http://www.pirate-party.us/news.php:
On Tuesday, July 13, 2010, members of the United States Pirate Party cast their votes for five positions. In keeping with the spiit of democracy and openess that is the core of the party, nominations for the elections were open to all members. The US Pirate Party is proud to announce that the National Administration of the Pirate Party will be comprised as follows:
Brittany Phelps retains the post of Administrator. She was initially elected to the post in January 2010. Brittany is based in Arizona
Long-time Operations Officer Glenn Kerbein did not seek re-election, and his duties will be undertaken by Jay Emerson. Jay is also the interim chairman of the New York Pirate Party.
Renee Schroeder is the new Promotions Officer. This position was formerly held by Travis McCrea. Renee lives in Pennsylvania, and is also working on a novel.
The previously vacant Legal Officer’s position has been filled by Andrew Norton. Andrew was the party administrator in 2007-2008, and later ran Pirate Parties International. He is based in Georgia.
Florida based Bradley Hall also retains his position as Records Officer. He was first elected to the post in January 2010, after being the Administrator pro tempore.
The Financial Officer position is currently vacant as Shirley Runyon did not seek re-election.
The US Pirate Party wishes luck to its former officers and also wishes to congratulate the new members. We are looking forward to an eventful year!
Thursday 15 July 2010 – 18:33:28 – Posted by Bradley Hall in Records Office
Last night the National Administration of Pirates held the National Convention of the Pirate Party. The NCPP is a yearly event in July where all of the amendments that have been passed throughout the year are actually added to the USPP Constitution.
The members of the National Administration of Pirates shall review all Party activities during the preceding year, and shall issue a report.
The full log of the Convention is available at: http://memwiki.pirate-party.us/2010-07-14
In this post I will condense everyone’s speech so as to remove comments and provide an easier reading environment. This series of speeches also gives an excellent account of some of the Party’s activities for the past year. Each speech was given in order of seniority in the Party, as in, he who was with the party the longest went first, then down from there:
Andrew Norton (incoming Operations Officer):
In July 2009, there were only 3 applications for the board, Ryan Martin
(admin), Glenn Kerbein (ops), and Bethany Jolly (records).
Initially, there was some upset over a member who was running for Administrator before pulling out, Tony Todaro, objecting to the election. He began his own group, also using the party’s official name, and lodged complaints with Pirate Party International (PPI).
New PPI head Samir Aloui (I had just stepped down the week before) asked Austrian party chairman Max Lalouschek to oversee arbitration. This stalled, due to an apparent unwillingness by Tony to provide
information, and because Ryan claimed there was no need.
The arbitration was never concluded, and was finally dismissed early this year.
Meanwhile, Ryan and Bethany jolly started on a tour. The tour started by visiting a few locations, mainly hackerspaces, and
burning-man type events, but reports from those events gave little indication of any
party promotional activity.
By September, there were stops only every few weeks. Eventually, a proposal was made by Ryan that a house be bought in a small
Pennsylvania town, for the party, which they would live in, and attempt to ‘take over’ the town, which was in a severely economically depressed state, through running for the city government.
The membership as a whole were dismissive of the plan, preferring that the national administrator concentrate on the national party. A vote of no confidence was proposed in late November, and passed, with representatives of the French and Canadian parties witnessing. Significant concerns were also made to the lack of any records from the meetings or tours held at that point.
The house was all but condemned, and would have required at least an additional $5000 to become habitable.
Throughout much of December, nothing was heard of from either of them, and two further votes of no confidence were taken, and passed, the third on December 29th 2009, removing Ryan Martin from office. Brad Hall was appointed Administrator pro-tem for a period of 30 days, to allow for a special election to replace Ryan, and
Bethany, to be held.
At this point, Brad Hall (Records Officer) started his speech. After Ryan Martin’s last vote of no confidence, he became the Administrator Pro-Tem. He picked up from Andrew’s ending:
I became the Administrator Pro Tem on either December 28th or 29th, depending on your time zone. My tenure started with me trying to get the “keys” from Ryan. I don’t believe I ever got all of them from Ryan. Brittany did though.
My main concern during my short Administrator-ship was to keep the party united and to get qualified candidates to run for the Admin post and the other vacant
officer positions.
I was stressed during that period, worse than I probably should have. Fortunately, I had a great group of people with me in the Party who also wanted it to succeed helping me along the way.
In the middle of the month [January], I recognized Oklahoma as the first official USPP recognized state party, which gave us another officer in the ranks to help out (Marcus Kesler).
I chose not to run for re-election on the grounds that I was running the election and did not want accusations that I tampered with votes so that I could win raised among other things.
On January 28th, Brittany Phelps took over the Administrator-ship. Her first order of business would be get the remaining passwords from Ryan and oversee the election of new officers.
At this point, Brittany Phelps (Administrator) took the stand:
To this day, I still have not gotten all of the passwords and documents from Ryan. I contacted Ryan a great many times, and while he did send over some passwords, some I had to wrangle through password recovery, etc., and some I have not gotten at all. I do not have any IRS access information, nor the PayPal information, to this day.
After the first time or two I got a hold of Ryan, he steadfastly ignored all phone calls and emails, and I heard from third sources that he claimed to have turned over the aforementioned information, though it never happened.
He and Bethany both assured me that they would forward all paperwork to me via mail, but neither packages materialized.
First thing–PayPal. I contacted PayPal, and they would accept IRS documentation, or proof of incorporation. Neither of which we had. The money remains in the PayPal, from
what I can tell, but we cannot access it until the incorporation paperwork goes through, finally.
More on that in a bit
IRS–Two filings have been done for the IRS. I tried to cancel both, but they have yet to cancel it. I have called in and been told to wait another 30 days, because apparently these things take half an eternity.
FBI/etc.–Due to not being incorporated, we really can’t go after [Ryan]Martin. Legally, the problem is that because we’re not based in a state, there isn’t a specific set of state laws to follow, roughly, from what I understand. Again, an issue solved with the forthcoming incorporation.
Incorpora tion–We filed the paperwork back in April, but due to the fact that “Inc.” was not in the title, it was rejected, so I had to refile it again, with “Inc.” When we originally filed, we didn’t think it was going to be an issue, but they rejected us anyways.
So, once we have that, we can get to the money in the PayPal, pursue any remaining documents from Martin, and perhaps finally get to a solution with the IRS.
So, yeah, we don’t quite have everything from Martin and Bethany as yet. The cause for their obstinacy in this matter is beyond me, but it is what it is.
If I find that the paperwork he has can solve the IRS problem, he’s going to quickly find that he does start caring when cops show up at his door.
I’d rather not, but seriously, it got frustrating ages ago.
Anyways, Just after my election, I set up the election that found Glenn Kerbein, Travis McCrea, Brad Hall, and Shirley Rungion elected to their various positions
Long story short, we made some good progress despite the problems inherited from Ryan, Travis built us a good website, and we got a good grasp of willing volunteers from the data.
We’ve recognized NYPP since then, and Massachusetts and Washington have been getting moving. Others have as well, though I can’t list them all off the top of my
head–Texas, definitely.
Then, somewhere around May I lost steam due to the ongoing saga of family issues, getting into a car accident, finals, and various other traumas, so I became somewhat idle for 4-5 weeks, and have just been getting back the past few weeks. I’ve been
in contact with quite a few people who are interested in organizing their
state, and have been working on a handbook to guide them.
And that brings us up to the election yesterday, and that’s it.
Anyways, that’s about it.
Jay Emerson (incoming Operations Officer) had this to say:
New York Pirate Party was officially recognized in May and since that time we’ve had a few volunteers (and myself) take up the 1st, 4th, 20th, and 21st Congressional Districts for when we assemble enough people for signature collection in order
to get on the ballot.
Also, Marty Marks was appointed to Records Officer to serve with me until we have a formal election for the NYPP. And as Ops Officer for this year I have successfully finished my dinner.
Travis McCrea (outgoing Promotions Officer) went next:
Okay well when I took the position as Promotions Officer we had been really slow on a lot of stuff promotions included.
We had accounts that we didn’t have passwords to… no real standard in usernames.
The followers on the accounts was pretty low, with the exception of our Facebook account and the Facebook followers were rarely messaged, and some of them
didn’t even realize we were a real party
This is not going to be a “go me” type of post, just an overview of what has happened in promotions… which is my department so sorry that I will be including little in other people.
My first task was to start the new website: Our old drupal site was old, and actually was not configured correctly and we could not upgrade due to the server load for whatever reason it was using way to much memory to properly use.
Owen and Myself were going to switch to a drupal based system that he was going to build, however, Owen has removed himself as an active member of the party, so I was stuck with doing it myself (with the help of a few people, zzbomb helped me build the template that I had come up with).
I had got the site switched over to e107 and built a system on top of it, to help each state’s constituants find the resources for their individual state.
Though this has not been very well maintained and this was my fault, I will still be working on the system (with Renees approval of course [Renee Schroeder, incoming Promotions Officer]) to better it
to make it easier to update
I have also created a system which got all the officers more involved on Facebook and Twitter, through Hootsuite, and through Mailchimp we had created a new mailing list which has shown a great increase in member activity.
I have created a few committees, the coolest and most promising is US Pirate Party TV. It is actually slated to do its first pilot here in a couple of months, or even within the next month.
The set has been built, the talent has already agreed and has already done some sound tests and such. But the guy in California just has had a slew of work that prevented him from doing some of the big stuff to get started, but after that, it will be easy for him to do a weekly series for us. It will be a news series and allow us to keep track of issues that matter to us.
Finally I was noticing that although we had TONS of requests to become a volunteer for the party, there was very little actual activity within the party from these people, so I decided to send out a feedback survey to our members. I had expected 10-20 members to fill out and send back. I think the last count over 100 people (150?) that filled out the survey almost every single one of them I had contacted back to recieve further details about what they wanted from the party
The party has had its slow points, but I have done a lot of work behind the scenes to make the party better, I know I haven’t been able to do much in the past few months because my only means of getting online has been broken.
However in that time, I had also flown to Canada twice to work with the Pirate Party of Canada and find out from them what they are doing to make their party so successful.
And I am working (and now passing that on to Renee) so we can have a more Canadian-like like press team and committee structure.
Though that will be up to her, I had put together some guides for it. I also did a canvassing guide for our party (which got adopted by PPCA).
Oh I also setup the Pirate Party phone number, and once we have some money we were going to setup the Pirate Party phone system.
That concludes the speeches from last night’s Convention.
[Submitted by Bradley Hall]