First, my son Douglas was born on the 5th of January

No complications and everyone is doing fine! He’s a very calm baby and only screams when he has a reason to do so. Gaining weight like nothing I’ve ever seen, adding 500g almost every week

I had 10 days of vacation after his birth (law in Sweden) and I returned to work last Tuesday. Not to my surprise there was a lot to deal with. Primarily internal IT-stuff but we’re also moving to the CRM used in Panda Security HQ and we’re having workshops on that which need planning (and a lot of translation work ).

As mentioned in a previous post, there was recently internal elections for the Pirate Party election ballots and most things seem to have gone well. The people I tried to push for are all on them (some in different regions) and the only questionmark (Swedish link) was promptly dealt with and removed from the list.

There’s another internal PP-election coming up and that’s for District Leader positions. I’m one of the candidates and if you have the ability to vote for the District of Stockholm, feel free to vote for me. My primary goal will be to remedy this situation and create an organization that does not run people into the ground The candidate threads can be found here (in Swedish) and more information on how to vote will appear there soon.

Cheers,

I’m not even trying running for Swedish parliament in the upcoming national elections in September. Skipped the internal pre-elections totally. The reasons are many, but the primary ones are:

1. I’m becoming a father – And I would hate to carry two fulltime jobs, as I did during the EU-elections, when my kid takes his first steps. It would kill me inside.

2. Putting my energy into work – As there are a lot of changes, and as some might know the hardest time being a manager is during transition periods. This is also about not doing a lot of things “so so”, but one thing really good.

3. I’m going to run for District Leader (DL) of Stockholm – In an internal election. If winning I’m going to try restructuring the organizational model in order to make more people involved and distribute responsibilities and knowledge.

It felt really good taking this decision as I had been going back and forth in my mind trying to decide on what to do. The main concept behind my decision is “Better to do a few things great, than a lot with poor quality”.

NOW, there are other people running in the current internal pre-elections that I would like to put forth as I know that they are really good people and have a lot to give.

Those are:

- Fredrik Lejnell (blogs in swedish):
Probably the most outspoken of all the Pirates I’ve met and what he lacks in theoretical knowledge, he makes up for with heart. He is active in the Stockholm region and is second in charge in the North of Stockholm. I’ve seen him debate a lot of people, including socialist party members trying everything they could (that one went on for two hours, totally insane) and I know he got his facts straight and can break down almost any opposition. I know him and his wife personally and know that he would make A LOT of noise in the parliament. He has previously been left-winged (not something I would usually support) but as all of the younger people in Sweden he is now leaning more over open waters with an eye-patch.

- Jan Lindgren (blogs in swedish):
Jan has been the District Leader for the District of Stockholm and invested more time and energy than he really can afford into the Pirate Party (as most of us have ). He has always been a good leader and speaker, and has helped me a lot when entering the organization as I know he has with many others. He was also one of the people on the voting ballot for EU-parliament and did the job associated with that very well, attending almost all activities (missed some due to allergies, something about trees). He is very good at putting forth cold facts (as he did with movie revenue & cashflow figures a couple of months ago) and representing the party. He is currently a student studying computer security.

- Johanna Julén (blogs in swedish):
Johanna was also one of the people on the EU-parliament ballot and I met her during the training weekend that was arranged for all of the candidates. She is very open, social and has a burning pro-integrity way of looking at our politics. She is a person that always try to see both sides and weigh the arguments to come up with the best solution. She is a good representative that knows how to express herself in order to be understood and make people relate to the issues. If I had not voted for myself in that election I would have voted for her. She is working as a techsupport rep. at a Swedish ISP and domain name registrar.

- Ola Nyström (blogs in swedish):
Ola is a very humble guy that has been getting more and more involved in the organization in the Stockholm area. Currently he is in charge of the North of Stockholm and is sitting in the same District Leader committee as I am waiting for the election of District Leader. He was a great resource when planning and executing the election ballot distribution in the District of Stockholm and has since been taking on official roles. He lives in Solna and works with firewalls/computer security (if I remember correctly, I’ll correct later otherwise). Voting for him will ensure that we have a balanced person that is capable of good planning and following the party politics.

And then there are about twenty others I like, but these are my top choices

Anyways, I’ll probably aim for the next EU election in 3½ years and I would be deceiving mysef if I think I’m not going to be involved in these elections as well Also, when the DL elections kick off, please remember to vote for me!

That’s what happened to the Swedish Pirate Party during the Spectrials last year. How do an organization handle that?

As a person that gets an e-mail notice whenever a new member in the Stockholm area pops up, this was not only a pleasurable experience as we got ~10000 new members, hehe. The general notion in the party was, and still is, that “we need to engage all of these new members” but no progress has been done on this front that has given any effect.

We have an organization with almost ten thousand members in the district of Stockholm, but our organization has not changed at all to meet the demands of these new and eager members. There is no organizational framework other than the rule:

If you have an idea, find three other PP-members and if they think it’s a good thing, DO IT!

And a district based hierarchic structure, in Stockholm based on one leader of the district with three people leading the larger election circuits. These circuits then span into 10-15 municipals, each having one leader. There are also seconds to all positions that is helping to carry the workload.

This is how PP has always worked, and it sure is an extremely creative way to work. I’ve never seen an organization where people take as much initiative and get recognized in the same way for what they do. I’ve also never seen such a large organization held up on so few stabilizing pillars.

When doing a check on how many official officers we had in the district of Stockholm, I found that we had 68.

68 people that are supposed to help, coach, guide and activate 10000 members. During their free time…

This operational structure is centralizing responsibilities but not giving any mandates in the same way that a more traditional organizational model would. It also creates a situation where you create ‘specialists’, or ‘supernodes’ if you will, that sit on a lot of knowledge but tend to either get burned out or lose their flame as the workload landing on their shoulders are huge. There just isn’t any underlying supporting structure to fall back on.

Now, I just got appointed to be one of three people in an committee that is to handle the role of DL (District Leader) during a transition period in which a new DL should be elected. During the meeting held to appoint this committee the usual question popped up: “So, what power do they have as DL’s?”. The answer is as always “None, but they do have control over the budget. Other than that just responsibilities.”. The budget for the 10000 members in Stockholm area is very limited, actually so limited that I can’t even understand why. Now money isn’t everything, especially for us as we have great in-house resources ready to work for credit & recognition, but I hope that you get my drift.

What I’m trying to get to here is that in order to sustain member growth and retention, we need to do something. Doing something means changing things… I’m sorry but it needs to be done. If carefully planned and executed, such a change does not have to impede on either creativity or the possibility to get engaged. Actually, it might help create more interested members.

Looking at this in a strategic way, one should first assess the current situation.

To get a quick picture in your head, imagine 68 people standing on a field. Then drop 10000 gold coins over them from 1 mile up and see how many they can catch (and still be standing).

The probable result would be that the people die and the coins slip through their fingers landing on the ground and slowly decomposing together with the 68 skeletons. Not too funny and no one gains on that in the long run.

Now what can we do about this? Provide them with umbrellas or helmets to protect themselves might be a starting point. Continuing on, providing them with some buckets to catch the coins without having them actively reaching after each and every one might drastically improve the chances of capturing some. Those captured can then be polished so that they attract a much greater value than they had from the beginning.

Translating this into reality might for example be to build better supporting structures for handling new members and providing them with information that they can use to activate themselves. Some might say that this exists, but let me ask you “Where?”. The answer would be “In these five different places”. That connects to another issue and that is the RTFM-culture that runs through PPs veins. That needs to be remedied, immediately, as information should be available for anyone and easily accessible. What happens if it is not? People lose interest and quit trying.

Moving on, the officer roles DL and VL (leaders of underlying election circuits) need to be changed and responsibilities for the larger districts need to be delegated and responsibilities for the delegated areas need to be enforced, even though that’s almost never a problem with the great people we have. Today, we have maybe 10-15 people in Stockholm handling everything when it comes to operations, logistics/planning/information/creating intiative, and this also needs to change. It is no wonder the pace has slowed after that marathon.

Also please understand and remember that I’m not trying to diminish the roles of the people that worked out in every municipal around Stockholm. You were the ones that carried us to the greatest elective victory in PP’s history. This is rather critique against the current organizational structure, that we apparently have grown out of.

I will be a candidate in the elections for District Leader, and if elected the first thing I’m going to try to do is turn that single role into a 4-5 people board (or similar). This board will have helping functions that have certain responsibilities, but also mandates to officially act in those areas. This will be done to ensure that we move away from the ‘single supernode’ concept and make our organization more efficient while letting people keep some of their time for themselves. It will also make us more adaptable to new situations as one person alone does not have to decide on and handle things that needs to be done.

Doing these things will not change anything when it comes to the “three pirates rule”, instead it’s a move to ensure that there is an organization there to back our creative and well spoken pirates once they need it.

To sum things up, we need organizational change… and if I’m not going to initiate it I hope that someone else will.