I was talking to Alex Macfie on the phone earlier, he's the vice prez of FFII, so his info should be pretty solid.
He says the proposal has not been handed back to the JURI, the vote has simply been delayed. The previous set of amendments have been binned and MEPs have been asked to rethink their amendments. The hope is that the MEPs will work together to produce fewer, better amendments.
The final list of amendments won't be available until about 48 hours before the vote, so we have to tell our MEPs what *type* of amendments we want. He recommended not pointing MEPs to the UEN amendments[0] that I posted. Instead he said we should use the text of some of those amendments as examples when telling our MEPs what we want.
[0] http://www.compsoc.com/~coriordan/docs/uen_amendments/
The PPE party is the largest party in the EP and it is mostly pro-directive. Fine Gail MEPs are all part of this party so it's particularly important to get them on our side. We already have Avril Doyle, we need the other three too.
Alex said he'd mail two documents to me, I'll make them public as soon as I get them. One was some good amendments by someone, they other was a doc that McCarthy has been circulating. It may be this doc:
LWN.net today had a story about Arlene McCarthy, she's produced a small FAQ: http://vrijschrift.org/swpat/press/final_factsheet1092003.pdf It's important to let our MEPs know that this is a pack of lies but for us to be believable, we have to know the directive and the arguments inside out.
He mentioned that the amendments from Castro/Crowley are a bit messy and kinda contradict themselves in places. He doesn't know what amendment 13 was meant to mean. It seems they jumbled together parts of three amendment sets that were supposed to be separate.
So what's to be done? We should probably do nothing until we feel really confident that we understand the text of the issues. (We know the issues, but we must debate them using EU texts.)
A voting list, or a voting-type list should be sent to our MEPs before the next big vote. The date is not set but it is very likely to be Sept 22nd.
He said the FFII amendment proposal pages were a good place to point MEPs to. They should give a good picture of what we want. I'm not sure I agree with this, the FFII site can sound quite angry at times, maybe we should mirror and editted copy.
So, probably the best thing we could do would be to make a list of our own amendments (stolen wholesale from others), and pass that list on to our MEPs as a voting guide. (and include a justification for the merits of each amendment.)
Ciaran O'Riordan
On 3 Sep 2003 at 18:13, Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
He said the FFII amendment proposal pages were a good place to point MEPs to. They should give a good picture of what we want. I'm not sure I agree with this, the FFII site can sound quite angry at times, maybe we should mirror and editted copy.
Be cautious of copyright here. While they do sound angry to us, remember they were written by non-native english speakers who often have problems getting the tone correct. The same goes in all EP documents really, so it's not so bad.
So, probably the best thing we could do would be to make a list of our own amendments (stolen wholesale from others), and pass that list on to our MEPs as a voting guide. (and include a justification for the merits of each amendment.)
We must be careful not to split the hair too finely. I've tended to go it alone on my campaigns because as always, my proposals are extremely radical (too radical for adoption at the present time). However if your argument is nearly the same as the FSF's or FFII's, then you should really try to coordinate with them as closely as possible. Cooperation is always better than competition and besides, psychology teaches us that humans tend to drown out noise in favour of single voices.
Cheers, Niall