The goal of the collective is to register as a party, and one of the conditions is that the party must fight an election in 5 years. While we might muster of up the strength to start a party, I don’t think we should be in a position to fight an election till say we have 10,000 members. So till then, we should just continue as an online community.
Any thoughts?
Agreed, If there are no tangible benefits to registering as a political party for now, I think we should defer it and focus on what can be done as an online community
Imo we are too young for this right now. I guess after sometime, we’d be able to figure out our ideologies and what we stand for better and establish ourselves. After which we can register ourselves as a political party.
Yes, I guess until one of us says they want to stand for election and it is approved by a vote 
Would love for us to understand and create our own identity first : ) Fully agreed on not rushing into elections yet.
I think registering a party and fighting elections has value in itself (as someone who has been trying to run an online community for many years at Indian Pirates and contested two elections as independent). Contesting Elections shows we are serious about this and that is also a good opportunity to walk to anyone and talk politics. We can always iterate and build our philosophy instead of waiting for a perfect final philosophy. Last time I checked, we will need 100 people from a single state.
This is true, though we also should be realistic. If we want to create a dent in a country with a billion voters, we should at least think of forming a faction of a million.
While I understand managing a state is complex and none of us can really understand the levers, but I think we need enough strong proposals on the table for people to take us seriously. Let us build some kind of a broad manifesto of key proposals that we would like to be implemented and let it attract some significant traction. Then it would make sense to take the step to fight an election.
I’m just saying contesting elections also helps in attracting new people. This is from my own experience. We will have to grow organically and for that we will need to many different things and contesting elections can be one of those things that will contribute towards getting us more visibility and people.
Contesting or not contesting,
There are enough people who tried, who made an attempt.
How do we not become some “Elite” Tech people doing some crazy things ?
I remember Lok Paritrana, I thought educated and education will help them, but sadly it did not. Pirate Praveen efforts are another interesting case, then AAP.
What is the differentiating factor that brings change ?
We need to have
I think we can learn from those who tried, see what worked, what didn’t work etc I think getting people outside tech circles to engage with us is going to be challenging. We will need to go out from online only format and actively meet various activists and organizations working on ground and include their ideas and experiences in building our structure. I think just hoping educated people coming together can change things is a folly. Education is only a necessary condition and not sufficient and also at the same time there are leaders who don’t have big education but has strong support from people. I was going to raise the need for a Code of Conduct. We should have a code of conduct to ensure people feel safe to participate here and we don’t accept personal attacks and trolls. We learned it the hard way at Indian Pirates and that could be one learning we can reuse. You can see Indian Pirates code of conduct this is based on code of conduct adopted by other communities. Visibility and credibility will happen when we start doing things and people recognize it. I don’t think it is easy to build a safety net in the current political climate of our country. This largely depends on how we manage to do in 2024.
Bare minimum safety net is having ourselves registered in some recognisable form, so that we are not counted in fringe by “This” ruling party.
I think yes, we should stay as an online community and discuss stuff around this new idea, until someone from us is ready to fight as a party leader maybe ? After someone is ready to take up the role, then we can surely take part in formal elections.
Loved what you did with Indian Pirates. This is exactly what I had in mind as well. But I strongly feel, as “online citizens” we are waaaay off from fighting elections. To make a legitimate attempt, we need to come with comprehensive set of ideas and a process as well. This is going to take consistent effort of years if not decades in my view (unless we get extremely lucky). We will have to build our ideas slowly over the years and then take it forward.