Spokescouncil planning meeting tonight

[Joe Cooper]

Howdy all,

We'll be doing another planning meeting for the spokescouncil tonight at around 7:30 (I'll be there a bit earlier, too). We had one last night at Dominican Joe's because OATS was so big about 10 of us felt we could be more productive in a smaller meeting, so we talked about spokescouncil, and constructed one complete sentence of a mission statement (I'm very proud of that one sentence; we did great work!).

Tonight, we'll briefly go over my notes from last night, and we'll then come up with a rough structure for what a spokescouncil might look like, how stack might be managed (can anyone in a working group speak? just one representative from a group? do we need a special proposal format for event/action planning and coordination? will we enact a waiting period on proposals from the beginning, so our decisions are fully informed? etc.). We may try to finish the mission statement, and come up with any other proposals we'd need to sparkle to define the structure of spokescouncil.

If you're interested in helping define how spokescouncil works, please come out tonight.

New York has a very good working document for their spokescouncil which should probably be considered required reading for anyone wanting to help shape ours: http://www.nycga.net/spokes-council/

There's also video of OWS spokes council meetings on some of the livestreams, and on YouTube. They run the gamut from very small and structured, to big and chaotic, so I don't think they've defined their process very well yet, either, but it's instructive to see how various people have implemented things and what the results are. For me, personally, my priorities in the GA have been, in order: Make good group decisions, be inclusive of different views and welcoming of thoughtful dissent, and present a friendly face to new participants (so, keep the conversation civil, even if not always fun). For the spokescouncil, I think there may need to a different order of importance, with a focus on efficiency and maximizing our limited resources, including time.