NEC/Minutes/29th November 2009

From Pirate Party UK Wiki

NEC meeting minutes 29th November 2009

Attendees

Andy, Philip, Miah, Tom

Summary

Start of web team meeting

Tom joined the call.

Voting system working well.

Progress is good on the website redesign. The forum skin is nearly finished; a little more needs to be done to the front page to make it more exciting.

Membership details database, some of the CSV fields are missing, eg. region field.

Action: Tom will add this.

Tom left the call.

Start of NEC meeting

Apologies from Eric, who is attending the meeting of the London regional party.

Constituency organisations need to be formally launched.

Ratification/election of people going ahead.

Featured Artists Coalition, emails exchanged and some tentative progress.

No news on copyright status.

Campaign against digital economy bill, fifth largest petition on number10.gov.uk, TalkTalk waiting on petition completing.

Should people looking to stand as candidates temporarily stand down from positions of responsibility (NEC, web team, etc)? Ideally such candidates will offer to temporarily step down at the point they decide to nominate themselves. In extenuating circumstances they may be allowed to continue their role, for example if there is no-one else available to fill the gap and time sensitive issues need handling.

Sixteen people on forums have noted interest in attending unconference. Some interesting feedback but broadly as expected. Will move to confirming the venue within a week unless get some big surprises in the feedback (e.g. a lot more people saying they want to attend).

Ratification vote. No signs of fraud or anything suspicious. If it remains like that, Eric will call the vote and set up the new elections straight away.

No new nominations for the elections. We'll vote using the same options as in the pre-formation officer vote, including options for RON and to abstain. I also propose a quorum of 10% of party members. Having RON plus a quorum mitigates some of the risks around the weaknesses of electing people based on a simple majority, so I'm hoping to avoid that argument for now and suggest it's carried over to the party unconference.

Wiki manifesto – need to take this down as it's confusing and out of date. Encourage WilliamFS to update wiki with actual manifesto and progress.

TalkTalk. Things progressing slowly, hoping to set up a meeting now that Eric is back in the country.

Andy was speaking at a conference "Digital Treasure" in Birmingham with the archives and museums authority. He spoke to the shadow culture secretary, who couldn't add any extra carrots to the digital economy bill to make it more palatable.

The attendees were very keen to sort out orphan works.

Philip to blog about intellectual property law issues with respect to science.