Minutes/Policy Development Committee Meeting/2014-09-24

Meeting Minutes This document is a record of a meeting. Do not edit this document without contacting the relevant group first.

Attendees

• Andrew Downing (Chair)
• Sunny Kalsi
• Daniel Judge
• Mozart Olbrycht-Palmer (Inquiries Officer)
• David Crafti
• Bill McLean

Absent

• Brendan Molloy (PPAU President)
• Fletcher Boyd
• Mark Gibbons

Apologies

• Ben Fairless

Agenda

1. Getting the broader membership engagement with Policy Development

    a. Ref: Brendan email and http://www.newchoice.org.au/?p=364
    b. Timing relative to WG staging?
    c. Contact/discussion medium?

Meeting did not achieve quorum. General discussion ensued

Brendan Email:

   New Choice has done a survey regarding member engagement.
   http://www.newchoice.org.au/?p=364
   Interesting chunks:
   "About 20 per cent of those who did the survey also are now or have been
   previously a member of a political party, and they’re our kind of
   parties – Democrats and Pirate Party mostly."
   "the skewed sample of former Democrats and Pirates (and others) eagerly
   put their hands up for developing policy"
   Mozart has asked the following:
   -> If New Choice's ex-Pirate members are keen to get involved in policy
   development, why aren't our members currently keen?
   -> How do we solve the engagement issue?
   I would like Andrew to consider this and get back to the NC as soon as
   possible with ideas on how we can tackle the engagement issue around
   policy development as soon as practicable.
   For the rest of us, have a read and keep engagement in mind. I'd like to
   ramp up our engagement starting next month as much as possible. :)

Summary of discussion

• Results showed people mostly preferred to be contacted by email.
• We did ask them across all channels to participate, but it would be nice to stimulate participation further.
• We need to "Engaging the long tail", but the tendency to bunch a lot of stuff up in one email is not good for participation.
• Better to have modest number of well focussed emails.
• We're assuming members care a bit, just on the basis that they joined a political party.
• AndrewD: I'd like to have more focussed emails, so they get hit with just a single isolated Policy issue to think about.
• dcrafti: What if we asked people to read our existing policies for the purposes of criticising them, to find improvements?
  • It could get people involved without having to start with creation, which is a more difficult task.
• DanielJ: While it's worth having work groups and meetings, I think if the work groups ensure an end result of that meeting is a post on the forum, and we push members to contribute via forum discussion. Then it doesn't have to be synchronous, and so can do at leisure.
• BillM: Also, a given individual will most likely be strongly interested in only one or two policies.
• AndrewD: I was thinking individual issue targeted emails, linking to a pre-prepared Discourse topic where they can engage.
• DanielJ: People tend to have passionate interest in a few key areas (ie enough interest or knowledge to arc up on it enough to contribute)
• BillM: Perhaps when someone joins the party, the registration form should ask what are their particular interests?
• The barrier to entry like for Discourse is considered to be VERY low.
• AndrewD: We should build into Working Group start-up, how to do member engagement, maybe differently in each case
  • Some very focussed issues will already have a nice clean definition and could just be posted right out for comment
  • Others, like say the Digital Currencies Working Group, probably need some work before we get to that point.
  • We should just build the decision about how to promote, into the establishment of a WG
• AndrewD: According to the survey data, we are already doing what the data says to do
• Mozart: You need policy to drive submissions and submissions to inform policies.
  • It's a symbiotic relationship in my view.
• DanielJ: We also need to start, at some stage, at least laying the groundwork, for state and local based policies. To do so now may put the cart before the horse, but many people do get more worked up over local issues. alas they are often transient and locally based, so hard to deal with federally
• AndrewD: We would highlight some existing policies periodically in the emails to members. Kind of a Policy of the Month issue.

Digital Currencies Working Group

AndrewD: If anybody is interested, we made some progress on the Digital Currencies WG ... http://pad.pirateparty.org.au/p/DigitalCurrencyPolicy