Thank you for the introduction. Thank you for inviting me here to Republika. It's actually the first time in a very long time in Berlin.

So, I'm a politician. That took me a very long time to learn to say, but hey, I'm a politician. Today's topic is going to be how we apply open source collaboration... to changing policy in the world. We've worked with open source and free software...

for at least 30 years by now, right? But these principles, it turns out, can be applied for much, much larger things. And we've learned how to do that. That's what I'm here to share today. My Twitter alias is FalcVigna. I love seeing my name on Twitter, regardless of whether it's good, bad.

Any mention is better than no mention. For convenience, it's also on every slide if you should forget it. So, a quick introduction. How many in here have heard of the Swedish Pirate Party before? Let's see a show of hands.

Okay, when I do this talk around the world... that's usually between one half and two thirds. But here was practically everybody, which was kind of expected, actually. So, just for kicks and lulls, how many have heard of any other Swedish party? One, two.

A few. So, yeah, scattered hands, like the rest of the world. And I think that's kind of fun, because it shows just how much... a lifestyle movement this is, and people hear of it. Even though we're a fairly minor party in Sweden... people have heard of us when I speak in San Francisco...

when I speak halfway across the planet. So, a very quick introduction is that we love the net. We love copying and sharing. We love civil liberties. People call us pirates for that. But rather than being ashamed, which I think is their intention...

we decided to stand tall about it. And we've now been rewarded with two seats in the European Parliament... 19 seats in German regional parliaments... almost 200 seats on local councils across Europe... and we exist in 56 countries at last count. So, today's speech is going to be a little bit of...

what experience did we draw on building activism, working swarm-wise? Compressing six years of pioneer organisation theory into 40 minutes... means that we are going to cover a lot of topics...

and only cover the most important parts of those topics as we go here. But I can almost guarantee that there's going to be... something interesting here for everybody... because we've learned so much in how you just change the world.

But first, what is a swarm? I see it as a new form of organisation that's been enabled... by affordable mass communication, where somebody could... today somebody can organise hundreds of thousands of people...

in their spare time from their kitchen. That was a physical impossibility just ten years ago. It was not anywhere near reasonably possible. So, seeing that ordinary people can get these kinds of movements going...

what do we learn from that? Some swarms are leaderless, like Anonymous. While they certainly can have an impact, I find that a hybrid... where you mix in just a few percent of people who take formal responsibility...

with a huge swarm of activists, can make the best difference. It also allows you to interface to the old kinds of organisations... as they look for something that resembles them. And if you have just an interface layer that does, then you can work with them.

So, that's how I see a swarm. And the most important thing about it... the most important contrast to old style organisations... is that in a swarm the focus is on what everybody can do all the time. In contrast, if you're working in a corporation or in an NGO...

the focus is usually what people must do or what they cannot do. Here the focus is what everybody can do. So, it's a huge enabler. Starting from the top, how do you bootstrap a movement? Say you've got something interesting you want to do. How do you do that?

How do you go about planting the seed... that becomes something that spreads to over 50 countries? And, hey, it takes place in parliaments. Turns out it's not enough to be interesting. You need to do three things.

You need to be tangible, credible and inclusive. And, of course, interesting. You need to be tangible. You need to be very clear about this is what we are going to accomplish. We are going to do this and it has to be so clearly expressed...

that people will realise if they are going to spend their spare time... helping this goal succeed because it coincides with their personal goals. That is the key to having the swarm succeed. People must realise that an hour spent in the swarm... helps their personal goals better than if they had spent it on their own.

You need to be credible. You need to show in the plan that this can be done. And you also need to reinforce that every single day. We can do this. We can do this. We can do this. That's part of psychology...

because usually a swarm forms around something utterly impossible. If I told you guys seven years ago, before the party was started... that let's form a new party that spreads to over 50 countries... and changes the world, what kind of idiot thinks they can do that? But turns out you can't. Turns out you can't.

This is where I have my famous line, as in, don't shoot for the moon. That's been done already. Shoot for Mars and show that you can do it. And you need to be inclusive. Everybody needs to see immediately... that they can contribute to this project and how they can do it.

It's not enough to say that we're going to do this and you're not welcome. We're going to do this, period. You need to say, we are going to do this... and this is how you can help make it happen. Once you've done that, you just need to publish this...

publish your ideas and it will find its way to social news sites. You don't need to worry about it finding its way if it's interesting enough. When I founded the Swedish Pirate Party... I put up a really ugly website with this kind of plan... and I mentioned it once in a chat channel in a file sharing lobby.

Just once. I wrote two lines. The Pirate Party has its website up now after New Year's and the address. That was all the advertising I ever did. The next day it was in newspapers. On the evening, there were 300 activists holding out their hand to me...

saying, give me something to do, I want to be a part of this. Speaking of activists, you also need the focal point. As in, if you want to be a part of this, here's how you can. So, looking at a couple of examples of how you do and don't do this... I've seen many initiatives start out like this.

Essentially having a huge game of bullshit bingo... which draws no interest whatsoever... and after that, people ask themselves, what did we do wrong? We didn't draw any interest. No, maybe that's because you're trying to raise quarterly profits by up to 2%.

You're not going to Mars, you're not changing the world here. Another example I see much too often is this kind. As in, people just want to do something but they don't really know what... they don't know how, and in particular... they're just thinking that something is fun.

Of course things should be fun, and I'll be returning to that... but you have to do the homework. When I started the Swedish Pirate Party, I knew that the math was there. There were 1.2 million people sharing culture in Sweden... and they were being demonised. If one fifth of those were angry enough, we'd have a new party in parliament.

You need to do the math. So a better example would be something like this. We're going to create one million new Tor nodes... and we're going to get a Tor client installed in 25% of the installed browsers... by a user account.

This is doable. This would change the world forever. This would totally dropkick every politician's aspiration of surveillance. Forever. And it's completely doable.

Anybody's welcome to actually do this, by the way. I just use it as an example. So how do you then survive the onrush of hundreds of activists? Like I said, I have 300 activists holding out their hands to me on the first day. How do you deal with that? Obviously you can't talk to them one by one. So the only way to survive that is to have them self-organise into subgroups.

I suggest 30 subgroups because of a magic number that I'll be returning to. 7, 30, 150 are magic numbers when it comes to the human psyche... and how we are social in groups, group sciences. I suggest 30, but the important thing is that you divide them by geography.

And I'll be returning to why later. So what you'd do in Germany, you'd essentially have... You'd probably go by the 16 states. So I should have said up to 30 subgroups. You use something that's natural for the country where you start.

And that's how you drop... That's how you just kickstart it. You let them self-organise. You just tell them to go there... go to the forum of your geography, elect a leader. I don't care how, just select a leader among yourself... and get that leader to come to me.

That's the kickstart. That's the easiest part. So how do you move on? You need to build a scaffolding of the swarm. You need to build a hierarchy of leaders. And many people sort of pull back at the sound of leaders.

And it's important here that these are not people that can tell the swarm what to do. These are people that are responsible for having the swarm functioning. So it's typically 1-5% that are... There's a traditional hierarchy in a swarm.

And you need leaders for every geography. So you'd start out by having a leader for Germany... one for Berlin, one for Mitte, for example... and you organise them in a geography tree. What that gives you is the ability to partition the swarm...

because once you hit these size number ceilings... the swarm can no longer grow. Many of these initiatives start out... then hit a magic number of 30 people in size or 150 people in size... and can no longer grow. What this gives you is the ability to work locally...

and still co-ordinate across the entire organisation. And the most important thing, their role is not managerial. They don't get to tell people what to do. Think of them as janitors. Think of them as responsible for maintaining the swarm.

Think of them as responsible for making sure that there are flyers, there are folders... there are things happening in the city... that the actual activists can come and join. I suggest in building the geography tree you've got five subgeographies per geography.

As in, if you had Berlin, you'd have five geographies under that in the tree. The reason for that is that that gives you a group of seven people... leading that particular geography. Yourself, your deputy... and those five leaders under you. The reason I'm going for seven here...

this is really a magic size... is that if you have a tight working group larger than seven... it starts breaking down. A group of eight will almost invariably fragment into four plus four. Seven is the largest size we can manage.

The next size is 30... which is a typical classroom. Or for that matter, a platoon. And the next size is 150, which is a tribe size. That is how many were able to know by first name. I'll be returning to this, but these... many, many organisations, informal organisations...

hit these ceilings and then are incapable of growing more. You need to actively break up groups that hit the ceiling... or growth will be prevented. Let this leader tree grow dynamically. Just create the empty boxes across the entire country. You might start appointing the very first leaders...

and they will start appointing leaders in turn for cities, for city parks. And the first time you see somebody you've never heard of... becoming a leader in your organisation... as in becoming responsible for a part of the city. It feels magical... because you know the system is working.

You realise that something is going on here... and you're building something that goes beyond just yourself. Right, I mentioned those numbers already. Keep those in mind. In particular, there will likely be an initial IRC channel... or a chat of some kind with the first starters. Once that channel hits 150 people, you'll hit the first ceiling.

That's the first time you need to break this up. Regular meetings in cities. People meeting each other is what builds an organisation. And I'm not talking about protocols here. I'm not talking about formal meetings. I'm talking about pizza and beer.

Don't over bureaucratise it. You don't need protocols. You need to have people's face to names. And you need to have a smile with a handshake. Which is again why you benefit from dividing the swarm geographically... from the get-go.

When I had meetings at the party leader level... I was very adamant that meetings are not work. Meetings are where you report on the work... that you've done between the meetings. So don't go thinking that...

as long as we just have meetings, we're working. That's not the case. Also, I made a habit of saying that we are meeting for exactly one hour. We're starting at 8. We're cutting off hard at 9. That meant two things. A. People could always plan for getting off at 9.

So they could do whatever they wanted with the rest of their evening. And B. Whatever didn't get done in one hour... wasn't important enough to get done at all. That creates a very hard prioritisation... and it stops people wasting other people's time. So I suggest having a hard stop in every meeting.

So once you've set up this boring traditional hierarchy... the important stuff comes. As you let loose the actual swarm, the tens of thousands of activists... the Swedish Pirate Party still has 18,000 of them. And the focus is on what you can do. Always on what you can do.

We have something called the Three Pirate Rule in Sweden. And that means that if three pirates are in agreement... that something is beneficial... that means they're beneficial for the Pirate Party. That means they have green light... from the highest authority in the party to act in the party's name.

Traditional organisations would be absolutely scared out of their wits... to give anonymous people, just heads in the background... this kind of empowerment. But guess what? I was the party leader for five years. How many times do you think this was abused?

In full five years and across three elections. It was not abused once. Not once. And we peaked at 50,000 members who all had this power. So that's a lesson. If you let people step up to the plate...

they will accept the responsibility that comes with it. And diversity here is key to success. The important thing is that everybody in this form is different. And that is one of the best assets the swarm has.

We let people look at what other people are doing... not just inside the organisation, but outside it as well. We copy, we look at, hey, that was good, that was good. Let's change it a little bit and then use it in our city. If you see a good poster being used in one city... you can see it sort of organically flowing through more cities...

without you at the top needing to do anything at all. It's part of the swarm culture. It's part of letting people observe, copy, remix, reuse. And one very important aspect here is that you provide the vision. This is what we're going to accomplish. And you repeat that almost every single day.

We can do this. We can do this. We can do this. No matter how impossible it is, we are going to Mars, God damn it. We are going to get in parliaments, God damn it. Yeah, we did. And the swarm does the talking. You talk to the swarm, the swarm talks to its friends.

And why is that? That is because different social contexts use different languages. And this goes against every piece of marketing you can ever read in an MBA. But the key here is understanding that most people just...

try to create a one-size-fits-all message... and then broadcast that to the entire country. Well, frankly, that sucks. If I'm standing in front of a libertarian crowd... I could say that I think it's very beneficial for the long-term economy growth...

that a link in the value chain can be cut out of the distribution logistics. And therefore, we can connect consumers directly to producers of culture... creating new jobs in the cultural sector...

and creating opportunities for long-term growth... as we get rid of this deadweight in the distribution chain. If I'm talking before a Marxist crowd, and I've done that too... I would say that I think it's absolutely amazing... that the cultural workers have finally assumed control of the means of production...

for their own sweat and labour... and are able to cut out these parasitic profiteer middlemen... who have been profiting unjustly off of their sweat.

And I'm saying the exact same thing. Hence, language is a very powerful social marker... of inclusion and of exclusion. If you're using the wrong language in a crowd... they will disagree with you, no matter what you're saying.

Hello, train. So, this is why you let the swarm do the talking... and you trust them to do the talking... because they do it better than you to their friends. So, everybody has the right and the duty...

to talk in the name of the swarm in their own language. That's key here. Without asking anybody's permission, just like I said at the get-go. You don't ask permission. You know that you're empowered to act. After all, you join the swarm... because it coincides with your own personal goals.

Project management. How many here have worked as project managers? Let's see a show of hands. Okay, that's a couple. So, for the rest of you, the first time you let a project self-organise... it feels like bloody magic. You just tell a crowd, and you're full of passion... that, hey, we're going to do this.

We're really going to accomplish this. But you don't tell them how. And the magic is you don't need to. Because if you get the crowd electrified... over the magic of reaching the goal... they will self-organise into making it happen.

What you need to do is to be very clear on what the goal is... and communicate how far we've come towards the goal. And you need to do that every single day... or at least every single week. You need to reiterate, we can do this, we can do this, we can do this.

Remember, you're in the centre of the swarm. You need to broadcast the message to the entire swarm in all directions. As where we are, you need to help people explain to their friends... why they should be joining. You need to tell people what the problems are...

and what the indicator would be that we've overcome them. So, again, self-organisation. It works. Democracy sucks in a swarm. And why is that? We've touched on that a bit already.

The reason is that democracy is one mechanism for conflict resolution. Conflicts are when Alice and Bob disagree on what should be done. Bob thinks that Alice should do something... and Alice thinks that Bob should do something else. Two people are in disagreement on what the other one should be doing.

But we've already said in a swarm that one of its keys is... that people act individually... according to how they think the swarm is best served. And that's why it's so powerful. You don't need that kind of conflict resolution. And it's worse than that. It's actually harmful.

There are four ways to solve such a conflict. You either require consensus among everybody before you do something. You hold a vote in which 51% wins over 49%. You have a dictum from the top...

that determines the outcome of the conflict... which is bad, very bad in a swarm. Or you don't let conflicts arise in the first place... because everybody is empowered to act in the name of the swarm. And nobody gets to tell anybody else what to do. And this is how a swarm works. Nobody gets to tell anybody else what to do.

If you have a vote... that means that 51% of the people get to say what 49% cannot do. And you create losers. Voting creates losers.

That's part of how the process works. But we've already seen that diversity is key to the swarm's success here. Those 2% that, if called to a vote... would just be shot down in lightning and flames...

might very well be crucial to the success of the swarm... because only they can explain the swarm's vision... to a key group for the long-term goal. If we had a majority vote on what to do... those 2% would never be able to explain that.

Everybody's empowered. Don't hold a vote and shoot them down. Maintain a power base. Again, this sounds very traditional. But what I'm talking about is that... as soon as you have started getting some sort of success in your swarm...

you will inevitably get a number of organisational astronauts... that have only seen traditional organisations... and know how they work. And there's this saying, right... if everything you have is a hammer... every problem looks like a nail.

And they'll come with their hammer... and start banging at your swarm, at your organisation... but that's not how the swarm works. You'll have many, many people insisting... that this is a great initiative, this is a great swarm... we are on a great road to success...

but you must make this and these and these and these changes... because that's how I know an organisation works. And if you do that, you're going to lose the key values. You're going to lose the key goals. And some things need to not be up for discussion.

Remember now, people join the swarm... because they feel that the goals of the swarm... coincide with those of their own. There's an implicit assumption there... that the goals of the swarm are clear. If those come up for discussion... if the goals of the organisation and the methods of the organisation...

come up for discussion... then nobody will know what the swarm is for. So you could just as well be pulling an emergency brake... on new recruitment. It needs to be absolutely clear... what the swarm is about.

And that needs to preferably not change at all... or if it changes, that needs to happen very, very slowly... and in a controlled manner. Again, you'll have no shortage of people... trying to hijack the swarm for their own favourite purpose. We should sell mustard instead. We shouldn't go to Mars.

Well, it's nice that you want to sell mustard. I like mustard. But this swarm is about going to Mars. Social connections. That's our forte, right? We know a lot about those. There are two key insights with social connections. First, the swarm only grows on its edges.

You sit in the centre, everybody around you... has already heard of your project. As you broadcast status, as we spoke about in project management... as you broadcast all the time that we can do this... we're here, we've come a long way, we can do that...

we're almost here, we're halfway, etc... you're broadcasting that to the edges of the swarm. And that's where it can grow. That's where there are people who have recently joined... and who have friends who might be interested. As a corollary to that, it is absolutely vital to have fun.

That's more important than just having fun in your life. It's actually crucial to the swarm's success... because people go to where other people seem to be having fun. The more fun you seem to have, the more activists you'll recruit.

It's ridiculously simple, but it's actually as simple as that. Having fun is crucial to the endgame success. And, as we spoke about, there's this activation ladder.

I'll be mentioning that more shortly. As you activate towards the swarm, you initially have heard of it somewhere... then you may be contacted or contact somebody that's self-identifying as this movement.

You go to your first meeting, you gradually climb up what we call the activation ladder. And it's important to understand that at the edge of the swarm, those who have just recently joined... they are not aware of what happens around you. They are not aware of the entire history of the swarm.

You need to constantly reinforce this. You need to help them climb this activation ladder. You need to repeat and repeat and repeat with every new wave towards the edges of the swarm. Once you start a project, examine the trajectory that new activists take.

And if there's a particular step on the activation ladder, that seems hard to climb. Like, is it hard to become a member? Is it hard to become an activist? Is it hard to find the first meeting? Is it hard to get in touch with somebody? Each of these are questions that need to be asked in order to have a successful swarm.

And finally, pwn the media. And what I mean by this is that you need to own your issue in media. If you want to go to Mars, every single time Mars is mentioned in a newspaper... or in a story, the reporter should think of you.

What this does is that it helps them write the story. They'll call you asking for quotes. That means you get to be a part of media. That means you're building the brand of your swarm.

And the deal here is that you need to think like a reporter. Think in terms of how they're writing the story. As they sit down to write a story, what do they need? Give them that. Usually, it's quotes.

These people say that, those people say that. If you can help them get that, you're helping them do their job. If you're helping them do their job, you'll get quotes in media. Newspapers, radio, television. Hey, it's old media, but it's still got a lot of influence.

So the key here is that you need to watch the same news sources as the reporters do. You need to catch the news at the same time they do. And you need to realise that at the same time they see the news,

they start writing an article about it. When that article has hit the papers, it's too late, because the article is finished. The same thing when it hits the online websites. You have, at most, 60 minutes, probably 40.

Because once the reporters have written the story, they're moving on to writing about something else. You need to give them your quotes in their hands, in their email box, or whatever means have you, while they are writing the story.

While they are thinking of, who could I possibly quote on this? That's a magic moment when your quote needs to appear. Oh, just what I needed. You need to train on this, because this is hard. From seeing an event, deciding that this is press release material,

and getting the press release out there, that's really, really hard cut down. We're down to 25 minutes. One key is using an Etherpad or an Etherpad clone, like piratenpad.de. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's essentially a multi-plane notepad.

You train on writing press releases, you just jump in there, five to seven people, and you write it all at once, and then send it off. Doing this on your own becomes very hard, and if you are demanding somebody to verify it, there is absolutely no way you're going to get down to the 40-minute limit.

You need to trust the people who wait at the time to do this. And media loves conflicts. This is actually the last slide, but it's very relevant, very, very relevant. If you portray one event as, well, I'm not, we might see a small problem

with the implementation of this directive, nobody gives a shit. If you say that these politicians are behaving like drunken blindfolded elephants trumpeting about in a porcelain factory, then your quote is banned in the newspapers.

If you're colourful, if you're provocative, if you're creating conflict, then you are going to be in media. Because that's the conflict narrative is what rules old media right now.

Newspapers, radio, television. You need to pick, you literally need to pick fights. So, wrapping up, this has been a short version of a book that's due later this year, swarm-wise. I've been picking the most important topics in a very concrete how-to in how to change the world.

As in dealing with media, building the organisation, trusting people, doing project management. It's due later this year and in the Swedish Pirate Party we do have software to do all this.

We've built it ourselves. Unfortunately, a lot is hard-coded at this point. It's public domain, of course. A lot is hard-coded at this point, but we are generalising it so that other organisations can use it. And if you would be interested in having the abilities that I just described,

we are looking at pilot applications from organisations that rhyme well with our values right now in terms of net liberties and so on. It does member, officer, activist and volunteer management at every geographical level so that a city leader can manage his or her area completely independently

from every other part of the organisation. It's entirely decentralised. It is empowering at every single level. And if you have a member sign up, that member writes his or her address and he or she is directly placed at the right level in the geography

and the people responsible are notified. So they get a mail saying, hey, there's a new member here. Why don't you give him or her a call and just welcome them? That would be utterly impossible if you didn't have that kind of decentralised, automatic sorting organisation. And it also does press releases, which I just described.

We're just typing them in a WordPress blog. And once we hit publish, it's sent to the categories of reporters we described. Civil liberties reporters, technical reporters, political reporters or local reporters for that matter, or all of them. And it does quite a bit of other things too.

So if you would be interested in taking part of the pilot starting late this summer, please contact me afterwards. And that's it. Questions?

My question is a little bit meta question.

Would this, let's say, let's call it technology, or how can I say, approach? Does it have intrinsic democratic... Excuse me for interrupting. To those leaving right now, I just want to say before you leave, thank you for your attention.

Okay. Sorry. Well, my name is Philip Stanovski. I come from Macedonia. And I'm interested in whether you see this approach, which is obviously in a democratic fashion, but having some intrinsic value which would create,

which would influence the democratisation and the liberties in society as a whole, or could this, for instance, software, which has a lot of staff management capabilities, be used by people or organisations which are not democratic, and then increase their power to become more control,

to control more people instead of empowering them? I think that's an excellent question. First of all, like when I said a bit provocative here, democracy sucks, that was referred to internally within this form, because everybody's empowered.

What this also does, of course, is that it brings, it flattens the organisation tremendously. And being a political organisation, that means that there's no distance anymore between the elected and the activists, or for that matter, the voters. So I think it has a tremendous democratising effect

to let everybody, to trust everybody, because it removes distances. As in how you could certainly use this as part of a democratic organisation. I mean, after all, we are a political party, we are upholding the democratic system.

So yes, you could use it as part of the democratic system. But could you use it to support a dictatorship? I guess you could do that. After all, it's managing people in an organisation, but it's not built for that.

So it's not going to be very supportive. It's built to let everybody have a voice. And dictatorships don't usually like that. Exactly. So it's not going to help them very much, even though they could try to use it. I think it would be a bit like a square block in the round hall.

Hi, Daniel Schwert from Pirate Party, Northern Australia. Do you know about how many pirate parties worldwide have the Three Pirate Rule implemented? Because I think sometimes in Germany especially,

we have the problem about legitimation. What's about... Do you know, is this often used, these Three Pirate Rules worldwide? I don't know how many pirate parties use the Three Pirate Rule. I do know that the Swedish and Finnish Pirate Party use this.

I know that Pirate Party UK was interested in using it, but I think in general, that we are sharing the same kind of philosophy, that trusting activists is a good thing, although we might go about it in different ways. I use that as an example here, in terms of just how powerful the swarm can be if you just let it.

Well, we have the problem that usually you have to... You have to search for legitimation if you want to do something, and usually, in Germany especially, you have to go through the whole...

The meeting of all the party members to find something out and to develop a strategy or something. And the Three Pirate Rule would be something which would be very much more effective or very much faster to come to these solutions. So, do you think it would be a good idea to start again

with the Three Pirate Rules in other countries? I think you could pick it up at any time you want. And what you say here was one thing I forgot, which is actually key. And that's the realization that no matter how much you prepare for a specific event or a campaign, it can always go wrong.

It can always go wrong. You can have a huge budget and an enormous advertising bureau, and you can still come up with the most ludicrous mistakes. And once you realize that the percentage of things that go horribly wrong are fairly constant,

regardless of how much you prepare, then you can instead optimize for speed and trust. Once you know that a small amount of things will go horribly wrong, then you can go into this Zen mode and realize that, yeah, things will go wrong. We'll deal with that when it happens.

Let's optimize instead, as you say, for speed. Thanks. First of all, thanks for your talk. I find it really interesting how flattened hierarchies are being explored in the political process. I know them from business, actually.

I know actually some businesses in the US which try to do that, where actually everyone is fully empowered and even the owners of the company have to pitch to their employees to get a certain idea done. And if they find a way to do it, then it doesn't get done,

which is quite interesting. But my actual question is something else. Could you show a bit of the software? I'm sorry? Could you show a bit of the software? I can't, because there's no Wi-Fi. But you could... No, you don't have a login. You could go to pirateweb.net, where it's currently at,

and you'll just see a login screen and not get any further. You'll see the new generalized interface if you go to pirate.activizer.com, and you'll also just see a login screen. But I can demonstrate it to you later, if you like, once we find Wi-Fi somewhere. Thank you. Just grab me if you have a phone with Wi-Fi or something like that. I've got a quick question about your numbers, 7, 30 and 150.

Can you explain about the jump between 7 to 30? Because I can kind of understand logically the difference between a group of 70 and 150, but what is this 30 number coming in? What do you use that for? It's 50... 150 is the maximum size of a tribe.

That's the number of people you can know by first name. The 7 is the optimum working group that you're working daily with. And 30 is the in-between stage, which is much more fuzzier, but that you could still get a feel for. It's the amount of people that you know something about.

It's the amount of people you can successfully work with when you're working several teams in parallel. It would be your extended family. It would be a class in school. It would be your group of project teams rather than your single team.

And once you see... You'll easily see meetings in a city start hitting 30. And this would be the typical example. Once you see physical meetings start hitting 30, you hit the ceiling. You need to break up that geographical area into two parts, like northern... north and south parts of the city are similar.

Okay, thank you. I got a question to the way of information input for the whole swarm. In your idea or opinion... Sorry, could you speak closer to the microphone? Yes, of course. I got an idea or maybe a question about the information input

for the whole swarm you described to us. How can you manage or the swarm managing the information input when one part, maybe the number of three, got an idea, creating it, and all the other parts get this information? But in my opinion, I get a real big problem

we also often got here in Germany for the German Pirate Party, that you got an idea and you have really, really hard to search in every part of the information networks. Is it already done? Is anybody ever also working on it? Or did I do something totally wrong

because it's not the opinion of the other parts and I'm working against it or I make a double or third time? How we can manage that better? I think you're onto a very crucial issue here that I didn't mention, which is, first, if something good happens, how can you publish it for others to see?

Second, if you do something, how can you know if it's appreciated or not? And third, if you have a proposal for the whole party, how can it get visibility in order to get support? Was that correctly summarised? And there are a few ways to accomplish this. One is to have some sort of centralised information bank,

like the Swedish Pirate Party started out with a forum. The German Pirate Party has a wiki. But at the end of the day, this is up to every swarm, but you need some sort of centralised information repository where people can at least post things that they want to become part of the swarm.

Getting visibility for them is as hard as anything drinking from the constant information firehouse. But as for the middle question there, how do I get appreciation when I did something good? This, I think, is absolutely key that the leaders of the swarm,

the geography leaders, the people who take care of the swarm, see, recognise and reward just with their attention. That's their job and that's crucial to getting this reward culture that you need to have fun. So I don't have one specific answer

for what kind of information infrastructure do you build. What I do say is that you need one and it needs to be official. I'm not sure that was a good answer, but it's the best I can give. Yeah, you said within the swarm, democracy sucks.

And you mentioned about conflict resolution. And you said let Ellis do and let Bird do what they want and then give them the trust. But how do you do it, for example, with political content? Let's say about, in Germany, free riding in the public transport. Let's see, A, it's a favour, B, it's against,

how to solve those quantum conflicts. Yes, this is a very good question. And my specific example here was if you're going to Mars, well, you're not going to midway change your mind and go to Jupiter's depth, so you don't need to vote on that. But if you have a political party, that means that by nature,

your goals are changing. Your platform is gradually evolving. And in the book, I describe this in greater detail and I portray the German Piratenbatai as a great example, because what the activist swarm cannot afford is to have half its activists be branded as losers.

That kills creativity, that kills engagement. So what the German Piratenbatai did was make sure that you have a longer cycle of engagement in the liquid feedback, liquid democracy cycle that makes people feel part of the decision,

even though it might ultimately not go their way. And yes, in this case, you do need some sort of probably vote, because I don't think you'll come to a consensus. A consensus is obviously the most optimal route,

and if you can discuss it for long enough so that 90% agree, then that would be the best, but many times you don't get there. Well, maybe one more personal impression of your observation

of the development of the German Piratenbatai. Just a few words, maybe. About the differences between the... The difference in development from when it started to now and what you did observe. Okay, so that's the final observation of differences between Swedish and German Piratenbatai

and the development of the German Piratenbatai. There were two things that stood out, that Germany did different from other party parties. The first was that the first Bundesparteitag, the German Piratenbatai realised that they were going to be around for a very long time. So they took time laying a foundation that enabled that.

That's paying off now. The other party parties, I could take my own, the Swedish party party as an example, we said, oh, there's an election in eight months, let's do this, let's get into parliament, that'll be fun. I mean, we were working on internet time, right? Eight months away.

Hey, we were used to changing the world in a weekend. The second thing the Piratenbatai did was realise there was a debate between supporters of sticking to the core platform versus broadening the scope of the policy in 2010. It was called Cairns versus Follis, I think, as in full programme.

And every movement before us has gone this way. You go from protesting an issue to having a narrow platform that resolves what you're protesting to having an ideology. The workers' movement went from protesting exploitation to allowing labour unions to having solidarity as an ideology

that radiated across society. The Greens went from protesting pollution to wanting to regulate industries to having sustainability as an ideology. And while we were busy in Sweden having an election campaign, the German Piratenbatai went ahead with this last step and started understanding where we really come from,

that we are not really just protesting that our civil liberties are being sold to the highest corporate bidder, but that we are something deeper, we are something akin to a lifestyle party for the connected lifestyle, with all the implication that brings.

So those are the two key things I observed that I'd used to explain why the German Piratenbatai is a little bit ahead of the curve and is enjoying tremendous successes right now, ahead of the curve in terms of maturity. No more questions? Okay, then I've just got a question that... Time's up!

So, again, thank you all for your attention. If you want to grab me for more questions, drinks or bribes or just endless praise, then I'll be just outside. Thank you.