Membership Drive

• Hand out leaflets on the street and at relevant protests and events.
• Create information stands to meet people and inform them about us and win new members. http://piratetimes.net/running-an-information-stand/ http://piratetimes.net/campaign-idea-using-pirate-balloon-art/
• Design, make and hang up posters and placards http://piratetimes.net/tips-and-tricks-placards/

I've been thinking about a simple 'join us' leaflet along the lines of:
Have you ever:
* copied music from a CD you bought to a digital music player
* showed a DVD at a sports club social event
* sung "Happy Birthday" in public without paying a royalty to AOL-Time-Warner corporation
* played music in a cafe or restaurant without a license from the copyright holder, or a rights organisation like APRA?

If you've done any of these everyday things, YOU ARE A PIRATE!

Join the NZ Pirate Party, and help us bring copyright law into the digital age.

Can we please get some current membership numbers from the board, please?

@strypey I like what you are saying there, but I wonder if making people feel defensive is a positive thing.

I know it makes an impact, which is a good thing. I just wonder if a more positive message would work.

e.g.

Do you care about your privacy? The Pirate Party Cares! Visit "appropriate PPNZ web address" to find out how your privacy matters to PPNZ.

Do you use Facebook? etc...your details are being used as a kind of currency by these type of sites. The Pirate Party Cares! about your on line identity being yours, visit "appropriate PPNZ web address" to find out what PPNZ proposes to do about this situation.

@adam I think you approach is the better one at a later stage, once the party is known and established. @strypey's suggestion is the better option at the current point in time.

This is, because currently people don't know what the name means and where it comes from and why we choose to describe ourselves like this. At its best they think that the pirate party is a bunch of young fellows who want to legalise their modernised shoplifting habits.

But in fact we don't want to be called robbers and murderers for singing 'happy birthday' in the kindergarden. We want to pint out that a couple of very important discussions that define our future are manipulated by spin doctors which call
copying of files -> pirating;
protesting -> terrorism;
spying at the UN or allied governments -> protection against terrorism;
online freedom of speech -> protecting commercial child abuse;

All these debates are core issues of the Pirate Party. And they are very abstract and appear to be far away from every bodies life. But they aren't. And that is what strypeys approach is about - and I like it.

Before we go out and bring the entire population of New Zealand into the Pirate Party can someone please explain article 5.3 of the Constitution:
Membership is for a term of twelve months.
WTF!!!

As we discussed at Pirate Camp, sometime after the election we will need to have an AGM, and debate any proposals to change the constitution. Unless you want to call an SGM? BTW @terryjones did our Inc Soc documents get sent to the Companies Office yet?

I wonder if we could look at having a combined micro-party conference with some other small parties with shared interests (Cannabis Party, New Economics etc), with a time slot set aside for each party to have its AGM in a separate break-out room? Or if there are people with memberships in multiple parties, a dedicated room with each party having their AGM in a different time slot?

This would potentially be a way to recuit new activists and members into the party, and launch shared campaigns, as well as and comparing and contrasting our policies on different policy areas.

@andrewreitemeyer we changed the membership term to 3 years, a couple of years back, which is where we lost track of a lot of members who needed to sign on again.

@andrewmcpherson Can you tell me why there is any sort of time limit on membership? Is it a legal requirement. I cannot think of any logical reason to have something like this.

Also where are the minutes for board meetings after October 2013?

I think it maybe a legal requirement for all political parties to have a maximum of three years membership.

Also, I am not sure about board meeting minutes after October 2013, as I have had limited contact with terry since then & have had to deal with my Fiancée being in hospital several times since then.
I will try and find out what is happening this week.

@andrewmcpherson @andrewmcpherson Could it be that there is an issue with the wording?

If the membership is one or three years, then you stop being a member after that time. If you want to still be a member, then you need to become a new member. That doesn't sound smart.

The time limit of three years is probably about the maximum time a one-off payment can finance your full membership status that is required to count towards the 500 member threshold. So this is about a membership status. The membership itself should be regarded as a subscription in that sense that after the time frame of your current payment you still are regarded a member, but lose the full membership status until the payment for the ongoing full status is received. This payment should be regarded as an ongoing duty of the member that can only be avoided by actively unsubscribing from the membership roll.
You should not automatically cease being a member.

"You should not automatically cease being a member."

True, but when your subscription runs out, you stop being a financial member (required to count towards 500, access to this Loomio group etc). CiviCRM keeps all contact information for those who have not kept their financial membership current (unless requested to delete them), and we can certainly still treat them as part of the Pirate movement we want to mobilize, even while they're not financial members of the party.

An update regarding MyPP: there are 23 people currently registered on the site. This by no means indicates how many financial members we have - I am yet to reconcile the old records with the new ones generated by MyPP.

Also, if you have inquiries regarding membership then please email membership@pirateparty.org.nz. There's a lot of threads here and I don't currently have time to check them all. I'm generally more responsive via email though ;-)