The international digital archive

Ahoy mateys!

The time is nigh to create a digital archive for the Pirate Parties of the world. This has been attempted before, but unfortunately it has failed, more than once. I am now going lay down my vision of the archive, which I feel could be shared among many Pirates worldwide. If you have better suggestions, please make them in a constructive manner and we can make this archive even better, together.

Because we have failed in utilising this digital archive before, I am going to keep it’s functions as simple as possible, for now. The archive can be used for several things, but I feel that all the Pirate Parties can benefit from two things above all:

– An international archive of Pirate parties’ campaign material, pictures, graphic design and slogans

– FAQ for the most common arguments used against us and actual scientific research defending our views on the core Pirate agendas that have been adopted worldwide, like open government and sharing information and culture freely.

Ok, so those are the most straightforward types of content that get good synergy advantages straight off the bat. How are we going to create the archive?

We have to do this collectively, or we will likely fail again. That means, we need to:

1) finance the servers and required bandwith together. Crowdsourcing seems like the obvious way to go here
2) keep at least two extra copies of the archive in different physical locations to ensure that we don’t lose all the work done and have access to the information at all times. So yes, three copies of everything in different countries would be the minimum in my view
3) build an interface to make the information accessible and searchable, as well as secure. I’d go for WordPress, because it’s easy to administer, even for noobies.
4) submit content and archive it in a structured, logical order. Categories and tags are fairly easy to use and seem intuitive. I have some experience in this already but it would be nice to agree on the data structure collectively.

To get the ball rolling and people collaborating, we can discuss this in the comments section and I also set up IRC-channel #archive in the piratenet.

Last, imagine all of the Pirate Parties working together towards our common goals. We are more than the sum of our parts and I think ten years after foundation of the first Pirate Party, it’s about time to finally unleash the potential of our worldwide presence, let’s do this!