Thought I would say hello.
Interested in how people feel progress is being made. And bravo on Pax - sounds like it went well.
I am unable to connect to IRC really due to travelling all the time (but slack for gaming friends is fine ;). So this is pretty much my window into PPAU.
A difficult question to answer. ‘Progress toward what?’ was the first thing I thought. At the moment I think we’re a bit directionless. With attention away from elections, movement on the TPP stalled, and few IP-related issues to deal with, that’s probably not surprising.
One thing on the horizon is the Tall Ship Party. While it’s important to raise funds, and while this is not the worst way of doing so, I think too much focus has been directed towards it to the exclusion of other fundraising mechanisms. It was a good idea for a bit of fun, but given how many tickets had to be sold, the price of the tickets, the requirement of a significant deposit (which itself had to be raised), the low profit margin, and now the probability that it won’t go ahead, it sucked a lot of time when perhaps we could have been trying more cost-effective fundraising methods. Hopefully a lesson can be learned from that.
The other thing is the membership database. It’s been a long time coming, and I hear significant progress has been made towards its launch. This will probably the the most important thing for us since registration in 2013. We’ve never had a way to do membership renewals, so we’ve missed the opportunity for the last seven years or so to raise a consistent amount annually. With this income it should make things much easier.
With parliament finished for the year, Trump not taking power until January 20 and the political front quiet, it is a good time to catch up on some rest for me. Elections are exhausting and we went straight from elections to Congress and then spent time getting the Bureau off the ground (speaking of which, we have content that has yet to be properly shared around).
The one thing (other than the tall ship party) we need to work on over the next six weeks is getting some general posters and flyers together for people to use on Universities. We have people at a couple of campuses keen to get clubs going in the new year so having materials for them to use is important.
The Tall Ship Party is as much about publicity as it is about fund-raising. I don’t think that much time has been put into it. Whilst it is touch and go on paying the deposit, without ambition, we will never get anywhere.
If anyone ever has ideas for fund-raising, please raise them!
Thanks Mozart & Frew.
I do come and check here every now and then, as I have for a long time.
Would say that outside of policy discussions engagement is at the lowest point I have seen, which is a shame.
InB4Simon - no technical problems with the server / database did not kill engagement.
Read last statement
CHARACTERS ADDED TO MEET MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS
A ha, intent of statement then misunderstood.
My grammar is terrible and general communications style can be … eclectic… so i would not attribute that to an issue on your side.