[Mikkel Paulson]

The Canada Elections Act gives us a minimum of 2 minutes' free advertising time per network, so long as we express interest in using it. We're also eligible to purchase up to an additional 6 minutes, again dependent on our interest/ability. We'll be negotiating with Elections Canada and the other parties on June 22nd, and I think we need to start thinking about what we will do with the time that will be allocated.

To that end, I suggest running a YouTube competition for 30-second advertisements, the winning products to be aired on TV and properly credited.

[Tyler Jacquard]

That's a wonderful idea! Get the masses rolling to our cause as well as showing that Canadians care! I like it.

You sir, my good man, are a genius.

[Mikkel Paulson]

We'd better wait until after the meeting to formally announce that, though, since we need to know exactly how much time we'll have available.

[Concerned Citizen]

I think this is a great idea!

Plus we can always use the airtime to show links to say our webpage as well as say a youtube channel for the Party. That way we get the most out of our airtime.

Also gotta make sure it's prime time, especially if the other parties are getting prime time airtime. It's pretty useless if they give us a time slot at like 3am.

[Mike Bleskie]

They generally give noontime or early afternoon slots, last I remember. I'm actually curious about radio advertising as well, and if there is some sort of option for that.

[btrower]

That is fantastic.

Here is what I suggest:

Aim for the use of that time, not to send our message, but to intrique our prospective supporters to go to YouTube and let YouTube carry the frieght of the message.

What the above would mean is a focus on *our* demographics, what motivates them to go to YouTube and how to 'set' the target address and the interest to go there in the viewer's mind.

I think that for a first go-round, we should attempt to reach people who know a little about the issues or have strong feelings about privacy, unfettered Internet access, etc.

Our 'core' issues require more education than we can effectively do in a TV commercial. We should be looking to leverage existing interest. We should not be attempting to persuade (and certainly not to educate -- there is zero traction in this) the general population to vote for the Pirate Party or come to belive in our issues. What we should be looking to do is persuade those who are *already* likely to belive in our stand on issues to go to YouTube and join us in our cause. Get this 'core' to then spread the word.

Jake and company did absolutely *nothing* to persuade me about 'digital sovereignty'. In fact, I coined that term independantly many years ago. It is possible it actually came from me. Certainly there was no evidence of the term on the web when I put it up there in 1999. At the risk of embarrassing myself with a hideous ancient experimental page, here is a link to a page archive in 2001:

http://www.hushnet.com/privacy.htm

What Jake and Co (sorry, I should know everyone by now, my bad) *did* do is provide the 'hook' to bring me in. They did an excellent thing by simply taking action and forming the party. People like me do not need any persuasion to join, just persuasion to look close enough to find the group. They will likely self-organize to some extent. We just need to let *our* people know we are here. Lots of people like me would rather lose in a *good* cause than win in a bad one.

The 'Pirate Party' as such is not likely well enough known to make a go of it just with the words 'Pirate Party' and there is some risk with that hook. We should look for a hook that will definitely 'get' people to look us up.

I did not want to get into it, because it gets complicated very fast, but social networking is a must. Somehow, that should be tied in.

[Mikkel Paulson]

Also gotta make sure it's prime time, especially if the other parties are getting prime time airtime. It's pretty useless if they give us a time slot at like 3am.

From the Canada Elections Act:

335. (1) In the period beginning on the issue of the writs for a general election and ending at midnight on the day before polling day, every broadcaster shall, subject to the regulations made under the Broadcasting Act and the conditions of its licence, make available, for purchase by all registered parties for the transmission of political announcements and other programming produced by or on behalf of the registered parties, six and one-half hours of broadcasting time during prime time on its facilities.

And, in the definitions:

“prime time”
“prime time”, in the case of a radio station, means the time between the hours of 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., noon and 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., and, in the case of a television station, means the hours between 6 p.m. and midnight.

[Concerned Citizen]

Well for a video clip we can always make some amusing/funny thing with a light political message and get people to goto our website or our stuff on youtube.

That said the best approaches would be IMHO...

1) Privacy: Expressing the importance of privacy by showing the world with a lack of it in a semi-humorous way like depicting a guy living in a glass house. This may get people's attention far better than traditional 'attack ads' and such.

2) Government Transparency: This will probably end up feeling more like the traditional 'attack ads'. Critical of the standing government and MP's declining audits into their expense accounts.

3) Copyright: Oddly enough the bulk of our platform but also the hardest to get into a small commercial segment.

[Mikkel Paulson]

3) Copyright: Oddly enough the bulk of our platform but also the hardest to get into a small commercial segment.

"This is your life. This is your life on legally-enforced DRM."

[Concerned Citizen]

"This is your life. This is your life on legally-enforced DRM."

Haha... I remember those anti-drug commercials... Actually that would be an amusing one.

Guy buys CD/DVD at the store. Guy goes home and puts CD/DVD into his player. It works. Guy goes to friends house and puts CD/DVD into their player. Then have the guy try to copy it to his MP3 player and have the thing go in a creepy HAL9000 voice "I'm sorry dave, I cannot allow you to do that. You must purchase a digital copy off of iTunes because of the Digital Restrictions Management on this CD". Have him do the same with his car CD player and his buddy's player and then just smash the CD and go onto pirate bay or something

[btrower]

Re: Social Networking

This is a thorny issue. The power of this will completely astonish even people who know about it. I can help with this, but...

Short-term, we need to get things together a bit more. Before people just rain down on us and crash the Server, we need to get our house in order.

Forums are great for threaded conversations, but I suggest that reference material be plonked onto the wiki. We already lost a bunch of material to a forum change. Whatever its faults, mediawiki is a workhorse that can be at least maintained for reading and I don't see it going away any time soon.

<rant>
As an aside, I was wondering why I had a recollection of 'SMF', but had not really installed it or used it. I have tried just about everything. I went to the SMF site and found my answer. It is 'BadgeWare'. In fact, it is worse than BadgeWare. At some point, it is near certain that the Forum software will change because SMF's license is a ticking time bomb. Eventually, it will fail. That might take years, but unless they do a complete '180' on the license, the software cannot survive. It is too much to go into here, but I am not talking about people voting with their feet and starving it (though there is some likelihood of that). I am talking about the fact that the license ties the fate of the software inexorably to the fate of the SMF organization. If wikimedia fails, mediawiki can be supported by anyone. If SMF fails, their software dies with them. Will they fail? Yes. It is not often that you will get an unqualified answer like that from me. It contains the seeds of its own doom. Only the SMF people can cure that ill and they have been quite vocal that they will not.

I wrote a rant on BadgeWare here:

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/BadgeWareIsEvil

BadgeWare being promoted under the guise of 'Free Software' or 'Open Source' is just false advertising. In the page linked above, I give an idea of the many thousands of people (me included) who contributed to a working (say SMF) software system. BadgeWare basically insists that everyone thereafter must give credit and free advertising for one contributor over another. Ironically, I think SMF ended up as BadgeWare because someone else used their original code base without giving them visible credit. Oh my.
</rant>

[Mikkel Paulson]

Haha... I remember those anti-drug commercials... Actually that would be an amusing one.

Guy buys CD/DVD at the store. Guy goes home and puts CD/DVD into his player. It works. Guy goes to friends house and puts CD/DVD into their player. Then have the guy try to copy it to his MP3 player and have the thing go in a creepy HAL9000 voice "I'm sorry dave, I cannot allow you to do that. You must purchase a digital copy off of iTunes because of the Digital Restrictions Management on this CD". Have him do the same with his car CD player and his buddy's player and then just smash the CD and go onto pirate bay or something

Actually, I was thinking of something simpler. Show a mosaic of a video playing on TV, computer, PSP, iPod, car TV, and space-age lookin' hologram. "This is your movie." Then, one after another, all but one of the devices flip to static with a padlock icon. "This is your movie on legally-enforced DRM. Pirate Party of Canada."

Forums are great for threaded conversations, but I suggest that reference material be plonked onto the wiki. We already lost a bunch of material to a forum change. Whatever its faults, mediawiki is a workhorse that can be at least maintained for reading and I don't see it going away any time soon.

Our wiki is more or less dead. If we want something to be read, it goes on the forum. We do have an EtherPad site for collaboration, though.

What in particular would you like to recover from the old forum? I still have access, and can copy and paste if need be.

<rant>
As an aside, I was wondering why I had a recollection of 'SMF', but had not really installed it or used it. I have tried just about everything. I went to the SMF site and found my answer. It is 'BadgeWare'. In fact, it is worse than BadgeWare. At some point, it is near certain that the Forum software will change because SMF's license is a ticking time bomb. Eventually, it will fail. That might take years, but unless they do a complete '180' on the license, the software cannot survive. It is too much to go into here, but I am not talking about people voting with their feet and starving it (though there is some likelihood of that). I am talking about the fact that the license ties the fate of the software inexorably to the fate of the SMF organization. If wikimedia fails, mediawiki can be supported by anyone. If SMF fails, their software dies with them. Will they fail? Yes. It is not often that you will get an unqualified answer like that from me. It contains the seeds of its own doom. Only the SMF people can cure that ill and they have been quite vocal that they will not.

I wrote a rant on BadgeWare here:

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/BadgeWareIsEvil

BadgeWare being promoted under the guise of 'Free Software' or 'Open Source' is just false advertising. In the page linked above, I give an idea of the many thousands of people (me included) who contributed to a working (say SMF) software system. BadgeWare basically insists that everyone thereafter must give credit and free advertising for one contributor over another. Ironically, I think SMF ended up as BadgeWare because someone else used their original code base without giving them visible credit. Oh my.
</rant>

At the moment, I'm concerned with what can offer the features we need. I agree that SMF should have been released under the GPL, particularly considering the in-fighting that has gone on in the community recently, but it's still the most feature-complete, customizable open-source forum I know of.

[luddite]

Well for a video clip we can always make some amusing/funny thing with a light political message and get people to goto our website or our stuff on youtube.

I agree... any advertising campaign that we engage in is going to be primarily to create awareness that we exist and curiosity about why we exist. Humour will draw more attention than finger wagging... and let's face it, everyone loves pirates, nobody likes politics.

To me the most obvious tactic would be to reference the Disney (irony!) vision of pirates as freedom fighters. Maybe a short action scene of the dashing pirate captain rescuing a damsel from the clutches of evil imperialists... ending with the tagline "If you love your freedom, kiss a pirate!".

Just an idea... but I do think it's supremely important to keep things light... I think if a person who has never heard of PPoC's first impression is amusing/endearing we are more likely to gain their support than if we introduce ourselves by trying to convince people that 1984 is just around the corner.

[Mike Bleskie]

To me the most obvious tactic would be to reference the Disney (irony!) vision of pirates as freedom fighters.

Not happening.

However, I highly agree with your analysis with the "1984" complex.

[Concerned Citizen]

I think we need to avoid pointed attack ads, no lower ourselves to the level of other political parties. Attack ads tend to turn people off and get ignored anyways.

Educate (about copyright and other technology issues), Reform (by fixing the problems rather than adding more as the existing government is doing with C-61), Rejoice (When we become victorious)