The Home Stretch: An Update on the Process to Choose a New Polyamorous Pride Flag
The primary goal of the PolyamProud project has been the same since the start: to replace the pi flag with something new, beautiful, free for everyone to use, and chosen in a publicly accessible vote.
While how we’ve progressed has continued to serve the intended goals, along the way we’ve necessarily had to make some adjustments to the process. This has come about due to a combination of worldwide challenges (the pandemic among them) and the impact it’s had on our team, volunteers, experts, and committee members.
Polyamorous Flag Selection Committee
Our initial intent was to have a committee of no fewer than 11 people from diverse backgrounds; however now we’ve reduced that number to a committee of seven. In order to balance that numerical decrease (which is necessarily a decrease in the committee's level of diversity), we've added an advisor tier into the process.
The advisor tier will have a minimum of 20 people who fit the same criteria as our committee members, but who have less time to dedicate to the selection process. We've already sent out a short questionnaire to the majority of them for input into the design process.
New Polyamory Flag Designs
We’ve been actively requesting designs from the community and we'll be setting a design deadline shortly, in order to ensure we have a solid batch of designs to send to advisors and subsequently the committee.
From the designs we receive, the advisors and then the committee will choose their preferred options, which will then be tweaked or adjusted with the assistance of the experts and vexillologists we have helping us.
Preparing to Vote for a New Polyam Flag
The number of people who have signed up to vote has continued to grow (we’re at nearly 20,000!) and we’re in the process of finalising an email subscription service which will be robust enough to email everyone the day voting opens.
The voting platform itself has been custom-built by Polyampirates, and will be hosted by them on a separate server. When voting opens, the candidate flag designs will appear in random order to each voter, so none of the options will have visual priority. We at PolyamProud won’t have access to the results until voting is closed. To ensure the integrity of the results every voter gets just one opportunity to vote: this will be tracked by email verification and a bot filter.
We've been building connections with folks who are ready to promote the vote leading up to and during the voting period (1-23 November, 2022). There's going to be a significant surge in promotion from us at that time, so keep an eye out on our social media feeds as well as the website.
PolyamProud Team
After reassessing the committee structure / design process, we’ve also taken a look at the volunteer team and started to fill gaps that have come up (due to some departures due to life busyness, health, etc.) We have a project manager who's going to help and generally improve delegation, communication, and workflow within the team.
You may have also noticed that we’ve started to shift towards more consistent posts here on the website, keeping everyone interested up to speed, and sharing a little general information about consensual non-monogamy as well!
Any questions about things we’re working on? Feel free to comment here, email us, or get in touch on instagram, facebook, or twitter!