If you know about someone else you can invite them as well but would prefer to keep work-group on this very small until structure if set up and we can expand the project to include more people. Gefion (flaschenpost) GMT +1 Daniel (flaschenpost) GMT+2 Justus (PPDE) GMT +2 Mozart (PPAU) Busy for next two weeks =11jun? Josef @collentine GMT -6
Next meeting: Wednesday 13/6 at 19.00 London = 20.00 Berlin/NL = 13.00 Mexico
ACTION PLAN
Before Meeting 1) Talk to PPI about being official press service -> @collentine did this at board meeting
*PPI very positive
*Set up as a work-group -> provides independence
*Happy to help with infrastructure we need. ML, Wordpress, Servers, etc.
*Gregory and Jerry expressed interest in helping with articles
2) Subpad structure for team -> Daniel will ask Jerry -> need our own later? or ok with .eu? 3) Internal mail-list needed. 'ppnews' = suggested name. -> Josef sent mail to Gregory 4) Structure to get new team-members on board -> Gefion 5) Create a pad with short intro about this project + searching for team members. Will be used mainly for crowd-sourcing our name but also introducing ourselves.
-> Name of pad?
After Name is found 1) Social media accounts 2) Mail account 3) Domain (or subdomain on PPI?) 4) External ML 5) Contact pirate parties and get on distribution list for press-releases.
PREVIOUS MEETING Agenda: Aim Result Target group Relations with other groups (see bottom) Areas of reporting Name of Int PP news agency
Protocol:
Aim Spread information across country borders and make it more accessible. Information about what is going in each PP Information on general pirate topics Gefion: Do not make it too narrow, provide a platform for ppl to publish what they want to write about, build a team from that process Set up a technical/organizational infrastructure so that the publishing is easy, provide proof reading etc., learning by doing, set the standards during we work out how the working goes. Also become known as the place where Pirates know they can go to get international pirate news
language: English for now, as we don't need to provide news in German (FP) or Swedish (everybody speaks English in Sweden), and we do not have the skills yet to provide our service in other languages like Spanish Define what we want to translate etc., not overreach what to write ourselves what to re-post / translate what to recommend Be a an instant source of news via a blog, and give the highlights for people that do not want to spend so much time on looking for news through the newsletter Build up local contacts in each country. Dividing responsibility on a few countries each (long-term goal)
Result Milestones, do no need to be discussed yet, end of agenda...
Target Group Short- and middle-term: Pirates and interested people long-term possibly expand
Areas of Reporting Narrow it down to 4 areas, try to publish on those in balance (ie not weigh one area too heavily) Not only what other people do and say, but also on our own content
1) Global PP related news 2) Organizational tips 3) Election Results and changes in Pirate Parties + EU parliament 4) Interviews (introducing pirate parties and pirates)
- Important dates
Rough target = 10 articles per month. 1) Global News 2) Organizational Tips *2 3) election results and GA's (depends on how many happen), 1 EU parliament 4) 2 pirate party introductions, 1 pirate interview
off-topic: I'm playing around with PHP and contact info at http://pirateparties.collentine.com
The first steps towards making an international news service is discussing what we want from it. Throwing out some thoughts and ideas I have about it. Hoping for comments and feedback as well as finding people interested in helping with this. We need people acting as reporters/curators for this project. For this new international news agency I suggest we keep the form of a simple newsletter with links to more information for interested people. Starting small and scaling up the reporting if we see that we have enough people and time for it. I'm in the field of PR/Marketing and thus appreciate especially tips from Flaschenpost and maybe how to take parts from there into this project.
Background: Changingpirateparties I have a similar project called Changingpirateparties which is a global pirate party newsletter (reaching 83 pirates from +15 countries, many high up in their national party). This was started due to my university allowing time for it in a course about 'projects' for a few months. I have been running it myself and been using the proprietary software madmimi.com to help with layout and management. It stagnated a bit mostly because it was limited to 100 subscribers and I wanted to move from their platform. The newsletter focused the news on what would be relevant across country borders and contained 4 focused sections: Global PP news, Organizational tips, Election Resuls / changes and Important dates. Sample of how it looks https://madmimi.com/mimio/07fe72/ and https://madmimi.com/mimio/ce4ac1
New project
Aim: Spread information across country borders and make it more accessible. Result: Creating international awareness and strengthening the sense of a 'pirate movement'. Increased collaboration and communication across borders. Target group? Whom are we aiming at? Which people do we want to reach? Pirates? People who are interested in the party? The whole world? -> I'd say mainly as an internal communication reaching and connecting pirates across borders + journalists to show progress and give them ideas on what to write about. I'd say mainly pirates interested in international politics and how it develops. Also could it be interesting as a source of information for pirate parties without a own newsletter. +1
Needs to discuss and fix Name of agency (I like my old one of changingpirateparties, other ideas?) Message in a Bottle, which would be the English translation of Flaschenpost, has a very nice ring to it too, I think. But we do not want to make it sound too germanocentric, as per usual, of course G: This also might cause problems because as far as I know it's a registered trademark The German PP press service, or the Sting song? From a marketing perspective I'd say bottle gives connotations to something small and closed off. With the name ChangingPirateParties I have two main things in mind. Partly describing how PP's are changing and partly as a symbol that the information in newsletter will hopefully affect and inspire some PP's to change. Bad aspect of the name is that it's a long one and has no good abbreviation. Domain (let the old one expire in waiting for this project) Newsletter infrastructure (need to replace madmimi.com, using mailman software instead?) +1 for mailman. We use that for the Flaschenpost as well. Staff in form of reporters / curators (start very small and then scale) +1 Do we want people who write exclusively for this project? Much of the content of the Flaschenpost could simply be translated and reused ... ? I guess we'll have problems with setting up a whole new team!+1 No need for exclusivity, pirates share! So mainly translations at the begin and then start writing own content while getting bigger? I'd say linking to interesting content in newsletter and do some of our own. See Changingpirateparties format Meetings / development of project (here and on Mumble +1 or skype) Both fine for me
Areas of reporting 1) Global PP related news 2) Organizational tips 3) Election Results and changes in Pirate Parties 4) Important dates 5) Interviews (doable with more than just me working with it) = #7 6) EU parliament (reports from the two pirate MEPS) 7) Introductions of pirate parties around the world (?) -> We have done this for a long time in Germany so plenty to build on ... and some already available in English :) 8) Interesting new programms in national pirate parties -> for example: Germany and the BGE, in that case we would write about that Normally include that in #3 Good to merge a few to keep areas down I think
Scalability (more steps?, change of order?) 1. Similar to Changingpirateparties newsletter with 1/month Sounds like a good starting point to me. 2. Adding three more areas #5 #6 #7 and doing more digging, interviewing 4. Efficient curation (youtube, PPI wiki, etc) -> Why also stuff as youtube and not only stay with text? curation = sifting through content to find good stuff and making it available to others. There's a lot of good videos produced but no one collecting them. Highlight a few new campaign/interviews on Youtube in newsletters? 3. Bi-weekly (?) newsletter 4. Translations (use PPI TTF to make newsletter and reports in more languages), use resources like parrot.fm and Flaschenpost to translate interesting items. I would make this the first step, really. Generating own content is far harder than starting out with a small team that focusses on gathering interesting content and translating it. More languages would be brilliant (we thought about translating the Flaschenpost for quite some time now!) but creates additional organisational workload - how do you make sure every person who wants to receive the newsletter gets the language he or she wants? How do you consistently translate? (Or you end up with this article in EN and DE, that one in EN and CZ, the other one in EN and RU ...) Agree but also see it as a hard step with translations. Maintaining a good and consistent translation is hard work, easy in beginning but quickly detoriates (ex look at PPEU) -> thus get project started first with only english and consider translating after. Re-using old content is definitely good as well but mostly looking for new content. Think translating new and interesting articles between here and Flaschenpost is no problem. So stay with English and leave the translation to the local newsletters? And other way round translate stuff from the local newsletters if we think it is interesting?yeah, sounds right. -> that's what I meant in the first place :)
Channels to spread our news
Newsletter (main and most important)
Twitter (instant, similar to @ppnewsletter today)
Blog (publishing our own content from interviews, digging research)
I propose we use the system the Flaschenpost has used for more than two years now: Wordpress blog that publishes all items and a wrap up of these as a newsletter (we can use everything else on top, of course). This also allows addons for multi-language! see http://ppeu.net for a language plugin in action agree but also consider it important to link to other relevant articles in newsletter like I've done with changingpirateparties. No need to create everything ourself when there is so many good things in other places that also need attention globally.
PPI Wiki (curation with news we produce)
Youtube (aggregating pirate videos)
Sources for information Blogs Wiki's (digging) Interviews Board meeting protocols conferences Pressreleases Country summary reports (have responsible give short summary of past month, Reporters can have responsibility for a few countries each to lighten load of gathering reports) I am building an 'attachee' service for PPDE, with ppl helping the int coordinators by summarizing what is happening in the individual countries. Maybe we can get some of them to provide their content also in a way that is suitable for us? sounds good. Had a similar idea with international coordinators in different countries. PPAU currently has a "Pirate Gazette" and webcast. Could be good source of info. Info channels: http://piratenpad.de/p/cpp
Other thoughts and ideas?
Relations with others. How we fit in. We should define our relationships with the following groups of pirates imo: Press services and officers on international (PPI (parrot)), national and subnational level news services on national and subnational levels, podcasts etc. Websites like LQDN, netzpolitik.org, ... as to where we want to advertise, for what we want to advertise, and whose content we want to scan for possible translations
