occupy.ideas next steps

[ndmc]

Hello,

This email is meant for anyone who has expressed interest in the ideas
working group or in the creation of a statement of purpose through a
transparent and inclusive process. You are part of this working group
if you want to be. You should all have received invitations to join
the google group. I suggest we relocate this discussion there.
occupy_ideas http://groups.google.com/group/occupy_ideas?hl=en&lnk=gcimv

I apologize for the length of this email. I could really use your help
developing and streamlining these ideas.

I would say that every manifesto or declaration that has been brought
before the GA has faced two main types of concerns. The first is that
people don't feel included in the process. The second is that people
object to us issuing a document that claims to speak for the 99%,
because they are not all represented in our movement yet.

These concerns reflect two major groups within Occupy Boston that are
frustrated for very different reasons. One group feels that they want
their voices heard. They want the world to know that we're not just
camping and drumming here; we are developing a consensus process,
engaging issues and holding serious debates. They feel that we are
allowing ourselves to be marginalized by our lack of a clear message.
The other group feels that we are in no position to make demands or
establish objectives on behalf of the 99% because we don't have the
diversity or the numbers to do so.

I think we can work a compromise. Here are my ideas:

In order for Non tech-savvy people to be included, I want to announce
one or two facilitated discussions where people can come to speak
their mind about what issues brought them to this movement, what they
think its purpose is, and what our core values are. This will require
some minimal facilitation (for instance a talking stick) and someone
to take notes, so that we can include it on the wiki. We should
consider announcing this at tonight's GA. I'm thinking Saturday
morning at 10:30. This could also be a time for us to meet in person
and discuss. what do you think?

We need to continually announce what we are working on and what our
methods are (see below) at EVERY OPPORTUNITY, certainly every GA. I'm
afraid there is still much confusion about what distinguishes our
approach from that of SPP and the individuals who wrote documents on
their own.
1)Ours is an inclusive process open to all.
2)Our document will reflect the entire range of concerns in our
movement for what they are, and not claim that these are the concerns
of the whole 99%
3)It aims to provide those of us already in the movement with a clear
idea of our shared purpose while at the same time...
4)it will communicate to those not yet involved that we are serious
about inclusion and we need their voices!

I have asked John from the library to announce at today's morning GA
that the ideas group is still actively collecting input both online
and on the paper in the library. In our future announcements, we
should be sure to say something like, "if you have questions, ideas,
and concerns about what we are doing, or if you would like be part of
this process, please find one of us or send an email to
occupy...@gmail.com so we can include your ideas and involve you in
the process.” In this way we can involve those who are most skeptical
and most likely to block the proposal. It would be helpful to have
most of us at a GA in the near future so that people would know who is
part of this group. I invite all of you reading this to consider
yourselves part of the ideas working group and to come up on stage to
make announcements as a group.

I have reached out to many of the authors that have tried to have
their documents adopted. I believe we share the view that Occupy
Boston needs a clear statement of some sort, and thatwe would like it
to happen sooner rather than later. Hopefully we can convince them to
buy into our process and to contribute to the task of analyzing what
we've got and putting it together into a statement. That said, SPP is
clearly not on the same page, as they are moving forward with a
proposal that was drafted by a small group of people in an exclusive
way.

In case you haven't heard, we're migrating from the wikispaces to a
new wikimedia site. Tim is already working on ensuring that the
discussion tabs get moved as well.

The GA wants to hear from us, to know what we're doing. We need to
agree upon a way to combine all the data in order to present it back
to the GA at the time of our proposal. I propose that we use a tagging
process where we, and anyone else who wants to help, can go through
the collected documents and tag the #CONCERNS and the #VALUES
represented in each. We'll need a set of clear instructions for how to
do this in a non-biased and useful way. It must work for all the types
of inputs, whether a short response, a personal testimony or, a
verbose list of demands. The goal should be to take very specific and
often conflicting ideas and positions and abstract them just far
enough to include them under one umbrella tag.
If we take for example the following statements: “Glass-Steagle must
be passed”; “nationalize the banks”; “Goldman Sacks is a vampire
squid”; “they got bailed out, we got sold out.” I would say that they
should all be tagged, among other things, with “Wall St,” “Finance” or
something to that effect. I would tag the first statement with
'glass-steagle', 'speculation', and 'wall st'. I don't doubt that many
of you would tag it slightly differently, but as long as the tags
reflect that this has to do with Wall St., banks, or Finance, we will
still be able to group them together. I propose that we tag with
specific tags (e.g. glass steagle) preferably drawn directly from the
document, as well as a broad tags (e.g. Wall st.) and possibly
something in the middle. Some sentences will of course be more
complicated and should get more tags.
Hopefully multiple people can tag a single document to find the
consensus.

I realize that the VALUES will likely be a bit wishywashy (ie many
other groups, even the 1%, will claim to represent the same values)
but I think they have an important place in our statement of purpose
regardless.

It will be much more difficult to tag lists of demands and the
associated discussions than it will be to tag short responses to
targeted questions. As Tim said, it would be ideal to have the authors
themselves tag their own documents. Perhaps we should also announce
and run a tagging training and get volunteers to use their own comps
or laptop(s) in the library to read through documents and help us tag
them.

We might consider working out a way to to tally supporting statements
for particular ideas. I don't think we should get overly statistical
in trying to represent relative support for specific ideas. Instead,
we should focus on reflecting the range of the concerns. I'm happy if
we can identify the topics which most of us feel strongly about and
the main areas of shared #CONCERN and leave the hardcore statistical
analysis to the research group.

This presentation to the GA of our data will require a projector. I t
should include the list of all the different inputs, and an estimation
of the number of people our data represents. It should be made clear
that we have actively reached out to oppressed or underrepresented
groups for their input and provide some type of evidence of this. It
should also give an illustrative example of our process of tagging. It
should show both the range of ideas collected as well as the relative
frequency of recurrence of various ideas within the data. Finally it
should show how the ideas cluster, ideally using some kind of
WordCloud Venn Diagram. We could use basic word cloud tech like wordle
but I'm still hoping someone will come forward with some software that
can do better.

Once we have our tags organized, it will then be our task to create
sentences that connect these concerns and values into a unified
coherent statement. We must make the case that they are inextricably
linked. I recommend using a living document format on the wiki. I have
reached out to Bryan K. from outreach to help us do this and I
recommend seeking the input of other gifted orators and thinkers so
that the document is not a reporting of the results of a process, but
an inspirational and unified call to action. This could also happen in
a pre-GA discussion so that we can gather ideas and include as many
people as possible. As soon as we have a draft it should be posted in
the Library on huge paper so people can make their changes to the
wording.

From my discussions with all of you, and whats been said at Gas uip
till now, I think our Statement of Purpose (feel free to propose other
ideas for the name of this document) should be very brief, ideally
taking less than 30 seconds to read. It should be a dual purpose
document as discussed above. As so many people have said in GAs, this
document should not claim to represent the the whole 99%. We should,
however, reach out to individual occupiers and supporters from
underrepresented groups to ensure that the voices of the
underrepresented are part of our discussion. OccupytheHood on Friday
will provide a great opportunity to get some of these voices included.
I will be there collecting these voices and I would love some help.

Besides including sentences about the #CONCERNS and the #VALUES that
we share, it should also show how we are organizing ourselves by fluid
and voluntary division of labor into working groups and make reference
to the microcosmic utopian society of the camp, free health care,
food, gift economy and all that. It should include a sentence about
our version of horizontal democracy (consensus) and what the GA is
for. Beyond that it should be a direct appeal for participation in the
re-imagining and reconstruction of our society based on the principle
of human needs over corporate greed.

What do you think?

Heads up to all of you that facilitation is going to propose that GAs
meet every other night. I would like to follow up this proposal with
another stating that Ideas and SPP (hopefully as part of a fully
integrated working group) schedule and organize open discussions on
the non-GA nights where we can begin discussing strategies, positions
and perhaps developing some specific proposals. I would like to submit
the analysis being done by ideas as the basis for organizing these
discussions. We could rotate through the main areas of #CONCERN, one
or two per night so that people could come to the discussions they
care most about and begin to exchange ideas in a large group, non-GA
format.

Thanks for reading this far,

I would really love feedback from everyone but lets break it up and
have the discussion on the google groups page. occupy_ideas
http://groups.google.com/group/occupy_ideas?hl=en&lnk=gcimv

Noah



On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 8:20 PM, Tim McKenna <mcken...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Justin makes a good point that
>
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 7:48 PM, justin almeida <justin....@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> those working toward this goal should not be analyzers and collaborators
>> for other peoples opinions, but facilitators of analysis and collaboration
>> among the entire assembly
>
> As it pertains to technologies like the wiki, those of us who find it easy
> to get around it should be thinking of getting ourselves out of the way as
> much as possible. That might mean helping everyone to be an editor if they
> want or it might mean letting the ideas move to the discussion tab where you
> need little tech savvy to create a topic or respond to one.
>
> Its not really a perfect platform, perhaps a bulletin board forum would be
> better. But it seems to work though there is very little traffic on most of
> the site. I wish the subject column on the discussion tab was wider, wide
> enough at least for a sentence.
>
> I know Noah has this whole pile of documents that people have given to him.
> Most were produced electronically but are now on paper. Putting them on the
> site seems too hard for one person or the 'organizers'. Besides just putting
> someone else's stuff on the site makes you as much analyzer as facilitator.
>
> I do like the discipline of summing up your manifesto in one sentence. i
> believe that is helpful to the process. But I don't want to be summarizing
> anybody else's stuff, everyone should do that for their own ideas.
> Tim
>