Officer Reports/2014-10-16

Legend

• Q1: "What did your Committee or Working Group do since the last scheduled National Council meeting?"
• Q2: "Did anything impede your group's ability to do anything since the last scheduled National Council meeting?"
• Q3: "What can the National Council do to assist your group?"
• Q4: "Any other comments?"

Responses

Officer/Group	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
TAS - Coordinator (Tim Serong)	Ran this thing: http://countingvotes.eventbrite.com.au/ which apparently went rather well (I couldn't be there myself :-/) 10 attendees including the speaker. Two attendees were current party members. Special thanks to Peter Lawler for MCing in my absence. We're going to try to keep doing this sort of thing regularly - see how we go :)	Nope.	Keep Counciling along as usual.	Not right now.
PDC	Fortnightly PDC meeting on Wednesday, 8th October was a focus session on the Health Working group. Led by Bill McLean Pad: http://pad.pirateparty.org.au/p/healthWG There was an incredible amount of consensus on the items listed in the pad. Monday 13th Oct was a Cultural Policy WG meeting Led by Sunny Kalsi. A brief/question prompter was posted to discourse ... https://discuss.pirateparty.org.au/t/cultural-policy-re-working/324/1 Relatively little useful responses, except from Nick Casmirri who pointed out useful links about library funding (which is bad and declining). This did give focus to the meeting and we are responding to him to let him know how useful his input was. http://pad.pirateparty.org.au/p/Cultural_policy Monday 6th Oct was a Distributed Digital Currencies and Economies.WG meeting Led by AndrewD Working with subject matter expert "jscinoz" who has volunteered to join the WG, http://pad.pirateparty.org.au/p/DigitalCurrencyPolicy We may roll this together a bit with http://www.aph.gov.au/[...]Digital_currency/Terms_of_Reference Initial focus looks a bit technical, but I think we want to propose that Australia initiate its own Digital Currency.	Nothing serious. A bit slow getting started with so many new PDC members. Process and know-how is building amongst the new members.. Attempts to engage members on Discourse about policy issues is also kind of slow so far. There may be some growth as we put more out there and members start to see us responding to the few useful suggestions we have seen so far.	Respond thoughtfully to PDC Discourse discussions.	Nope.
Press Team	Issued one press release — https://pirateparty.org.au/2014/10/03/foreign-fighters-bill-an-affront-to-democracy/	As always, lack of time, both my own and those of the members of the Press Team.	At the moment it seems like it's only Brendan who ever refers things to the Press Team, and usually that is a GTalk message ordering me to write a press release at short notice. It'd be helpful if the National Council could refer things to [email protected] on a more regular basis and the earlier the better (i.e. if a story breaks in the morning, don't wait until the evening to tell us we need a press release for tomorrow). The NC can also take initiative to start press releases if they want to say something specific. Another concern is that there is a lack of coordination between what the Press Team does and what everyone else does, which is evident particularly from Facebook comments. Often we'll get a response along the lines of "so what's the plan?" Sometimes this is in IRC too. It'd be great if the National Council could coordinate so that every press release can point to a relevant campaign that might be being planned.	I am still waiting on confirmation, but it seems likely that I'll be studying overseas next year, from January to July. This will affect my ability to write and issue press releases, as well as take calls. Some sort of contingency plan might be needed in case this happens. I'm giving the NC a heads up now, but I'll know for certain by December whether I'm going or not hopefully.
IEC	Unfortunately, nothing.	I've been dealing with a number of personal issues at present (my partner's going through some issues at present) and haven't been able to devote much time to party activities, due to this, I regrettably missed the last scheduled IEC meeting. Unfortunately, no one but myself has shown up on IRC at the scheduled time for several meetings before the last.	I'm not sure to be honest. I sent out an email reminder to the other IEC members prior to one of the previously scheduled meetings, but it was unfortunately to no avail.	None at this time.
International Relations	We had a meeting last Thursday, Peter Fulton has continued to source contacts around Asia. Discussed upcoming PPI GA.	Me mostly. Was in Melbourne so Jade could set up an exhibition and was Internetting through my phone, which limits ability to work. My flat was flooded the day after I returned and have been dealing with that and work since.	We are OK.	PPI GA coming up, planning to work on stuff for that over the weekend and next week.