Pirate Party of Canada Forum

As a person new to the PPCA I must say I am somewhat underwhelmed so far by what I see.  The problem is that all I see is the website.  I think that holds true for the majority of passive members and the curious.  More than anything else, I think if the PPCA is to grow I think the website has to improve.

Here is how I would spruce it up:

-remove Mibbit from the chat section.  It serves up advertising (and not the kind we want to be associated with).  This just give the image of a low rent website looking to score a little cash.

-members login where you can review and update your profile.  Participate in polls and voting, etc.

-FAQ section: How to become a member.  How sign up and vote in internal elections.  How to participate in the political process (most new members I suspect are not familiar with the political process in Canada).

-continuous updates on the site.  At least 3 posting per week.  People should want to come back again and again, otherwise when there actually is some piece of information to get out no one will read it or they will read it too late.  It doesn't even have to be about the PPCA.  Inform people about what is going on in the larger fight.  Links to interviews by prominent people in the movement: Cory Doctorow (he is the most charismatic to the wider public), Lawrence Lessig, Michael Geist, Eben Moglen.  News articles about abuses, new legislation here and abroad.  Links to organizations sites such as EFF, FSF.  Blog postings (Ars Technica does interesting articles all the time).  Things going on in the broader PP.  Even if the PPCA did nothing there would be plenty to serve up on a daily basis.  Aggregate what is going on in the fight for freedom.

The site should be about getting people informed.  Not just about the party, but why people need to care about the issues.  Maybe they just hear about the PP and think "hey, what's that?" and come to the site on a whim.  Get them educated so we can recruit them to the cause.

Hi icarus,

Mibbit is going to stay. It is a good client with very fast response time that do not require people to install some software. It has been successfully tested by a wide variety of devices and it is the AJAX client that works the best. The ads are can be blocked by adblock. We could also get a subscription with them to remove the ads, however we would require a donation that is specifically earmarked for that purpose. (50$USD for a year).

CGI:IRC has only been installed a few days ago and more testing needs to be done.
PJIRC uses Java which is not something that always work on most computers.
Visitors can always download an IRC client and connect that way.

The member section is going to get expended soon. The web voting system is new as of not even 3 weeks ago.

For the FAQ, I agree we kind of need it, however we also do need people to step up and that are willing to write for us.
Same for the frequent updates to the blog, and it also goes for the monthly newsletter.
If you, or anyone, feel like writing some content, you can create a pad a http://www.piratepad.ca and send the URL of the pad to either me, Mikkel Paulson or Jake Daynes.

Also, I had recommended short bios of each person on council, as well as candidates to be put on the site, that would have to be written by each person.

That's a very important step to be taken. I would also recommend short bios on anyone actively participating in a committee. These may not need to be as detailed as the Leader, Director, and Candidate bios, but it is important for members to have some idea about the people that are making the decisions in committees. Whereas the Leader, Director, and Candidates should probably have a profile page, the committee members could probably have their briefs organized into committee pages. Having those committee's exact purposes and their current projects outlined on those pages may be a useful advantage as well. It'd be a nice and useful way to promote open government within the party.

I concur.  I was thinking about this earlier this week and think that a profile page for each of the candidates is important.  I plan on creating a website for myself, but I have to find time to actually research what I want to use.  As much as I like writing code, I'd rather focus on creating the content for the pages.

Not to hijack the thread, but does anyone know a good open source platform that would allow for something like that?  I'm looking for something that could do blogs, forums, photo albums, etc.  or anything really.  It doesn't matter what language it's in, but I know all HTML, PHP, PERL, CF, Flash (which I don't want to work with), and then bits and pieces of others.

Thanks, and sorry for the off-topic request.

Check out Wordpress and Joomla.

I'll take a look at those two.  Thanks!

I agree with it being a lot of work to put up a web page from scratch. Used to build my own up until a year ago when I started to find it too tedius. After taking a good look around, I decided to go with wordpress. There are two different types of Wordpress, one for the people that have their own host, and one for everyone else (they host it). The former is a lot more flexible as you can use any wordpress template you wish. The later doesn't cost anything for hosting, so it saves you some coin.

I have both. I have my own hosted page ( http://www.shawngray.ca ) where I've modified the Render Magazine template. And I have my cycling blog ( http://thenortherncyclist.wordpress.com ), where I've taken one of the supplied templates. There are plenty to choose from, and most are customizable from within to some degree. The "sub-page" idea allows you to easily sort out a platform, or any talking points you may want to bring up.

Those would work fine as personal platforms and bio sites, and could probably be linked to on any Leader, Director, Candidate or Committee pages that may pop up here.

Well, I don't think it's necessary to have a dedicated site for every director's bio, but one for each candidate isn't a bad idea. I've already registered mikkelpaulson.com in anticipation, although at the moment it just redirects to my Twitter.

I didn't mean an independant site for each director/candidate/etc. Just an individual page. If people want to do their own wordpress thing or whatever, that's always welcome and can make things easier on both the back end and bandwidth of the PPoC site.

I figured that as other parties have pages for their MPs, so should we....   but seeing as how we don't have any of those yet, we could do one for the candidates instead    :)

I've had CraigNobbs.ca for quite some time... now I can put it to some use.

I like the forwarding to the main page....
We should get together with Ayes, Jake and the other locals for a BBQ or something...

J

I'd be down with that, if I were in the area. I'll let you know next time I head out west and hopefully we can hook up.

Sounds like a great idea.   :D  I'd like to get together with other people...   mostly at the meetings, it's just Jake and I, at least for the last couple.  :(