The PPI board has now served one third of their elected time and it is a good time to summarize what they have accomplished. This might also be a good opportunity to give the board praise for accomplished tasks as well as point on things they are still behind on. With two thirds of their time left, the future reports from the board will hopefully indicate further improvements and progress made.

The current Board was elected April 15th 2012 at the PPI Conference in Prague. The board has held eleven board meetings  up until now (latest one being on August 14th). The attendance of the board at the meetings have been high, most people having only two to three meetings that they have not been able to attend and therefore been excused from. The two people that stand out are Nuno (who hasn’t missed a single meeting) and Jelena who only managed to attend less than half of the eleven meetings. Important to remember is that these numbers only account for excuses made at the time of writing the protocol, urgencies and excuses made afterwards are not accounted for in the following meeting statistics of the board:

10/11 (1 excused) Co-Chairman – Gregory Engels / PP-DE
8/11 (2 excused) Co-Chairman – Lola Voronina /PP-RU
7/11 (3 excused) Chief Administrative Officer – Travis McCrea / PP-CA
8/11 (3 excused) Treasurer – Ed Geraghty / PP-UK
5/11 (2 excused) Board Member – Jelena Jovanovic / PP-RS
8/11 (2 excused) Board Member – Denis Simonet / PP-CH
11/11 (0 missed) Board Member – Nuno Cardoso / PP-PT

One of the main tasks for PPI is to help new pirate parties to form and get started. During the time of this PPI board there have been registration attempts in Hungary, Iceland and Israel (there were also two attempts in Poland – the papers have been filed in the court for Polska Partia Piratów on 23rd of July, and for Partia Piratów on 24th of July, but this is not exactly something to brag about). There has also been contact with people interested in trying to start up their own pirate parties in the following countries: Andorra, Armenia, Dominican Republic, FYR Macedonia, India, Iraq, Mali, Mauritius, Mongolia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Qatar, Thailand, and Uganda. Hopefully we will be able to cover these countries with an article once they get organized enough to start up pirate parties.

The main problem the PPI board has had in this term is that they still, after one third of their term, have not been able to gain access to the assets in their bank account. The failure of this task can be explained in three parts. The first is a badly prepared hand-over from the previous board, making the task of getting access a slow and ardous proccess. The second part of the failure lies in difficulties in communicating with the bank, the current account has been closed (not explained why in board protocols) and the current treasurer has no legal proof that he is indeed the treasurer of PPI (the board mentions that they might have to wait until PPI gets a headquarter to solve this). The last part of the blame for this fail lies with the current board who have acted upon this task very slowly. A treasurer was not elected until the second meeting (1 May) where Ed Geraghty volunteered as a last resort. The next mention of the bank account happens at the meeting a month later (29 May) “Still waiting to talk with previous treasurer, when he gets back from holiday” -Ed. The first contact with the previous treasurer is mentioned in the meeting that took place two months after the board was elected (19 June) but there is still a lot of information missing. The next mention is at end of July (31 July) where some troubles with the bank are disclosed. The issue was mentioned again in this last meeting (14 August) and seems to be prioritized now but not being closer than they are to get access to their own account is a failure of this board.

Besides this, the board has progressed and accomplished a lot of other tasks during this first part of their elected time. Gregory does a good job summarizing everything in a nice report quoted below. The only additional points to mention are that the possibilities of an Internet GA(General Assembly) is being worked on and that the calls for arranging the GA 2013 are worked on but delayed (the board originally agreed to ask for applications for the beginning of June.

A good summary of the other progress the PPI board has made can be found in the report that Gregory sent out a few days ago.

Photo Credits: Mike Herbst

About Josef Ohlsson Collentine

I’m a dual citizen (American/Swede) and try to integrate my reflections from a more global perspective if possible. I’m the organizational leader for Pirate Times and work actively to strengthen the pirate movement through this work as well as being the international contact for Piratpartiet (PPSE). Elected board member of PPSE for 2015-2018.
If you would like to ask me something I speak English, Swedish and Spanish. Find me on the links below

 

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The PPI board has now served one third of their elected time and it is a good time to summarize what they have accomplished. This might also be a good…