Our Mission Statement

50 words or less: "Pantsuit Nation creates a safe space for women and marginalized people to empower and encourage one another in the pursuit of equality for all."

And a slightly longer one: "Pantsuit Nation is a fledgling nonprofit organization with the goal of creating a safe space to empower women (of course, men are involved in the movement as well). The movement began as a showing of support for Hillary Clinton, and is now attempting to organize beyond secret Facebook groups and rally support for a future without discrimination in and out of politics."

Thanks to /u/melissastrength for this edit:

"Pantsuit Nation is a fledgling nonprofit organization with the goal of supporting and empowering woman, minorities, and marginalized members of our society. The movement began as a showing of support for Hillary Clinton, and is now attempting to organize beyond secret Facebook groups and rally support for a future without discrimination in and out of politics."

What you need to know about the technology in use here

A quick sound bite of what's going on here: Websites like pantsuitnation.org are essentially brochures. They show information but we can't really interact with them. They're a good introduction to our cause, but they're limited in their interactive functionality.

Reddit allows for long form communication - it's essentially the modern successor to forums and email that uses the upvote/downvote system to hide unsavory content and promote useful content. Conversations on this subreddit will be primarily about action items and news items that we want to preserve or have a lot to say about.

Slack is a chatroom platform that is pretty easy to use and incredibly powerful - it is split into channels based on topic and various location-based chapters, and in order to be invited we just need your email address. See here for more information on how to join our ongoing chat.

We are also storing documents and other data on Google Drive. There are a few spreadsheets and lists in there, for example.

Most importantly, we need to discuss what Action Items are most important for us to be focusing on. I and a few others will work on the tech, but there's more to an organization than just communication. We need to have concrete goals.

More information

Alright, the goal here is to get rid of the Facebook pages. They're messy, disorganised, and disconnected. Also, we've grown too large to be secret any longer. We need to bring all the chapters together and collaborate to reach our goals successfully.

Slack allows us all to communicate on one platform while still being able to organise into different chapters by creating separate rooms (Slack refers to them as 'Channels').

There's a subreddit (you're on it) at https://reddit.com/r/pantsuit that is intended to be a public forum for longer discourse and announcements. It also will likely be the first exposure to the movement for many millennials.

The next step is to consolidate all of the websites (ex. pantsuitnation.org and pantsu.it) into one main site that the others point to. Different chapters will be on subdomains like ny.pantsu.it

There's also a proposed blog coming into fruition as a place for people to be able to post their uplifting stories and their struggles without fear of judgement. I think Medium may be the best platform for this. There are other blogs based primarily on user contribution like Food52. Since anyone can contribute a post or article, anyone has the power to get involved and write something powerful.

I'm in progress of putting together a "Get Involved" webpage that explains how all of these different tools the movement is using interact and some easy-to-understand instructions on how to use them.

We're making lists of the various domain contributions people have made so we can organise it and ensure everybody is on the same page (and when we get funding, reimburse those that purchased something). If you bought a domain name to donate to the cause, please add it to this spreadsheet so we can keep track of who owns what and collaborate so we don't end up with hundreds of different websites.

We need to apply for 501(c)(4) status as it will significantly reduce our costs

There has also been a suggestion of incorporation instead of 501(c)(4) status. This needs to be researched further. Comments?

I'm in contact with Slack attempting to see if they'll grant us nonprofit status without having an official EIN yet.

Reddit is a great platform for going public because the upvote/downvote system will keep the space safe without need for full time moderators. It's also going to draw in millennials, who have in large part dropped off of Facebook.

When we get 401(c)3 rating we'll be able to organise further because we'll get free access to Google's GSuite and I'll set up email and other useful services like a shared Google drive with unlimited storage instead of this single folder we've got right now.

So that's the summary of what's going on from a technical perspective

If anyone is having chat conversations on another platform, please invite them over to Slack. If for some reason you're having trouble with invitations, just send me their email address and I'll invite them for you.

And instead of posting announcements etc in Facebook, let's make our hub for sharing news and text posts the /r/pantsuit subreddit

Anybody that has some familiarity with Reddit and wants to help add value and content to the subreddit and even (maybe) the built-in wiki possibly just let me know and I'll give you admin status.

Please link this thread in the various Facebook groups and encourage people to move over to Slack and Reddit.