PPI Board Responds To PPAU Membership Termination | PirateTimes

Posted: March 4, 2015/Under: Creator, Europe, Guest Author, News, Pirate Parties/By: Guest Author

PPI Board Responds to PPAU Membership Termination

March 4, 2015 · by Guest Author · in Europe, Pirate Party News

This is a guest post from the board of PPI stating their response and view on the recent resignation of PPAU. Since PPAU resigned PPUK followed suit and PPBE just decided to suspend their membership in past few days.

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The Board of Pirate Parties International (PPI) regrets the decision of the National Council of Pirate Party of Australia (PPAU) to terminate its membership with PPI. We wish the Pirates in Australia growth and success in the upcoming elections.

We want to take this opportunity to deliver a slight different view about the facts. The resignation of PPAU is a decision of one particular member party, who has repeatedly expressed their disconcert in the course of the past years, but is not a symptom for general failing of the pirate movement or the PPI as an organization.

PPI have managed to produce a number of astonishing results, given the fact that it had to operate on zero budget and with very little internal support since its foundation. We have organized four international gatherings with a total over 400 attendees that had, besides of handling the official business, given space for international collaboration and fostering numerous new projects. 2014 two academic conferences named “ThinkTwice” where conducted (in Frankfurt and Istanbul), the proceedings have been published in an open access journal (pdf). PPI has participated with consultations at UNESCO and WTO events, our paper with the call for inclusion of free licenses into the TRIPS agreement has been published at the WTO website (pdf). This count goes on and on.

We have always tried to include all of our members, especially the non-european, into all of our business. We have issued an open call for hosts for all of our events, we consider international time zones for our online meetings, we have asked for resources and help on countless occasions. The response however was always behind our expectations. We never saw an application from outside Europe, and this includes Australia, for hosting any of our events. Nor have our calls for resources ever been forwarded to the internal mailing lists of several members.

The conflict about the right structure and the goal for the international umbrella organization of pirate parties is actually older then the founding of PPI itself (April 2010). There has always been a group of people who only wished for a simple organisation that is merely focused to provide a communication platform for various pirate parties worldwide.

Opposed to that – the vast majority (over two thirds) of the parties that where founding the PPI decided that the organization should also follow a political agenda and become a global player on the parquet of international politics, advocating for ideas shared by pirate parties at various UN bodies (like WIPO and WTO) and create cooperations with other international NGOs. According to the founding documents that was also the position of PPAU back then.

Finally it is to note, that the need to join forces in an international organization to pursue common goals at the international parquet is having different levels of urgency among the established Pirate Parties and those who are yet struggling to establish effective internal structures and to achieve first notable election success. Joining forces will be more effective and helpful for the organisation and will help the whole movement in pursuing the political changes and following our shared common goals.

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Tags: PPAU, PPI, PPI board, resignation, response, statement

8 Responses

1. Stephen March 4, 2015 at 19:16 · Reply →
  
  PPAU did try to organise a General Assembly… It was yanked out from underneath us all.

1. Andrew “K`Tetch” Norton March 5, 2015 at 02:17 · Reply →
  
  We never saw an application from outside Europe, and this includes Australia, for hosting any of our events.
  
  Except for the online one that was presented by the Australian party, assisted by the US party? The one that was agreed to, and then after the proposals came in, was swiftly cancelled when it was revealed how hard it would be to control the outcome.
  You remember, the cancellation that prompted PPAU to leave, you know the action you’re responding to? It’s like Gregory (and yes, this whole thing was mostly written by Gregory) just doesn’t know what’s going on.
  
  Oh, and it’s not the first time it’s been proposed. People have been pushing for an online GA since at least 2012.

1. Gregory Engels March 5, 2015 at 11:54 · Reply →
  
  Dear Andrew,
  
  If everything you know is to blaming it all at me – go ahead. Because you do not have real arguments. This statement was redacted heavily, I have wrote the first draft, that was much more “aggressive” in tone, and it was washed and toned down to this statement, that was passed unanimously in the board meeting. I know, you have difficulties to accept the democratic outcome if it let you in the minority, but please stop up making up your own facts as it fits you. There was never an application from PP-AU for hosting an event. Writing a proposal for RoPs is really not the same as organizing an event. PPI have not canceled any online GA, but we have voted against the proposed RoPs (that where written mainly by you, as you claim elsewhere).
  
  This whole thing seems to be a deeply personal matter to you, cause you have been in front of a “coreteam” of self-appointed group that happen to prepare the foundation of PPI, and you think that you would have done everything different and much better then everyone who was doing it after you left.
  
  Let agree to disagree: there are different opinions from yours and that do not automatically make them “wrong”. Ok?
  1. 1. Andrew “K`Tetch” Norton March 6, 2015 at 07:42 · Reply →
      
      I know, you have difficulties to accept the democratic outcome if it let you in the minority
      
      PPI have not canceled any online GA
      That’s right, so the event voted on, passed by your own rules (it WAS in compliance with your OWN rules) and due to be held in just over a weeks time, AS ANNOUNCED BY THE BOARD, is still going on? No? then it sure sounds like you ‘cancelled’ it then.
      
      So, er,
      
      please stop up making up your own facts as it fits you.
      
      PLEASE?
      
      Also, do us all a favour, and stop trying to play clever with linguistical semantics, it gets really amusing when you try and argue detailed nuances of a word, and then a few days later on another topic claim ignorance when you screw up ‘because you’re not a native english speaker”.

1. Maxus Piratus March 5, 2015 at 16:04 · Reply →
  
  It’s really sad to see this response from the PPI to one of its member. Really really sad in the context of several parties leaving PPI and of course a lot of very justifiable criticism of PPI over the past few years.
  
  No one is disputing that PPI has done stuff, some very successful stuff (Pirate Times being the most successful in my view!) but come on, if members don’t think the PPI is serving their interests, if they think its not democratic in how it operates, that it has been a bit incompetent, well that is what we have seen over the years…
  
  If you look back over what the PPI has done and its priorities, It starts to look a bit like the Gregory Engels project rather than something for its members and yes, thats because Gregory has done a lot of work and understandably that work has been on thinks he is interested in.. But that doesn’t mean he gets to dismiss an entirely party, one that stands in elections and gets more votes than PPI has ever had people gathered in one place!
  
  The parties that stand in elections reach more people than PPI, they have more impact than PPI and that is expected because that is job! PPI was supposed to be a place to come together and coordinate, make things better, support new parties, instead it is an angry talking shop trying to be a NGO and failing at being an organisation.
  
  I would not be surprised if more parties leave, at least the ones with functioning boards and actual memberships anyway.
  1. 1. Andrew “K`Tetch” Norton March 5, 2015 at 23:19 · Reply →
      
      No one is disputing that PPI has done stuff, some very successful stuff (Pirate Times being the most successful in my view!)
      
      Pirate Times is not done by PPI.
      
      https://twitter.com/LuciousLisaa/status/565979383606050818
      
      My understanding is that sure, PPI asked Josef to set it up, but in the end it was decided to avoid any ‘entanglement’ with them.

1. Josef Ohlsson Collentine March 6, 2015 at 19:55 · Reply →
  
  who hasn’t dreamt of an international news service reporting everything about pirates?
  
  I did a workshop talking about a pirate newsletter for a university project during the PPI GA in 2011, a different temporary two month project. Gefion Thuermer had been running the German pirate news Flaschenpost and gathered valuable experience from that. We met and discussed at the PPI GA 2012 and together with Daniel Ebbert, who had also been active in Flaschenpost, we founded Pirate Times in a sort of mix of those ideas. In the beginning we got some help from PPI with infrastructure but quickly moved to our own site to have more control of up-time.
  
  Thus you can definitely say that PPI helped facilitate the start of PPI but it has never been a PPI project. We’ve always been proudly independent and committed to bringing news to our audience without ties anywhere.

1. Pirate Parties International – Powered by Delusional Egomania | Politics & P2P March 6, 2015 at 20:44 ·
  
  […] have it. There is no other possible explanation. They’re blind to it though. In their response to the Australian departure, they […]