21st Council Meeting | Candidacy - 11th Board (Member) - Jelena - Introduction & Questions Thread

Emerodh · June 1, 2026, 9:48pm

Please consider using this thread to introduce your candidacy motivation, and answer any questions submitted to you here.

If you will, you could also pre-register your personal detail and documentation, helping with next board’s registration formalities, using this link

Jelena · June 2, 2026, 10:56pm

Hello, everyone!

I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you that there are European Pirates outside the EU zone, and that Pirates have been making substantial changes wherever they appeared.

In short, I was member of Pirate Party of Serbia from the end of 2011, and was being active in our local PP-RS Belgrade-based Communication Bureau, at the same time serving as a board member at Pirate Parties International for couple of mandates in a row, starting from GA in Prague in 2012.

At that point anti-Acta (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) protests were taking place everywhere. Here is something I digged up from archives so that you can get a grasp on how it looked like at that point in Serbia. It got so flared up so quickly that OSCE took over from there, organising a round-table discussions and inviting Pirates to share their opinions.

It was beautiful and intense times to live in, also very rewarding to be part of the crowd that halted unjust treaty aimed at supressing people from what they called **“**online copyright infringement”, but basically from downloading Disney movies on Sunday afternoon for the purpose of making young cousins happy when they visit you.

In PPI I was mainly in charge for the outreach, co-organisnig PPI GA in Berlin in 2016 hosted by PP DE focusing, as usually, on discussing party governance, policy, and international strategy. My role was to help out with speakers, programme, and media outreach to some extent.

Thankfully, Internet Archive keeps at least some bits of intormation on it https://web.archive.org/web/20160908141818/https://pp-international.net/ s well as our beloved Pirate Times & Munich Secuirty Conference and Pirate Uncoference with promiment speakers from the movement discussing media freedoms and new media roles Security after Snowden Conference 24-25Jan | PirateTimes – New Pirate Times

As a Pirate, I was part of a team that initiated supervisory control over the local ISPs practice due to their unfortunate and, luckily, exposed interception of torrent traffic. Also took part in the first PP Croatia’s campaign for the EU Parliament.

One of my favorite moments from the old days was speaking at Share Conference in Belgrade as well as participating in first Kopmist Weddding ever IFTF: Kopimism
Photo: Share Conference (note that Peter Sunde held an opening speech)

TL; DR

I am happy to see the Pirates blooming across the Europe. It has been a while, and now I’m both available and willing to catch up with Pirate policies and inputs needed in the next round.

For me, this organization has always stood for fair digital policies, privacy protection, support to whistleblowers, and transparency, and I am eager to bring my professional background in communications, journalism and advocacy to help advance the Pirate values and core principles, maintaining the camaraderie and making sure everyone’s voice gets heard.

Jelena · July 3, 2026, 4:06pm

Oh ,I figured it’d be nice to add a few fun facts a day before the GA

I come from Serbia. I was born in Yugoslavia, and I’ve been a holder of 4 different passports with different names of states I’ve apparently been living in - and all that without ever changing the country of residence … Funny, isn’t it?
Serbia is, and has always been, diverse multinational and multiconfessional country with Christian Ortodox and Roman Catholic (Hungarians, Croats) as well as Muslims and Jews in our society. Significant communities of Bosniaks, Roma, Croats, Slovaks, Romanians, and Albanians live throughout the country.
3. Kosovo is a disputed territory and personally I’d be happy to see Serbian people and Serbian cultural heritage that has been under UNESCO protection both safe and sound.
4. I’ve spent significant part of my life living out of a suitcase due to job positions and/or hobbies. Before that we couldn’t leave the country and had our borders closed due to civil wars (yes, they were hybrid too), and after the Covid-19 global crisis my environment has radically changed. In the past few years have been helping couple of opposition movements / public figures in my free time with data journalism, media outreach, strange cases related to documenting election fraud (more info), and petty AI traps set up for both online and local communities that resulted in silencing them all out.
5. Last thing that gained publicity for Pirates was that I had been invited to Share foundation podcast CYBERAMA in October 2021 to speak and discuss the hunt for torrenters in an official capacity (allthough I held no official position at that point as PP RS became inactive).
6. I feel I need to add a few words about my motivation: since there’s nothing left for people in Serbia to do aside from clashing with riot squads in the streets (thank you PP CZ!) i.e. since the right to peaceful protest has been suspended across the country after one of the biggest engineering catastrophes in Novi Sad (National Geographic reported on Serbia - Construction Fails (short video)) I figured that I might be able to do things that can not be done otherwise.
7. That being sad, aside from work, I took part in creation of couple of publications for Digital Agenda in Serbia as well as in copyright - copyleft affairs that included some parliamentary speech, and media attention for Pirate Party, later Internet Party too (in short but sweet cooperation with Liberland).
8. Can not make any glamourous commitiments at this moment but I do feel it would be just to participate in strengthening whistleblowers protection in - some - way, especially given that Serbia introduced Whistleblower Act years before the EU.