Dear Pirates,
It is with proud heart I start my new role as Secretary General for the European Pirates this week. Exactly what this role will entail is still to early to tell, but in short I have been tasked by the board to build up an Office of volunteers, to manage the day to day operations of our organisation. Please stay tuned for information on how you can be a part of that project (or send me a private message to pitch how you can help out if you don’t want to wait)!
For those who don’t know me, or who want to know me better, I thought I would use this thread to give you a short introduction to my background in the pirate movement, and then open it up for questions, to give you all a chance to ask me anything you might want to know about me. I invite you to ask absolutely anything you might want to know about me (though I keep the right to decline to answer questions of too private a nature).
So who am I, and how did I end up with the pirates?
I joined the Swedish Pirates back in 2006, and quickly got involved at the central level, joining the mangement team of the party after a couple of month in a role responisble for organisational development. After the national elections the same year this was clarified to boil down to 3 main tasks: revamp statutes of the party, create a youth organisation, and prepare the party structure to be ready for the 2009 European elections. Said and done, I set up the Swedish young Pirates the same year, and ensured that it got project funding from the swedish youth agency in 2008 and then annual funding from 2009 and onwards. So until the start of 2009 I juggled my responsibilities in the party with the role of Secretary General in the young Pirates, as well as one year of representing the Pirate Students as vice president at the Student Union at Uppsla University.
I left all that behind in 2009 to focus on the EU elections, where the Swedish pirates secured 7,1% of the votes and 1(2) seats in the European Parliament. What was meant by 1(2) seats is that we got 1 seat directly after the elections, with the prospect of getting a second seat once the Lisbon treaty was ratified. I was recruited to become the head of office for Amelia Andersdotter, who were set to hold our second seat once we got it. For a bit over two years I did preparatory work for that position on a voluntary basis, until she finally could take up her seat in December of 2011, and I could formally start working with her in the European Parliament.
My main responsibilites was to recruit and manage the team, including a long list of interns who we recruited from pirate parties across Europe to give more parties an insight into the work in the EP. On the side I also joined the board of the Swedish Pirate Party for a couple of years, where I got the responsibility to represent the party in the preparatory work to found the European Pirates. As another side project I organized the conference that lead to the founding of the Young Pirates of Europe.
I left Amelias office just before the 2014 elections, and went back to Sweden to help with the elections campaigns. Unfortunately we lost both of our seats in that election. But the pirate presence in the European Parliament remained as Felix Reda (a formed intern from our office) got elected in Germany. I was drafted to help set up his office in Brussels and to recruit his team, and somewhere along the way I was also recruited as a policy advisor on Digital Policy for the Greens/EFA Group, tied to the pirate presence in the Group.
This put me a bit further away from the day to day activities of the movement during work hours as I got into the nitty gritty art of making legislation happen, but I still tried to help out a bit on the side, joining the second board of the European PIrates in 2015 in a (mostly failed) attempt to revive the organisation, and taking on the role as deputy party leader for the Swedish Pirates in 2016. A role I sadly had to leave shortly thereafter as the parliament administration found that it was incompatible with working for the institution.
The 2019 European elections saw the pirate delegation in the EP grow to four elected members, our biggest achievment as of date. I stayed in the role of policy advisor for a couple of years, but felt that I wanted to work closer with the pirates across Europe, and when the delegation got the chance to create a new position in their team as a Pirate Parties Network Officer, I didn’t hesitate to apply for it. Towards the end of 2022 I started in this brand new position, helping the delegation negotiate a relationship agreement between the Pirates and the Greens/EFA Group, supporting the Board of the European Pirates with updates about our work in the European Parliament and with day to day administration, facilitating the drafting process of the 2024 Common election program, and building collaborations with allied parties across Europe, such as Alternativet in Denmark, and the Two Tailed Dog Party in Hungary.
What goes up must come down, and in 2024 the pirate delegation again went down in size to only one MEP. This unfortunately meant that my tenure in the EP had to come to an end, but not feeling done with the pirates just yet I applied for this newly created position of Secretary General for the European Pirates, and I couldn’t be more excited to start this new chapter of my involvement with the movement.
I am sure there’s a bunch of things I’ve forgotten that I’ve done, and of course there’s my entire life outside of the party (I have two kids, a lovely house, and a board game collection that I don’t get to play with as often as I would like). Luckily you can ask me anything here in this thread, so if you felt I left anyhing out, please ask away!