NEC/Minutes/30th August 2009
From Pirate Party UK Wiki
NEC meeting minutes from 2009-08-30 at 16.02
Attendees
Eric, Andy, Philip, Miah
Summary
Queens speech coming up on November 18th.
Constituency organisations when the time is right.
Facebook group is splitting up into European election regions. Committee will keep an eye on this and see how it goes, with respect to splitting the party in that manner once it's large enough.
Approx 5500 followers on facebook at the moment.
Ratification and elections process. Action: Andy will take ownership of this.
No news on Featured Artists Coalition negotiations, no reply from them in any form. Concern that delays will make any kind of compromise harder. Action: Andy continuing to try to make contact.
Regent's Park event. Action: Eric to write blog entry and then team will hold off on further blog entries until after the event to ensure it stays on the front page. Some debate about cut'n'pasting pertinent things into each blog post instead. Eric will do this on Monday and email officers to let them know it's up.
Could promote on facebook group, and can also send email to members about this. Action: Presumably Philip?
Difficult to get a good handle on numbers attending, but hopeful that 50 will turn up. Andy has a one and a half hour slot on Saturday 5th September, 5.30pm til 7.00pm, likely to be a 30/45 minute talk followed by a Q&A. Eric will be in attendance too.
We will have a stall at the event, Andy sorting out banners and leaflets. This should be easily possible within the budget we have. Plan is to use a local supplier who seems quite good. Leaflets will be fairly generic. Goes to print on Tuesday. Lead time for banner is 1 hour, lead time for leaflets is 48 hours. Banner is waterproof with eyelets. Action: Andy will email out artwork for comments Sunday/Monday to officers list. Action: Andy will check that stall is being organised with stall manager and that there will be some way to display banner. Action: Philip will organise press and co-ordinate with project team.
Plan is to send some leaflets ahead so that early starters will have material to work with. Action: Andy to confirm who will be arriving first at the event and liase.
Idea of events calendar on front page of site.
Updating the front page to move the majority of the front page blurb elsewhere and leaving a summary with a 'more...' link has been passed to Gavin and is on his list. Action: Possibly Philip; Miah has since emailed Gavin to get this moving.
Philip writing article for magazine, deadline Monday 31st August.
Andy has located a possible shop supplier who does t-shirts, cups, promotional items. Runs a few one-stop-shops for local schools. Andy is meeting him on Tuesday.
Eric is making good progress with t-shirt supplier negotiations, hoping to start closing the process down on Monday, but if this doesn't happen Andy will make further enquiries with shop supplier.
Bank account is now opened. No paperwork received yet but treasurer has account number and sort code. Money all in paypal at the moment, plan is to move money from paypal across to bank account, not least because the account offers some interest.
Proposal to ban the use of and the people who are 'sockpuppets'. Specifically this is referring to someone not disclosing and/or deliberately deceiving as to their identity and acting as if they are a third party to themselves. This was felt to generally be a problem caused by the current intermediate stage of the site with there being members of the party with forum access and non-members with forum access. Once the site goes members only, this should deal with the problem to a great extent, if not entirely. Felt that this is more of a forum issue than a membership issue specifically, and thus should be dealt with through forum moderation in the first instance. Persistent/severe transgressions could be dealt with via constitution clause that talks about bringing the party into disrepute.
Think Tank proposal, intended to encourage open debate. Idea of splitting off non-members stuff to separate site which is independent of the party and the party website/forums. Proposal to put a vote up for all members to decide whether to seed new site using threads from current forums, or not. Action: Philip to contact WilliamFS to discuss some ideas for the Think Tank. Action: Andy will announce new site and get vote organised.
Currently it is recognised that there is a disconnect between new members paying, being validated, and the site being updated to indicate their validated status. An email needs to be sent to update the new user. Further work on solving the disconnect between the different parts of the process needs to be looked at in the future, possibly as part of a customer/member relationship management tool.
WilliamFS and writing manifesto - WilliamFS should discuss with policy group coordinators and work out how this should work going forward. Action: Andy will take this on and get everyone talking.
Andy is taking a short holiday soon; his last before the general election. Action: Philip nominated to stand in for Andy when this happens.
BBC Portsmouth have contacted the party asking about an appearance on a Sunday morning program. Action: Philip will contact John as to whether he'd be interested.
Struggling a bit to get guest blog authors, looking for suggestions.
Andy is being asked to write more guest blogs than he can realistically manage, looking for assistance.
Peter Mandelson had an article in the Times/Sunday Times. Action: Andy is going to respond to this.
Desperately short of photography for the website. Need relevant/on-topic pictures to brighten it up. Action: Philip will organise a photo-blog from the upcoming Edinburgh meetup.
Andy has received a mysterious lunch invite from a 'Simon Persoff'. Action: Philip will follow this up to find out who/why/etc.
Channel 4/independant production company want to run a documentary on various political candidates on their way to the election. They've already lined up candidates for the main three parties. A series to be broadcast after the election. Action: Andy to bring journalists and media expert group on board (Daniel Brett) to advise.
Andy to post update on Eric/John situation in the near future, and update on officer elections, draft hopefully ready on Monday.
Concern from member over attitude of one of the moderators. Action: Miah to contact moderator team to ensure moderation policy is put together and encourage them to address this issue themselves.
Philip is writing a book about the pirate movement, ideally published by the time of the general election.
Philip did an interview with Essex student radio on Saturday which will be broadcast in a few weeks time.
Andy talked about a radio interview he did which went really well, executive summary was that the DJ was virtually begging for anyone to phone in to disagree with our policies and couldn't get anyone to do so. Many positive callers demonstrating that the man on the street is really taken with our message.