#Occupy - HOW-TO - Oct 22
How to cook a pacific #revolution (from Spain); Consensus (Direct Democracy @ Occupy Wall Street); #occupywallstreet general assembly facilitation; Quick guide on group dynamics in people’s assemblies; HowToCamp / HowToOccupy; and, Ketchup's description (via Chris Hedges)
by Staff | Energy Bulletin | Oct 22 2011
How to cook a pacific #revolution
Take the Square
1. We are “los indignados”
On 15th May 2011, a number of citizens of different ways of thinking started a non-partisan political movement known as 15M. In the wake of the demonstration held that day, and quite spontaneously, we decided to camp out in the streets and squares of our city, both in visible repudiation of the political and economic situation that is becoming more unbearable by the day, and as a means of organising our efforts to find a better way together to make a world.
Over 50 cities in Spain sprang up to join the movement, establishing camps throughout the country, and focal points of support appeared in many other countries. We’re no longer camping out in town squares everywhere, however: instead, we’re meeting in the hundreds of neighbourhood assemblies that have been established since.
We are not represented by political parties, associations or trades unions. Nor do we wish to be, because we believe that we the people can decide for ourselves. We want to think amongst ourselves about how to build a world where people and our natural world take precedence over economic interests. We want to come up with the best world we possibly can. Together, we can and we will. Fearlessly. ...
2. Why did we take to the streets?
Because the public spaces were always ours, but that had long been forgotten
The call us “los indignados”, indignant citizens who have had enough, and that’s what we are. ...
3. What are we doing?
We’re feeling, observing, thinking, listening, talking, proposing, discussing, cooperating, learning, networking, communicating, attempting to understand one another, working, building…
We’re fighting… to change an unfair system, we’re questioning its laws, its methods for participation and economic systems and we´re proposing specific and feasible alternatives. Our aim is to improve life on this planet for all its inhabitants.
We’re creating… human and digital networks that give rise to new forms of collective knowledge, honing our increasingly effective analytical skills and furthering our joint decision-making mechanisms. We’re the world’s collective intelligence, in the process of organisation.
We’re developing… new ways to organise, interact and live. We’re combating the stasis induced by the system and pursuing ongoing development and improvement, active participation, reflection and analysis, decision and action.
4. How are we doing all that?
We’re reclaiming and using public space: we’re taking to our cities’ streets and squares to meet and work together, openly and visibly. We’re informing the entire population about our aims and inviting everyone to join us. We’re discussing problems, seeking solutions and calling citizens to action and demonstrations. Our digital networks and tools are all open-source: all the information is available on line, as well as in our streets and squares.
We’re organising around assemblies, reaching decisions openly, democratically and horizontally. We have no leaders or hierarchy.
Since there’s plenty of work, all sorts of work, to be done, we’ve organised the task at hand around three types of bodies:commissions, working groups and general assemblies.
(posted 15 July 2011)
Consensus (Direct Democracy @ Occupy Wall Street)
Meerkat Media Collective, YouTube
The community of occupiers at Liberty Plaza have sparked the process of building a movement that now transcends any one physical landmark. The tools to keep the movement alive belong to all of us.
Created by the Meerkat Media Collective. For the last 6 years we've been using consensus decision making in our filmmaking process - http://meerkatmedia.org
(13 October 2011)
#occupywallstreet general assembly facilitation
Occupy Wall Street via YouTube
Training video on how to run a general assembly in your own community as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement.Hand signs, roles etc. This training session was held at Washington Square Park in New York City on October 8, 2011.
(8 October 2011) More detailed than the previous video.
The hand signal information is available as a document on the NYC General Assembly
site.
Quick guide on group dynamics in people’s assemblies
Commission for Group Dynamics in Assemblies of the Puerta del Sol Protest Camp (Madrid), Take the Square
The purpose of this Quick Guide is to facilitate and encourage the development of the different Popular Assemblies which have been created since the beginning of the 15th May Movement. This Quick Guide will be periodically revised and updated. On no account is it to be considered a closed model which cannot be adapted through consensus by any given Assembly. From the Commission for Group Dynamics in Assemblies of the Puerta del Sol Protest Camp we invite our friends and comrades to attend and take part in the meetings, work plans and internal Assemblies of this Commission, which are open to anyone who wants to come to them and actively participate in maintaining, perfecting and developing them.
Open Reflection on Collective Thinking
While we would like to share our impressions so far, we encourage you to continue to reflect on and debate these impressions as we feel that Collective Thinking is an essential part of our movement.
To our understanding, Collective Thinking is diametrically opposed to the kind of thinking propounded by the present system. This makes it difficult to assimilate and apply. Time is needed, as it involves a long process. When faced with a decision, the normal response of two people with differing opinions tends to be confrontational. They each defend their opinions with the aim of convincing their opponent, until their opinion has won or, at most, a compromise has been reached.
The aim of Collective Thinking, on the other hand, is to construct. That is to say, two people with differing ideas work together to build something new. The onus is therefore not on my idea or yours; rather it is the notion that two ideas together will produce something new, something that neither of us had envisaged beforehand. This focus requires of us that we actively listen, rather than merely be preoccupied with preparing our response.
Collective Thinking is born when we understand that all opinions, be these opinions our own or others’, need to be considered when generating consensus and that an idea, once it has been constructed indirectly, can transform us.
Do not be discouraged: we are learning; we’ll get there: all that’s needed is time.
THE BASICS
What is a People’s Assembly? It is a participatory decision-making body which works towards consensus. The Assembly looks for the best arguments to take a decision that reflects every opinion – not positions at odds with each other as what happens when votes are taken. It must be pacific, respecting all opinions: prejudice and ideology must left at home. An Assembly should not be centred around an ideological discourse; instead it should deal with practical questions: What do we need? How can we get it? The Assembly is based on free association – if you are not in agreement with what has been decided, you are not obliged to carry it out. Every person is free to do what they wish – the Assembly tries to produce collective intelligence, and shared lines of thought and action. It encourages dialogue and getting to know one another.
(posted 21 July 2011)
HowToCamp / HowToOccupy
Various authors, Take the Square
HowToCamp / HowToOccupy is designed in order to promote the methods, techniques and knowledges on taking the square. This is the place to all of those who are keen on researching about how to starting by him/herself a pro-democratic and non-violent uprising in its region. We are opened to the whole world, we are an open community of sapience, we believe in the power of synergy applied to information, creative commons, copyleft. We want to establish a global network which could be able to offer to worldwide community the necessary tools of rising up. We are in the beginning and our project will depend of everybody. We plan to install more features to this platform soon, as we develop and unite. Be welcome, let's make it together!
(2011)
Why the Elites Are in Trouble
Chris Hedges, TruthDig
Ketchup, a petite 22-year-old from Chicago with wavy red hair and glasses with bright red frames, arrived in Zuccotti Park in New York on Sept. 17. She had a tent, a rolling suitcase, 40 dollars’ worth of food, the graphic version of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and a sleeping bag. She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Wall Street occupation. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which called for the occupation, although she noted that when she got to the park Adbusters had no discernable presence.
... The occupation of Wall Street has formed an alternative community that defies the profit-driven hierarchical structures of corporate capitalism. If the police shut down the encampment in New York tonight, the power elite will still lose, for this vision and structure have been imprinted into the thousands of people who have passed through park, renamed Liberty Plaza by the protesters. The greatest gift the occupation has given us is a blueprint for how to fight back. And this blueprint is being transferred to cities and parks across the country.
“We get to the park,” Ketchup says of the first day. “There’s madness for a little while. There were a lot of people. They were using megaphones at first. Nobody could hear. Then someone says we should get into circles and talk about what needed to happen, what we thought we could accomplish. And so that’s what we did. There was a note-taker in each circle. I don’t know what happened with those notes, probably nothing, but it was a good start. One person at a time, airing your ideas. There was one person saying that he wasn’t very hopeful about what we could accomplish here, that he wasn’t very optimistic. And then my response was that, well, we have to be optimistic, because if anybody’s going to get anything done, it’s going be us here. People said different things about what our priorities should be. People were talking about the one-demand idea. Someone called for AIG executives to be prosecuted. There was someone who had come from Spain to be there, saying that she was here to help us avoid the mistakes that were made in Spain. It was a wide spectrum. Some had come because of their own personal suffering or what they saw in the world.”
“After the circles broke I felt disheartened because it was sort of chaotic,” she said. “I didn’t have anybody there, so it was a little depressing. I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“Over the past few months, people had been meeting in New York City general assembly,” she said. “One of them is named Brooke. She’s a professor of social ecology. She did my facilitation training. There’s her and a lot of other people, students, school teachers, different people who were involved with that … so they organized a general assembly.”
... “So it’s 9:30 p.m. and people are worried that they’re going to try and rush us out of the camp,” she said, referring back to the first day. “At 9:30 they break into work groups. I joined the group on contingency plans. The job of the bedding group was to find cardboard for people to sleep on. The contingency group had to decide what to do if they kick us out. The big decision we made was to announce to the group that if we were dispersed we were going to meet back at 10 a.m. the next day in the park. Another group was arts and culture. What was really cool was that we assumed we were going to be there more than one night. There was a food group. They were going dumpster diving. The direct action committee plans for direct, visible action like marches. There was a security team. It’s security against the cops. The cops are the only people we think that might hurt us. The security team keeps people awake in shifts. They always have people awake.”
The work groups make logistical decisions, and the general assembly makes large policy decisions.
... Working groups blossomed in the following days. The media working group was joined by a welcome working group for new arrivals, a sanitation working group (some members of which go around the park on skateboards as they carry brooms), a legal working group with lawyers, an events working group, an education working group, medics, a facilitation working group (which trains new facilitators for the general assembly meetings), a public relations working group, and an outreach working group for like-minded communities as well as the general public. There is an Internet working group and an open source technology working group. The nearby McDonald’s is the principal bathroom for the park after Burger King banned protesters from its facilities.
Caucuses also grew up in the encampment, including a “Speak Easy caucus.” “That’s a caucus I started,” Ketchup said. “It is for a broad spectrum of individuals from female-bodied people who identify as women to male-bodied people who are not traditionally masculine. That’s called the ‘Speak Easy’ caucus. I was just talking to a woman named Sharon who’s interested in starting a caucus for people of color.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment