A spring retrospective: OpenMedia’s 2016 is shaping up to be a big year

Forget stopping to smell the roses – OpenMedia staff have learned to appreciate the roses while on the run.

Three weeks ago we sat at around our meeting room table – on a hodge-podge of chairs we’ve rescued from the ‘free to a good home’ area in the lobby of our Vancouver office – and we made a bold claim. “May will be campaigns moratorium month,” we declared. After an incredibly busy winter, we were looking forward to tending to our existing campaigns and planning big things for the summer ahead.

Well, if you can believe it – we can’t – it’s the end ofMay, we’re almost halfway through 2016, and it’s shaping up to be one of our biggest years ever in terms of engagement, impact, and number of coffees consumed.

After our bold declaration of “May as Moratorium Month,” at a recent campaigns meeting, we caught our collective breath, and took a moment to reflect on how the last few weeks have shaped up at OpenMedia. After all, it’s important to stop and smell the roses, or to practice the OpenMedia alternative of enjoying those roses while on the run.

And as it turned out, the last few weeks have been jam-packed with announcements, campaigns, big wins and big challenges. So (without slowing down) we’re here to take a moment to take stock of what we’ve accomplished together and recognize you, our community, and the contributions you’ve made:

1. Bell megawin. We won! Twice! Earlier this month, our Toronto office made an early morning call to the Vancouver office, rousing Communications Manager, David Christopher from his peaceful slumber with big news. As David shook off his night’s sleep, the news began to sink in: Bell’s petition to federal cabinet to overturn open access rules for fibre Internet had been rejected, marking the second time in as many years Canadians had won a major victory in the long road to more affordable fibre services. In just the last few months, over 80,000 people signed a petition to cabinet implore them to uphold open access rules. And they did. You > Bell. Read more about our win here.
 

2. Netflix letter and #allthemedia. You probably know that we’ve been running a campaign for the last several months asking Netflix to respect its pro-privacy customers who choose to use VPNs. But what you might not know is that last week our Digital Rights Specialist for privacy, Laura, wrote an open letter to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on the issue of blocking subscribers who use VPNs, and taking him to task for calling his privacy-concerned customers “inconsequential.” Laura’s letter literally reverberated across the globe, and got our campaign covered in digital-focussed media outlets like TorrentFreak, SlashGear, Alphabeatic, TechNewsToday, and earned us coverage everywhere from Pakistan to New Zealand, to Estonia.
 

3. Met with the Public Safety Minister. Our campaign to Kill Bill C-51 continued in May in the form of a meeting with the Minister for Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, Ralph Goodale. In this meeting, Laura, on behalf of OpenMedia, delivered the voices of over 300,000 Canadians who have spoken out against this reckless and invasive government spying bill. You can read all about our meeting with Goodale here. We even asked you what you wanted us to discuss with Minister Goodale at this meeting, and the response from concerned Canadians was overwhelming. Speaking of overwhelming, check out this picture of Laura taking a much needed break on Parliament lawn in Ottawa:

4. Vancouver tech policy roundtable. OpenMedia was invited to participate in a round-table on technology and the tech economy in our home city of Vancouver. As a jurisdiction that has quickly become Canada’s technology and innovation hub, we jumped at the opportunity to get in on the ground floor and discuss with members of the community the challenges faced by innovative tech businesses, and the potential solutions. We made sure to mention barriers to innovation like C-51, the TPP and lack of affordable, high-speed Internet. We’re hopeful that trying new approaches to overcoming these challenges will help us to test our assumptions, experiment, and come up with creative solutions that can be expanded to the rest of Canada, and beyond.
 

5. Nolink tax for the EU. We launched a new initiative to Save the Link in the EU. Despite our previous attempts to convince the European Commission that the link tax is the worst idea since the invention of pop-up ads, it seems that the Commission is still not convinced. So in early May we launched a new petitionexplicitly telling the Commission we don’t want link tax laws, and encouraging members of the community to use this excellent answering guide we helped build to respond to the Commission’s consultation on this exact topic. Already nearly 25,000 individuals have spoken out against the link tax, and more signing on every day.
 

6. Delivering your comments to EU Parliament. Speaking of you telling decision-makers how you feel, this month we also delivered the voices 3737 Europeans who responded to an earlier Commission consultation on the role of online platforms. Our UK-based Campaigner Ruth Coustick-Deal travelled to European Parliament as it met in Strasbourg, France, and met with members of parliament who work on digital policy (three out of four of whom just appeared in a list of the EU’s top 40 most influential MEPs). Democracy has never felt so good.

7. OpenMedia intern. OpenMedia’s first (paid) Intern! We were thrilled to welcome Erin Knight, who has been funded by the Loran Foundation to work with OpenMedia for the summer. Originally from Winnipeg, Erin will be spending three months in the Vancouver office, learning the ropes. A far cry from running for coffee, Erin will be doing critical research on data caps in Canada, and helping to bring our municipal broadband campaign to life! Erin is a heck of a writer and we’re lucky to have her – you can read her first blog here.
 

8. We inducted a new team member. Care about Net Neutrality? What about affordable Internet access? Well then you’ll be happy to hear that we have a brand new Access Campaigner who will be working to ensure we can all enjoy what the Internet has to offer. Katy Anderson joined our team in April, but this month she travelled to Vancouver to spend a week in our head office, meet many of our team members, and stare out longingly at the ocean.
 

9. TPP protest in Toronto. Like many Canadians, we’re concerned about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and what it will mean for our Internet freedoms. That’s why we’ve been working to make sure as many people in as many places as possible are educated about its impacts, and have the opportunity to speak to their elected representatives about it. This month, we partnered with a number of different groups, and showed up in numbers outside a TPP hearing being held in Toronto. We even brought our banner, which travelled all the way from Canada’s very first hearing in Vancouver, to greet the members of the Standing Committee on International Trade which is tasked with studying the TPP. Here we are with it:
 

10. Campaign to Stop Congress’ Internet slow lane bill. Last but not least, only days ago we launched a brand new campaign aimed at stopping the U.S. Congress’ most recent attempt to gut Net Neutrality protections by taking away the ability of the FCC to regulate telecoms. Yes, really. OpenMedia paired up with our friends at Daily Kos to make sure this bill, that has already passed in Congress, does not make it through the Senate. Stay tuned for more!

And to think – we thought that May would be a quiet month!

Advocacy is hard work, for both the organizers and the organized. There’s never a shortage of important issues to work on and challenges to overcome, especially when you move at the speed of the Internet. Our community has endless enthusiasm for learning about new topics, and never hesitates to give us input that is critical to guiding our work, or send a message to elected officials, or to get into the nitty gritty of crowdsourcing policies for a more vibrant and collaborative digital future. So thank you for everything you’ve accomplished already this year!