"Occupy as a new model of society" : alpha lo's article

From alpha lo

Hey guys,
I've been working hard for the last week and a half on an article which I
think is important for the Occupy movement..
I just submitted it to www.shareable.net e-magazine (I've been working with
the editor of the magazine this week to make changes to the article to make
it work better)
I am interested in hearing feedback on this article. Its not yet published,
so changes can still be made.
OCCUPY'S NEW MODEL OF SOCIETY

One of the compelling attractions of Occupy is that it is modeling a
possible socio-economic-political paradigm for how society can run. It is a
model the whole world is beginning to watch. For those who come and
participate in it, its a learning experience, a training in this new
paradigm.

Occupy's general assemblies model a participatory democratic method. This
method has been crucial in allowing people joining the movement to feel they
have an integral part in it, and it has been key to not allowing one voice
or agenda to take over the show. Without it Occupy would probably have been
a much smaller movement. The general assembly has created a space where
people can share many different worldviews and experience, listen to each
other, and learn how to move as a collective. Its a rich, informative and
growing experience for many who participate in it.

Here are notes for how the general assembly works taken from the
occupytogether.org website
"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 be left at home. An
Assembly should not be centered 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. {author's note: a number of Occupy nodes
are now using modified consensus}

Within the General Assembly, there are smaller gatherings known as
"Working/Thematic Groups that focus on supporting specific initiatives or
topics relevant to the movement. These range from Food, Medical, and Legal
Committees to Arts & Culture, Direct Action, Principles of Solidarity and
many more. All groups are open to anyone interested in supporting. "

Occupy uses a gift economy model as people share goods and services, and all
sorts of donations flow into Occupy nodes. There is a sharing of food,
clothing, bedding, bicycles and computers. Occupy is a small village
self-organizing into being with free workshops, talks, medical aid,
libraries, solar-powered electricity, music, yoga, bodywork, media, and bike
repair. Experiencing this sharing may be quite a beautiful experience. That
a gift economy can be used to create and run these small villages may come
as a surprise to those who are used to living in a social system that uses
market-based incentives to motivate people.

The socio-economic-political processes Occupy uses, however, could also be
improved, as we are sure most of the participants would agree. The general
assembly method is sometimes a little too slow and runs into bottlenecks,
and different voices still have a hard time being heard. There are also ways
that distribution of goods and services at Occupy nodes could be
improved. Some specific examples of difficulties and inefficiencies that
have arisen - i) people having to discuss for several hours each day for
consecutive days whether to portion a certain amount of money for an art
project at Occupy, ii) a group that was given the task of buying trash cans
felt hampered<https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/are-the-occupwallstreet-working-groups-...>in
its efficiency to get a much needed item by the General
Assembly conditions that the trash cans had to be fair trade and that they
first had to look on Craigslist for the best price iii) people who
wander into a meeting, interrupt it with an opinion without understanding
the flow of the meeting, then go off to another group and interrupt that
with an opinion.

How well Occupy will grow depends in part on the effectiveness of the basic
political and economic processes it borrows or develops, the ability of
these governemental processes to be both inclusive and efficient, the way
its internal economic process can shift resources and skills to areas where
it needed, avoiding possible bottlenecks.
Here are some suggestions (some of which are already being tried out at a
few Occupy locales) for things that we can bring to the Occupy movement to
improve its socio-economic-political processes:

1. Run Open Space Technology facilitation processes. These processes are
helpful when the issue is complex, there are many different voices to be
heard and the solution comes from a synthesis of a variety of aspects of the
issue. The process allows for both self-expression and collaboration. It
self-organizing nature allows for solutions to emerge out of the collective
intelligence. Its been used for groups strategizing to save the eco-system,
applied by people from poor urban neighborhoods to solve their homelessness
problems, used by a wide variety of stakeholders to come together to work
out health care transformation initiatives, and utilized by the Canadian
native peoples and the Canadian government to work out their issues.

One question which Open Space Technology can be used on, is a question
facing many Occupy locales - what to do when it gets cold. This question has
many facets and factors that influence it - health issues, whether older
people can stay long times in the cold, outdoor heating technology, what
kind of structures might be able to be erected, the permissibility of these
structures, relations and dialogue with police and city, visibility of the
movement, issues of being indoor versus outdoor, possible usage of indoor
spaces, how the movement is growing, what are the goals of the movement,
what is required to achieve these goals, the amount of money flowing in, the
evolving public perception of what is going, neighborhood relations etc.
In Open Space Technology there are multiple sessions one after each other.
At the beginning anyone can stand up and announce a topic for discussion or
action - in this example it would be related to the cold issue. A whole set
of topics is then created. In a session everyone breaks off into smaller
topic circles. People are free to walk from one circle to another sharing
and cross-fertilizing what they are learning different groups. In the next
session people move to a new set of topics around this issue. Different
viewpoints get a chance to be heard and integrated into the deeper patterns
emerging out of the multiple dialogues. At the end of multiple sessions the
group can come back together and synthesize all that has been discussed.
Often there is a lot more clarity in the topic ; solutions, actions, and new
possibilities will have emerged from the collective intelligence.

Other examples of topics that Open Space Technology could be used for
discussing - what actions to take against the banks, safety and health
issues inside camp, how to make Occupy more accessible to mainstream people
etc. The circles that are called within the process can be also used for
initiating actions.

2. Run World Café processes. World Cafe is a conversation process that
allows for deeper themes and patterns to emerge from the multiple voices.
One of the aspects of Occupy is that it is a commons space where people can
gather to have conversations that matter. The World Cafe provides a
facilitated structure for this. It offers a way both to people who are there
longer term, and to the many people who are visiting Occupy but not yet sure
how to engage, to have an important dialogue about what it is that is
unfolding. The World Café organizes around questions that matter. At Occupy
an example of a question would be "What are the causes of the economic
crisis and what are possible solutions?" The process works with the
collective breaking into groups of 4 or 5 to discuss topic. After a set
amount of time e.g. 10 min people switch groups, share what happened in the
previous group, and then continue the conversation. This cross-fertilization
of voices allows for deeper themes to emerge. The process of switching
groups continues multiple times. At the end people speak to the collective
about the viewpoints emerging from each group. These viewpoints can be
summarized and added to the internet as part of a larger global conversation
about our economy.

A sister to this process called the Forum is run at the Oakland Occupy
locale. In a recent Forum people broke into small groups to discuss the
question how we can respect each ourselves and each other. Then for the rest
of the hour there was an open mic for people to share to the larger group.

3. Run Appreciative Inquiry, Theory U, and Future Search facilitation
processes. These facilitation techniques help a group develop a vision, to
look at what works and how to expand it, to project possible future
scenarios, and to tap into inner knowing for guidance. Its been been used
by different parties to figure out how to look at food sustainability and
used by the United Religions Initiative to bring different religious groups
to vision how they can work together. And these facilitation processes could
be useful for Occupy to figure out collectively where it is going, what its
vision is.

4. Run gift circles. A gift circle is where people sit in a circle and share
what their needs and gifts are so they can find ways to help each other.
Others can then offer to help with needs, or receive the gifts offered. For
instance people can express a need for a ride, a cell phone, a massage,
babysitting, people to carry water supplies to camp, a sewing machine to
make Occupy t-shirts, trash cans for Occupy, etc.. Others can then offer to
help. People can also offer gifts they have e.g. putting up a website,
connections with certain groups, vehicles people can borrow etc.. This helps
the flow of resources and builds community at Occupy nodes. The gift circles
can also allow projects to birth in a bottom-up way. By expressing their
project into the circle the resources to make that project may flow in.
This process allows both people who are situated longer and those who who
are just stopping by to contribute to different projects. Gift circles can
also provide a mechanism for people who are coming from the outside to make
donations of money directly to help specific needs and projects e.g. getting
trash cans for the site. This leads to a decentralized flow of money into
the Occupy social system which is complementary to the more centralized
money flow where donations are given to the general Occupy locale and the
General Assembly or a finance committee decides how to spend it. To further
the gift economy flow multiple gift circles can be happening throughout the
day. To include people not at the physical Occupy site, the gift circle
processes can be integrated in with online tools for gifting like
Giftflow.org so that these people can also contribute to the circles.

5. Run a variety of facilitated circles that shift consciousness and sense of
community, e.g. heart circles . These circles can allow people to reflect
and become aware of what is happening inside, and allow for a space where
emotions to be expressed safely. When this kind of safe space is created it
allows for economic and political processes to flow more easily because
emotions are less likely to boil over. CIrcles can use meditation techniques
to help people center in a deeper state of being. They can help participants
to reflect on their internal motivations are, to see if they are really
coming from a heart centered place in their actions, and if not it can
provide processes to help people source themselves from love.

6. If needed integrate Agile-based Scrum and Bioteams project management
techniques into how processes work at Occupy. These project management
techniques allow people to self-organize in the horizontal,
non-hierarchical, non-command & control way that is part of the Occupy ethos.
In these processes people can autonomously choose what they would like to
work on whilst coordinating their actions with others. For the many projects
that are already working in this self-organizational way at Occupy these
techniques may offer nuances of how to make things more efficient. For the
situations when projects get bogged down and bottle-necked the application of
these project management methods may offer much needed guidance.

..
The Occupy network is a set of experiments of socio-economic-political
experiments in many different locales. Each node or locale can test out
different techniques, ideas, and facilitation processes. The best practices
can then spread to other locales, The whole nodal network is thus tapping
into its distributed collective intelligence to evolve new forms of
socio-economic-political systems that are more horizontal, self-organizing,
participatory, democratic, and sharing based.

.................

In addition to more internal uses of these facilitation techniques there is
also another usage of them which leads to a certain strategic direction for
Occupy, and it can be discussed within Occupy itself whether it wants to
take this direction - and that is that dialogue and visioning processes like
Open Space Technology, World Café, Theory U, Future Search, Appreciative
Inquiry can also be used to create community dialogues in which people who
have so far have had more ideological differences with the Occupy movement
can also be included. Inclusive facilitation methods have been hailed by
some as to what enabled the multiple demographics of South Africa to work
together to end apartheid. Can inclusive facilitation processes at Occupy
be a participatory democratic process that allows even more diverse
demographics to work together to navigate us towards a future more palatable
to all?

Authors:
Alpha Lo with help from Brad Smith

Bios:
Alpha Lo, a social architect of new paradigm systems, co-editor and
co-author of "Open Collaboration Encyclopedia", he helped create the Gift
Circle Network. Writes the blog www.opencollaboration.wordpress.com
Brad Smith, Southern California coop facilitator