WANTED: 15 active members

Furthermore is the online membership management system down at the present point in time.

As an aside you can still email [email protected] if you would like to become a member

We will send out an invitation e-mail to all people that showed interest and entered their e-mail address for that purpose in the past.

I think it is crucial that we can show into which direction we want to develop the party and why it is worthwhile to put the effort into it. We have to convince people that such a party is important to us and to the country (and possibly for the world wide movement we are a part of).

I will start a couple of threads presenting my views (as I don't have any other ones) in the hope that others express their supporting or opposing sentiments and/or start more threads about their most pressing concerns.
I will start these discussions as a member of this group with the same right as any other member. They are not to be mistaken as official statements or anything which they are not and cannot be without decisions being made by the membership.

Any other ideas how we can convince people to engage?

Hurrah! signs of life.

"Any other ideas how we can convince people to engage?"

Well, I suggest having as much as possible under way within the current loop (+ extras hand picked for their tolerance), before asking the rank and file (or public) to invest their time in an uphill frustration.

People expect (perhaps unreasonably) there to already be a fully functioning Party before they arrive. Invite them too early and we lose their respect. (and so do our ideas).

• Membership management functioning
• A leadership that responds promptly when contacted
• Policy & promotional material available (and lots, even if it's provisional)
• Some evidence of someone following events in parliament / political news and a PP commentary

That's some examples, I'm sure there's more.

Summary: Reaching out for membership and participation is a 'launch', and you only launch when you have a functioning institution.

Thank you, @tommyfergusson , for showing up again. Your support means a lot to me - and I know to others as well.

signs of life.

There has indeed been little happening in loomio for quite a while. The board has been working hard behind the scenes, though, trying to re-gain control of the party assets which vanished with the former board members. We have had some success, but the overall outcome is more than disappointing. But the four of us have all been persistently workingwithin the boundaries of our possibilities.

Well, I suggest having as much as possible under way within the current loop ...

Basically we have to start from scratch, and our real assets are the tree circles of
- the continuously active board members,
- the 26 members of the loomio group,
- about 170 e-mail addresses of formerly interested people.

Our first aim at the present point in time is to get a lively discussion between > 15 people going and develop a vision we feel worth advertising before reaching out further.

• Membership management functioning

At the present point in time we can clearly manage our membership on as little as a single sheet of paper, really.

• A leadership that responds promptly when contacted

All members of the current board are and have been approachable at all times (despite me having had a summer break). And we are committed to be present as a communication hub for all interested parties. We don't see ourselves as leadership, though. The board only there to manage the environment for the membership to work. The President represents the board towards Pirate Party International (PPI) and the Five Eye-Patches, but this is also all about organisational stuff.
Real leadership in the PP is something that someone could only gain in moderating a discussion realm so that this person would gain natural authority amongst those who discuss these matters. The "Primus Inter Pares" in a particular area of expertise.
Once these the party would have been grown so far to have some of those people sticking out, it would be the role of the board (as communication hub) to point interested parties (e.g. press) to those members who have eared their mana to represent the general party stance in particular areas.

• Policy & promotional material available (and lots, even if it’s provisional)

Given that the party funds are < $300 we might want to stick with the one media that we can play with little money -> the internet. I would think that investing the time to update the site and the wiki would be better spend then painting colour on dead wood. We should also consider the online services we need to develop the contents that we want to print on paper when we really need to (e.g. general elections 2017).

Some evidence of someone following events in parliament / political news and a PP commentary

True, oh so true. We need an active membership. And we need vivid discussions about near to everything. We need to become 'the better environment' for those discussions and an efficient conveyor belt to transport the message. But the drive must come from the membership.

Summary: Reaching out for membership and participation is a ‘launch’, and you only launch when you have a functioning institution.

We may find ourselves trapped in a catch23 situation here‽

TLDR; those of us that are currently active should be more active (if possible) until such time that we get more members that are willing to be more active.

All members of the current board are and have been approachable at all times (despite me having had a summer break). And we are committed to be present as a communication hub for all interested parties. We don’t see ourselves as leadership, though.

Agreed 100%. However, we should consider these attributes that we assign ourselves (not leaders; support role, communication hub) as much a vision or long term goal as something in the short term.

As committed as we are to providing a framework to support the membership we will actually need to kick-start the process by using this framework ourselves.

We need to demonstrate that:
* The party leadership has at least a minimum viable set of objectives for the party that we can all (all members including the leadership) work towards (could/should be a mixture of international pirate policy and New Zealand policy)
* The party leadership is willing to get things done to help support the objectives of the party
* The party leadership is providing a framework to support the objectives of the membership
* The framework is robust enough to support the party as the party grows and as the party changes/adapts its objectives
* The framework is flexible enough that anyone can join in and help support the framework, change the framework, and use framework

The board only there to manage the environment for the membership to work.

This is exactly what will lead to a catch 22: people won't join/engage the party unless work has already been done, but we want to make it easy to people to get involved and develop the party once they do join. We need to start doing at least some of this work ourselves, but approach the work in a way that it could easily be passed off to someone else that is willing to contribute.

We could solve this in the most minimal way by re-writing the constitution to prevent the leadership from indefinitely holding all the power. It's too difficult to enforce rules such as maximum terms for board members since we don't currently have enough replacements, but we could introduce this change later or create a clause that specifies a minimum number of candidates or general members before the rule is applied. We could continue to make the leadership the executive decision makers of the party but add more explicit abilities for the general membership to veto the decisions of the board or throw the board out.

I agree with the assessment that all currently active members should be more active at least until a broader community is guaranteeing a 'critical mass'.
I have difficulties with the term 'leadership' for those currently active members for two reasons:
1) pretty much all active members are part of the board, so that the board could be taken as the place where the leadership is.
2) even though the currently active members are doing an important work, keeping the party alive, we are actually not following the general political discourse, analyse the value of proposed arguments, finding scientific evidence or setting any political positions. We are in fact not doing anything more than a board should do.

Again, I agree that we should do more. But political work that we do, we should do expressively as normal members of the party, not as board members.

My point is that the board should not be leading; but the leading people in the membership should at all times consider becoming board members. Someone has to do the not so glamorous decisions as well. And those who are well respected in the party may be able to do that smoother. Point being: the leadership comes from the reputation in the political discourse, that is driven by party members (of which some also may be board members).

Who wants to be a leader would need to set a political stance and defend and strengthen it with well founded arguments to convince the majority of party members.

To set some potential positions and start such discourse I have put up some provocative discussions in the area of my genuine interests and have invited all other members to do the same for what is their core interests.

The most important thing about leadership in a Pirate Party is in my eyes, that a leader in a PP is not being followed (due to authority), but is being backed (due to respect and merit).