Pirate Manifesto Amendments structure

Each amendment will have, in this page, the following sections:

• Rank. In chronological order: First, Second, Third, etc ...
• Affected paragraphs/sections. This will allow the merging of the amendment with other amendments affecting the same paragraphs/sections. Only is allowed the modification of one paragraph per amendment, unless there are other related paragraphs that require to be modified if the first one is modified.
  • The reason to allow the modification of only one paragraph per amendment is to allow a fine-grained amendment process. If amendments were meant to be made to whole sections or even to the entire Draft, people would may like some parts of an amendment while disliking others, and however being forced to approve or reject the entire amendment; allowing fine-grained amendments, voters can truly approve those parts they like while rejecting the rest.
  • Paragraph to be modified has to be specified. e.g., Preamble, 3rd paragraph; About restrictions of Ideas and Information, About Trademarks, 1st paragraph; etc.
• Amendment Contents. It will include a link to another wiki page where will be detailed, first, a list of arguments supporting the amendment, and next, the new text proposed for the parts to be modified -there is no need to write the whole section where the text to be modified is, writing the paragraph or paragraphs to be modified will be enough, omitting the rest-. Contents of the amendment can only be modified by:
  • Its author.
  • the responsible of the Pirate Manifesto Amendments Central -and he will only be allowed to add informative notes-.
• Discussion on the Amendment. A direct link to the discussion page corresponding to that amendment, to be able to check the comments made. In this section all wiki members will be allowed to participate with their comments, no matter whether they are members of any pirate party or not.
• Blocking amendment?. This section allows parties which are going to present amendments as a party to indicate the rest of parties that the approval of the amendment will be required for that party to approve the Final Draft -i.e., if the blocking amendment is not approved, that party would reject the Final Draft-.
  • By allowing the rest of parties to be aware of the blocking nature of the amendment, it would enable the rest of parties, if needed, to contact the party who wrote the amendment and try to have a deal regarding its contents.
  • People from parties who allow their members to individually propose amendments are not allowed to label their amendments as being blocking, as they propose their amendments on their own and not representing their parties.
  • It is strongly recommended to not abuse of blocking amendments, using this label only for really crucial issues, if any -not expected to be too many, as First Draft was written according to pirate parties' common stances-.
• Merged amendment?. Attention: This section has to be filled only by the responsible of the Pirate Manifesto Amendments Central. Allows to know whether the amendment will be proposed as is, or if it will be merged with others that modify the same parts of First Draft, becoming an amendment with multiple options instead of only one.