Instructions for Starting a Work Group

As of 11/25/2011

1.Attend a General Assembly and announce the formation of the WG and what the focus of your task will be.

This is a good opportunity to recruit like minded individuals to work with the WG.

General Assemblies currently occur on Tue Thur Sat & Sun at 7pm, weekend GA's will change start time to 5pm starting next weekend.

We recommend that you connect with someone or look on the main website (www.occupyboston.org) to confirm when GAs are.

Also, it helps to bring a bunch of copies of a written description of your proposed Work Group, so that people at the GA can read it.

Be sure to look through the existing work groups to make sure you're not creating too much overlap with existing Work Groups.

Also, it may help to talk to a few people working in similar Working Groups to make sure people are supportive of your planned "Statement of Work". The "Ideas" Working Group is helpful for that.

2. Establish WG meeting dates and times: this could be once a week or up to 7 times a week, e.g., the facilitation working group meets M-F, 5-7 pm and S-S 4-7 pm (this is one of the few groups that meet 7 days a week) alternately the Nonviolence WG meets once a week, Wed 1-3 pm. Other working groups are "virtual" and meet online via discussion lists and/or conference calls. However you decide to meet, it's important that the public have access to the lists and to the meetings. So if they are timed events, they must be posted on the calendar.

3. Establish a wiki site with a contact email address. The Internal IT WG can help you with this.

That's pretty much it for the establishment of a WG. It's basically considered an autonomous action. Working groups are comprised of anywhere from one to dozens of people.

Every Working Group is entitled to a $100 weekly stipend, but very few WG's use them. These disbursements must be used for something that the WG needs to directly assist with their task.

The WG needs 2 members as contact points, and for a disbursement to be made the WG must fill out a form provided by the financial accountability working group (FAWG) then submit the request to Logistics in the event that the materials or services can be obtained by donation, if not then return to FAWG submit the form for the disbursement -- receipts are required for all disbursements.

For additional questions, pleasesend an email]