Summary of Occupy Strategic Planning Calls through 6.10.13

Homework from June 10th call

Dear fellow engaged citizen,

The Occupy Strategy Group has held a series of calls since mid-May. They are held once a week on Mondays from 6-8pm.

At first, the calls were an opportunity for us to connect using a different medium than email and to connect a voice to the written messages we read daily.

During the second call a suggestion was made to use this group to target a demand like ending corporate personhood that would have an impact on many other issues. This suggestion received positive responses from the other people on the group call. This demand would impact many issues like the ones written on the groups "List of Goals" Wiki page or impact the statements on the Vision Document from the 2012 National Gathering. On this call, there were questions about if we should have one demand or a few demands and how will we determine what the demand is or what the demands are? We then agreed to engage in a process, which would take multiple calls, to narrow the list of goals in order to determine what demand(s) we wanted to declare as the first thing(s) that are the highest priority to get done. The context of process was the idea that certain demands are preconditions to effectively getting something else done. For example, if the demand is to stop using as a form of currency Federal Reserve Notes and return to the practice of using U.S Notes, a precondition to this getting done is the ending the Federal Reserve Bank as a privately held central bank.

Over the next two calls we narrowed the process down to thirty one demands. We all voted on each item using a weighted vote from 1-5 with 1 being lowest priority and five being the highest priority. (Note that the priority is regarding the need to get that demand done. This does not mean that the demand is any less important than any other demands.)  This process narrowed the demands down to a top 12 with only one demand, ending corporate persons, receiving all fives.

An issue was discovered in our process which was not all the demands were voted upon during the call as several were missing due to an oversight. That week on the list an impasse developed over how to handle this situation. During the third call in the process of targeting demands, we did not make any further progress in the process. In response to the impasse, autonomous action was taken to create and circulate a survey of the top thirty one demands.

The next call we shifted our focus to building a culture based in the values of effective group dynamics. We began this process by having people share what values they felt are important in positive group dynamics. As part of this process, we decided to have homework over the course of the week which would serve multiple purposes: it would have us do the work assigned Homework from June 10th call, but it would also provide common topics for us to be able to share back with the group to practice building culture through the implementation of the values shared in the last call.

The focus of this week's call is to go through the homework while remaining mindful of the values shared. Part of the homework is to reply to what we individually believe the role of this strategy group is with respect to greater Occupy, what do you think the final product will look like for this group before the National Gathering in August, read up on electoral reform & proportional representation, and watch the documentary Ethos preparing a list of 5 items that can be shown to be helped by addressing the preconditions mentioned in the film.

Homework from June 10th call