Review

We've had some reviews of campaigns and events on a discrete basis, but we should also review them as a whole. How could we have gotten more people to run for office?

Noe ran, and tried to convince other people to run. Young people believed that running would take ridiculous amounts of money, or ridiculous amounts of time. It's no worse (in terms of time and money) than enjoying hiking or skiing. Campaigning is easier in the city, where one can walk from house to house. Local races are easier than larger races.

Frank Capone is running for city counselor at large in Medford. Platform is police accountability and municipal internet. It's a non-partisan race.

In our last call for candidates, seven people were interested in running.

Campaigning helps your interview skills. It's easier to talk to a job interview after talking with hundreds of people while campaigning.

We'd like to stress getting a critical mass of people running together. Having a critical mass makes more things possible. It's beneficial for candidates to do things together.

College chapters. For most universities, a chapter would require support from a certain number of students, or from a faculty member. Logistically, it would be easiest to start with campuses nearest to where we are.

Having SCATV membership (and programming) has given us exposure that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

We have a database of approx. 400 supports. We tried to contact them a year ago, but never finished the job. Should try that again, so that we can organize better.

Joe is planning to run for state rep again (in the same district).

Why run? You'll meet your representative, and they'll remember you.

Openness and decentralization. General philosophy: if you'd like to do something, and it aligns with general Pirate goals, then you should go ahead and do it. You don't need to seek permission first. If you're not sure, talk to three other pirates.

To run many candidates, we'll need a decentralized structure, and we'd like to encourage groups to pursue their own initiatives. If you say you're a pirate, we trust you, go run with your idea. Use your best judgment and be responsible.

We have a code of conduct. There are a bunch of things in there we can use (when proposing decentralized work). Our code of conduct should go up on the main website, in the 'about' section. Noe may make a video about it.

Events

We did 26 events from May -- Dec 2014. For 2015, should we aim for 1--2 events per month.

Running for office seemed to generate more interest than events. Running for office shows people that we're serious about doing things.

Consistency is a good thing. We've marched in the pride parade for three years in a row. None of the other minority political groups have done that.

This year, let's try not to stretch ourselves too thin.

Perhaps we should have different teams to work on ? For example, a Cryptoparty team, a video team.

Would it be useful to work on DIY cryptoparty kits? Put together sets of slides that others can use. Put together some videos on how to organize a cryptoparty?

For future cryptoparties, we should focus on hands-on / workshop. Should also add segments to address privacy and security on mobile devices.

Goals

Replace Mailchimp with CiviCRM. Perhaps replace other things with CiviCRM.

More TV shows.

Building infrastructure to support bill advocacy. (e.g., being able to tie members to their legislators, so we can do better ``contact your legislator campaigns).

Last year, we devoted a lot of time to events. Perhaps this year, we could devote more time to issues (or issue-related events). For example, Net Neutrality was one of the most popular topics selected for piratecon. We probably can't influence the FCC or congress directly, but we could work on local issues related to net Neutrality. For example, municipal internet.

For municipal internet, we need to build a knowledge base. For communities that have municipal internet: how did they get it? What were the infrastructure costs? How do they pay for it? For communities that don't have municipal internet, what are the obstacles, and how could those obstacles be overcome? If someone wanted to bring municipal internet to their community, what concrete steps could they take.

Perhaps we could organize a research meeting/hackathon, to start pulling this information together.

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