Ballot papers for the ORG board election should be with members by now. In case you hadn't seen it on my blog, below is my election statement for the ORG board in full. If you have any questions for me about my candidacy, comment here, on my blog, catch me on Twitter or email me.

I am standing for election to the Board of Directors of the Open Rights Group.

I have been an active ORG supporter since 2008 and a regular contributor to ORGZine since its inception in December 2010. My main interests under the wider digital rights umbrella lie in the areas of copyright and free software.

By education I am an economist and political scientist, and in real life I am a technology manager for a multinational consumer goods company and I am based in Newcastle upon Tyne. I am also a trustee of national LGBT domestic violence charity Broken Rainbow UK, which has given me a range of skills necessary to represent ORG members on the Board of Directors and ensure that ORG is set up for success both financially and organisationally.

One of my main passions is to ensure the message about the importance of digital rights reaches a wider, more diverse audience. Too often we are preaching to a relatively small choir rather than reaching out to organisations and people who may care about different things as their primary cause but whose interests overlap with ours in the digital rights space. Digital rights are human rights - they go beyond the technorati.

Parents get advice and support on all kinds of issues on Mumsnet. Feminists organise through websites like The F Word which often translate into real world action. Disabled people find new ways of reaching out to the world and fighting for their rights through The Broken of Britain Campaign. Bullied lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender teens can find new hope through the It Gets Better videos. Men, women, black, white, straight, gay, Muslim or humanist, able-bodied or not, the internet brings us together and empowers us all. As the information war gains new fronts almost on a daily basis, it is vital for the Open Rights Group to build connections and bridges to help raise awareness of digital rights as the defining political issue of the 21st century.

If elected to the Open Rights Group board, I will focus my energies on making sure we are in a position of organisational and financial sustainability, as well as on ensuring we reach out beyond our traditional audiences to create an inclusive and collaborative digital rights campaign space across geographical, organisational and political boundaries.

If you have any questions for me, please drop me an email (milena dot popova at gmail dot com), or comment here and I will reply.

It's been a good week for misogyny. We had the Archbishop of York presenting the misogynist case against marriage equality. We also saw registration open for RadFem 2012, a "feminist" conference limiting participation to "women born as women living as women". While at first glance it may seem that the issues here are homophobia and transphobia respectively, both are driven by deeply held misogynist beliefs.

Read more.

I find myself in the odd position of responding to government consultations and writing to my MP on an issue that I feel - at best - lukewarm about.

Marriage is not a social institution I feel has any relevance to me (not until I hit the inheritance tax threshold anyway, which is a long way off), and I have for a long time now felt that we're doing the whole thing wrong.

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...in which I am bitter and say "I told you so" a lot...

A year ago today, I spent the day stood outside my local polling station, trying to convince people to vote for a change to the Alternative Vote. We all know how that went.

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Whose adviser said what to whom in News Corp? With both Rupert and James Murdoch up in front of the Leveson inquiry last week, the plot thickens. One begins to wonder how many adviser and ministerial resignations and demotions Messrs Murdoch will have to their name by the end of this.

Read more at the Scottish Times.

I remember my first Stonewall Workplace Conference, maybe in 2006. We had spent most of the day discussing issues of "lesbians and gays" in the workplace when a woman interrupted one of Ben Summerskill's keynotes to point out that we weren't just "lesbians and gays" - some of us were bisexual. That was the moment I stopped feeling like a fraud for being there.

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The 1st of April this year saw the entry into force of a key new citizen engagement tool at a European Union level, the European Citizens' Initiative. First set out in the Lisbon Treaty, the ECI allows one million EU citizens representing at least seven member states to call on the European Commission to initiate legislation in a policy area that falls under the EU's competency. So far so good - it's a great idea, giving citizens powers equal to the European Parliament and the Council (of the European Union - not the European Council or Council of Europe - but now I'm just being facetious) to request the Commission to initiate legislation. The implementation, however, is sub-optimal to say the least.

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The overwhelming feeling I left this year's ORGCon with was that digital rights in the UK had grown up. The depth and complexity of debate has come a long way since the last conference in 2010. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the two keynotes: Cory Doctorow's "The coming war on general-purpose computing" and Larry Lessig's "Recognising the fight we're in". Both painted, in broad brush strokes, a picture much bigger than the current digital rights space.

Read more at ORGZine.

Last week, the Economist raised some concerns over the economic viability of an independent Scotland. I am inclined to agree with Alex Salmond that the way these concerns were raised was patronising and condescending. I'd go as far as saying cheap and crass actually; yet there are some valid questions here.

Read more at the Scottish Times.

One of the small tragedies of my teenage life was my unfortunate addiction to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series. I have a number of excuses for this. For one, I was reading it in translation, and unlike MZB herself, her German translators could actually string together a grammatically correct sentence. Most importantly, though, I found the books addictive because some of the characters were "people like me", where in this particular context I mean LGBT people.

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In this space, a newly-independent Scotland would have an unprecedented opportunity to set itself up for the 21st century. A comprehensive digital rights policy can establish Scotland as a state whose institutions value transparency and accountability, civil rights, freedom of speech, creativity and innovation, and an appropriate balance between the interests of businesses, the state and the citizen.

Read more at the Scottish Times.

The Health & Social Care Bill has finally made it through Parliament. Despite vociferous campaigns from both the general public and medical professionals, the huge top-down reorganisation of the NHS has already begun.

Regardless of what you think of the need to restructure the NHS in general or these reforms in particular, there is one big issue with the way the decision was made in the first place.

Read more at ORGzine.

I've a confession to make. Every once in a while, I write fanfiction. No, I'm not going to link to it.

For the uninitiated, fanfiction is basically taking an existing universe (a book or TV show, say) and using the setting and characters to write new stories. It's a great way of engaging with a work you love. It's a great way of learning to write fiction as it eliminates some of the variables: if you don't have to worry about world building and (to an extent) characterisation, you can focus, for instance, on plot and pacing.

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One in five abortion clinics breaks the law, screams the Telegraph today. The Health Secretary declares himself "shocked" and promptly announces further inspections of abortion clinics. For a thorough debunking of the hype I'll point you at @stavvers who does a great job of asking difficult questions and trying to get back to the primary source only to find there isn't actually a published report from the Care Quality Commission on this subject. I, in the meantime, would like to ask some other questions.

Read more.

It's been a good few weeks for a game of homophobia bingo. With this week's launch of the government consultation on same-sex marriage (finally!), every cliché you can think of has been rolled out: from the "slippery slope" argument (great example here from Cristina Odone asking why gay couples should get special treatment when paedophiles don't - classy!) to the Thought for the Day segment taking the "marriage is a sacrament" and "separate but equal" approach. In between all the talk of sacraments, ancient institutions, and life-long commitment, I'd like to propose a different idea: let's do away with marriage as we know it.

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