PPI Minutes 2023-03-29

Agenda PPI BOARD MEETING

--- 29.3.2023 16:00 UTC, 18:00 CEST ---

Big Blue Button Room: https://bbb.piratensommer.de/b/gre-cnw-a9v

Audio recording: PiratesOnAir Streaming

https://owncloud.ag-technik.de/s/WdHfnm2Kw7xtB98

Video: https://bbb.piratensommer.de/b/gre-cnw-a9v

1 - ATTENDEES

1.1 - Members of the PPI board

participating: Keith, Julian, Mike, Florie, Alexander, Toledo

excused: Gregory, Bailey, Mauricio

unexcused:

Quorum:

1.2 - Others

Alternate Board Members:

participating: Bastian, Mia

excused:

unexcused:

Guests:

participating: Numero6, Joseph, Piratin_Stade, Cédric, Ysann, PiratesOnAir

2 - PROCEEDINGS

RoP: https://wiki.pp-international.net/wiki/index.php?title=PPI_Board/Rules_of_Procedure

Meeting opened at 16:03 UTC by Florie.

Meeting chaired by Florie.

Secretary for this meeting is everyone.

Quorum established with 7 (out of 9) board members present.

Streaming started: started https://piratesonair.net/live-stream/

Recording started: 16:03 UTC

Postal votes: none

Notes on meeting process: We received a comment from an alternate board member that it is not clear about the procedure for postal voting. Alternates can submit votes. If there are not 9 votes then those votes will be counted. As far as informing about the votes, we send voting announcements by email, wire, and Discourse. For a postal vote, board members and alternates can submit votes simultaneously. In general we will wait until the next meeting to tally the votes. If it is an urgent matter, and there are 5 votes from board members (not including alternates), then the proposal could be passed during the interim between meetings. Statutes for postal voting exist but are limited. This interpretation of postal voting seems the to be the intent of their existence in the statutes.

3 - APPROVAL OF THE MINUTES

Motion
Do we approve the minutes?
* Minutes of the last meeting: https://wiki.pp-international.net/wiki/index.php?title=PPI_Minutes_2023-03-05
Yes : Keith, Julian, Florie, Alexander
No :
Abstain : Mike
Result: Minutes are passed.

4 - REPORTS

4.1 - Short reports of the board members 1)

Board

• Florie Marie: Last week I started to write about my political career and toxic behaviour. So I started to explain it on Twitter. I tweeted something violent but sarcastically and got banned from Twitter for good. I contacted Twitter and they stayed by their decision. I asked French authorities about this as there are lot of banned people lately, so we'd like the authorities to do something. It might be useful to inform about this. We should take advantage of this and speak out.

• Gregory Engels: excused

• Bailey Lamon: excused

• Michal Gill: One last time using my master thesis as an excuse, but aside from the trip to Vienna for the ad hoc committee consultations I didn't do much. In the PPCZ though we're working on our participation at the PPEU council in Strasbourg in two weeks and preparing our own GA at the end of April.

• Keith L. Goldstein: I am on my way to a small island in the Pacific. I was hoping that this hour would suit more people, as it is very late for me. We had a Pirate beer, which turned out nicely. We have requests for more PBs to be scheduled, which I hope we can decide on today. We have had a lot of issues in Israel lately that are keeping my home party active. The PM has been trying to enact a law that makes him officially a tyrant. This is being matched with ferocious protests, which pirates are taking part in. We received support from Australian Pirates, who participted in a protest about the crisis in Israel and we shared their statements on social media. We have had a lot of discussions on Discord, Discourse, Wire, Messenger, and elsewhere. I'm hoping to hear from more board members and the entire Pirate community on these channels or any others.

• Alexander Isavnin: nothing to report, except some reactions on Russian govt. stupidities. Including former president Medvedev suggestion to download and share intellectual property (movies) of Western companies. Participated in Pirate beer.

• Julian Häffner: Nothing to report

• Mauricio Vargas: not present

• Maycow Toledo: not present

Alternates:

• Adam Wolf: not present

• Sebastian Krone:

I have monitored the PPI tech as I do every day.

All patches are up-to-date. All systems are running smoothly.

All requests for mail forwarding etc. are done (but I'm not sure that I'll get them all, as there are some peer-to-peer conversations).

I had asked to see the contract for the processing of data by a processor (Art. 28.3 GDPR) regarding our discourse hosted by Stefan Thöni that we use. When will this happen?

• Mia Utz: Nothing to report

• Raman Ojha: not present

• Carlos Polo: not present

Comment from Joseph. Is it possible to confirm issues with the treasurer?

5.1 - Proposals

• Treasurer Confirmation

Keith: In the last meeting we voted to confirm Bailey as treasurer with 3 affirmative votes and 3 abstentions. We were not sure if this was valid under the RoP, so we opened it to postal votes. Since no postal votes were received, we have reviewed the rules and it seems 3 votes is sufficient. As such, we should confirm Bailey as Treasure. I just bring up the point to confirm in this meeting. The relevant rules state: If 3 board members (including alternate board members) are present the board makes quorum. If 3 board members (including alternate board members) are present, unanimous votes are necessary to approve a proposal. If 4 votes are present, 3 votes are still necessary to approve a decision. If more members are present, a majority of votes are necessary to approve the decision, with a minimum of 3 affirmative votes. According to this rule, the prior vote of 3 affirmative votes and 3 abstentions counts, presuming that abstentions are not counted. Lacking opposition to this motion, I think we can conclude that the vote is accepted and Bailey is treasurer without having another vote. I therefore propose a motion to clarify in the RoP that abstentions are not counted against a majority vote. The following proposal is contingent on no objections to the prior vote on confirming Bailey as treasurer.

Florie: Are there any objections that we should not accept the postal vote?

Mike: I sent in a postal vote to the board email on March 23rd. It might not have arrive

Keith: I didn't receive that e-mail from Mike. Did anyone receive that e-mail? It's an important issue as an e-mail to the board hasn't arrived.

Mike: I sent it to the board email, and even I didn't get it.

Florie: Your vote was for Bailey. It was my proposal to have this election by postal vote. We elected Bailey on the last meeting. We checked the statutes and it was okay and Bailey was elected duly.

Mike: Indeed for.

Florie: There's the proposition by Keith to ammend the RoP so that this won't happen again.

Keith: We can simply change the Rules of Procedure.

Motion
Abstentions RoP
Add a line to the RoP to clarify that abstentions do not count against a majority vote.
Yes : Alexander, Florie, Julian, Mike, Keith
No :
Abstain :
Result: change approved

• Update to Rules of Proceedure

Motion
The following RoPs for the board voting need to be updated or we need to return to using Loomio and Redmine. Vote in absentia of the board members - The board members may vote in absentia using any of the following means: Updating the decision on the Project Management Referential with their vote Using Loomio to cast their votes Emailing the board mailing list citing the object and their vote. A tally of the vote shall be maintained in the decision record on https://tasks.pp-international.net Board members not present at the meeting can vote on a proposal published in the provisional agenda or Loomio PPI Board by citing the proposal and expressing their vote in an e-mail sent to board@pp-international.net (postal vote) or casting a vote in Loomio. The Loomio and postal votes shall be added to the votes cast at the meeting if the proposals are exactly the same. The Loomio and postal votes shall be mentioned in the provisional agenda and can be superseded by subsequent email, a change to the Loomio vote or by a vote cast at the meeting. Mike: Does it mean we replace Redmine with Discourse and Loomio with Wire? Keith: My thinking was to have a transparent record of postal voting. Florie: I also started a Discord. We can add that. Keith: Okay, adding Discord. Joseph: I would like to see where we have each country having its own channel. I am not sure if I have joined the channel, but I will make sure to. Keith: I am not sure that we need to vote on this at this session, and I will prepare the text for the next meeting. Florie: We will need to know who is who and make sure that we do not accept people who are not acceptable. I think it would be a good idea to have people with limited roles. It is important that we have people who know the server. I will propose at the next meeting that we will have a new system for organization. I ask Links: PPI Discord: https://discord.gg/T8Fv3vzmRp USPP Discord: https://discord.gg/WNXVc7WR Remark from Bastian: Discord is a data octopus and not compatible with the GDPR. We cannot use Discord for official meetings.
We will update Redmine and Loomio to Discourse, Discord, and Wire. The Board email needs to be fixed to allow board members' votes to be received.
Yes :
No :
Abstain :
Result: we will vote on the exact text at the next meeting.

5.2 - Working Groups Update

Mike: The working group needs to be updated in the statutes, but I need to work on it.

Florie: We should speak about this when we meet up. I have some ideas that I want to propose on this work based on what we are doing in France.

5.3 Economic Update

Nothing. Bailey is not here.

5.4 ECOSOC/UN

• Carlos visited UNOG and wrote an update on his activities that Mike is drafting into a blog post along with a story about his own visit to UNOV.

Mike: I am working on a statement. Carlos is going to so many events lately that it is hard to keep track. He sent me his text, I'm combining it with mine and will post it on our website.

• Can we create a UN activities email that is forwarded to all board and working group members that we use for UN updates?

Keith: I would like to start a new e-mail for our UN activities, as I suspect we're currently missing a lot of e-mails that aren't reaching us. I can start an e-mail outside of our domain.

Florie: We have a working e-mail in France you can use. My PPI e-mail is working well though.

Keith: The group emails are the problem.

Florie: We may have a team that can work on the issue. This situation can be solved by a temporary email?

Bastian: I wrote in the chat there was a fuckup I fixed I ask you to check if you received an email now. Of course we have a tech team here. We have a problem with Gmail. We made some complaints. I think it is fixed now. If you received the test email, then it works.

Several individuals indicate that they received the email (Mike, Florie, Keith, Julian).

Bastian: I believe that the problem is fixed now.

Keith: So can we have a group mail to get the UN updates? Now the e-mails go to multiple groups.

Bastian: If I get the name of the list I can make it within this meeting.

Florie: We have many lists, is it possible to have a list of the mailing lists? We need a new mailing list for the UN activities.

Motion
Updating UN contacts with a new UN email list
Can we create a new UN email that we can update from the existing contact emails? It is not necessary to vote on this, in case no one objects.
Yes : {{{Yes}}}
No : {{{No}}}
Abstain : {{{Abstain}}}
Result: motion passed. Keith will contact Bastian and update the UN connections with that email.

6 AOB - Any other business

• Florie: Twitter Discussion

After being banned from Twitter, I propose to speak about the possibility of filing a complaint against Twitter at an International level in the name of freedom of speech. I will explain what happens to me, and the reason why I’ve been banned of Twitter on the next meeting of the board on march 29th at 18 CEST.

Florie: As explained, I've been banned for life for no reason from Twitter without chance to get my account back.

There are so many people who have been banned for bad reasons, for no reasons, and with no opportunity for debate.

Mike: Again, as much as I would like to do something with this, there is no way that we are ever going to win. There is no legal framework. They will always say that it is a private framework, and there is nothing we can do. Our best bet is to contact (Mike ADD NAME).

Florie: In France we have a law which can be used. So we have here something to do in France. If the PPI also engages in this, it might help in France. We have people who want to work on this.

Mike: I did not know this. Is it new?

Florie: it is about democracy and freedom of speech. Digital economic trust law. It is about economy and also about freedom of speech. In France we have a law that was voted on a long time ago. This law relates to huge enterprises that are working on the speeches. I think you understand the situation. I will send you a link on the French law and ask the French pirates to translate. Maybe we can speak about it at the next meeting. It is a long time complaining, but we can do something really great with the French state and the French government.

Mike: This is going to be a good topic to discuss in Strasbourg and Liberec.

Florie: We (PPFR) have a press conference scheduled about freedom of speech. We will send you the statement by PPFR and we shall publish it this week. In Strasbourg we'll talk about it. I used to have 12k followers, so it's a big loss. A friend of mine lost his account with 10k followers, also due to poor moderation.

• Keith: CoA

Has the coa@pp-international.net email been checked? The board does not have access to this email list. We must ensure that all coa members receive emails to this list, and also that anyone from outside the members can also send mails to that list in the case of an issue.

Keith: I heard from some CoA members that they haven't been contacted. If there's anyone from the CoA, make sure all of you are added. It's a technical issue. We need to make sure that all CoA members have been pinged.

Florie: I believe Cedric received the email about the CoA.

• Keith: Fixed schedule for board meetings. We have now had 2 meetings with times of Sunday at 09:00 UTC and Tuesday at 20:00 UTC. I propose that we keep these 2 time slots. We can add in one more time slot if you all want, and then stick with this rotation. What do you all think?

Mike: Also fine by me.

Florie: I personally agree.

If no one objects we can keep this schedule of Sunday's at 9 UTC and Tuesday's at 20 UTC. If no one objects, we can go further.

• Keith: Pirate Beer Schedule.

When should we schedule the next PB?

Keith: We put up the last PB at 9 or 10 PM UTC. Do we want to schedule the next PB? Since you all will be in Strasbourg, let me know an hour that we can schedule a hybrid Pirate beer with you all together. You can all let me know on Wire, and then I will announce it.

Florie: Maybe it will be on Sunday. Maybe we can meet before the meeting. Maybe you can organize it every week. Someone announced on Discord, Vincent on the Coa. He wanted to join, and he asked if it is possible to organize with Australia and the US teams. Maybe we can do it every week. Let's discuss this on the Wire.

• Numero6: PP-EU participation

If PPI wishes to participate in the next PP-EU Council meeting (April, 16th), it should designate its representative(s) at the upcoming March 29 Board meeting. https://wiki.ppeu.net/doku.php?id=12th_council_meeting_2023

Florie: Is it usual for the PPI to be represented at the PPEU Council?

Mike: Me, Florie and Bailey at least we'll be there. We haven't had anyone at the last one specifically, but PPI is an observer member of the PPEU.

Florie: We don't have to vote on this, probably. There will be a lot of us present.

===================================================

• Next Meeting: Sunday April 23rd at 9:00 UTC

• Meeting Closed: 17:20