Chicago Social Forum

[Ted Ernst]

Just continuing the story.

Last night I hosted an OST meeting for this planning group.  There was some
confusion over how many would come and if it should be cancelled, but of
course I expressed my opinion that the process works no matter how many come
so we could have it or not, either way.  There were 4 of us for most of the
meeting and a 5th came near the end.  Because it was so small I left out
some of the elements from the book.  I didn't make bumblebee/butterfly
poster, nor Be Prepared to Be Surprised.  I did post theme, one law, 4
principles and the time/space grid (4 20-minutes blocks).  I didn't walk the
circle instead just informally explaining the process and the fact that I
was going to wear two hats as facilitator and participant.  The 3 of us
generated 13 topics, some of which were merged together.  The timeslots were
then juggled by the conveners to put topics into a sort of ordering so the
whole conversation would more or less just flow through most of the topics
on the wall.  All topics were discussed, some more explicitly than others.

The bottom-line outcome of the meeting is that all planning meetings from
now until the event (Jan31/Feb1) will be in OST (and while not stated
explicitly how this would be evaluated, the idea is that this is an
experiment, but as we fleshed out the details, that idea sort of fell away
and people became more comfortable with passion bounded by responsibility).
At the previous meeting it had been decided to do a "themed meeting" once a
month where the 1st hour would be about a particular topic (connecting the
local to the global, for example) so that outreach could be to specific
groups perceived to be interested in that topic regardless of their prior
knowledge of the Social Forum idea.  While this idea was retained, it will
also be in OST.  We'll have two time slots per meeting where the suggestion
in the opening will be for the 1st time slot to be about the theme of the
night and the 2nd slot will be for "What needs to happen to get us to Jan
31st/Feb 1st?"  People really liked the idea that these conversations would
be broken up by interests and the organizing piece could start in the 1st
session (contrary to suggestion) and the themed piece could carry over into
the 2nd session.  We will also have monthly meetings only about logistics
(obviously since these are also OST, any topic is fair game, but the theme
for those meetings will be more nuts and bolts).

I'm really excited about this whole thing because the idea of the Chicago
Social Forum itself is to create an open space.  I'm excited that we've
decided to live in that space while we're creating it (similar to what
Michael's got us doing in the openspaceworld.net wiki space online).  Good
stuff.

peace,
ted

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ted Ernst [mailto:ted at chicagohumanist.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 11:55 PM
> To: OS List
> Subject: Chicago Social Forum
>
>
> Recently I heard about the World Social Forums that have been in
> Porto Alegre Brazil the past few years.  I'm not totally clear on
> the concept yet, but it seems that it simply opening a space for
> people from all over the world to come together and share their
> own work and make connections (the idea is to oppose
> neo-liberalism and support universal human rights, etc).  Anyone
> can propose a workshop, seminar, forum, whatever, during the
> week-long event and as long as it gets in on time, the organizers
> set the time and place and each thing happens.  I've heard there
> were 1700 workshops at the last one (100,000 participants total).
>
> Anyway, there's a group that's been organizing for a Chicago
> Social Forum in some form since January.  Until tonight they
> hadn't picked a date and didn't seem to have even choosen how
> they (the planning group or whatever) wanted to operate.  I
> suggested we simply pick a date and then convene OST meetings how
> ever often we think is necessary between now and the event so
> that we'd be living in CSF space (presumably getting bigger and
> bigger if people liked the idea) up until the big "event" and
> then we could simply continue afterwards if we wanted to.
>
> One person in the group talked about experiencing open space and
> seeing it be VERY powerful when the group in question has passion
> (or some such word) like his church congregation doing their
> yearly planning, but how it doesn't work if the group doesn't
> care enough about the issue and it just falls apart.  Pretty good
> explanation, no?  Anyway, I didn't push it and the group was too
> scared to really go that direction, but they did like the concept
> of living in the type of environment we're trying to create.
>
> When we came to the end and they were setting up meeting dates
> and topics they decided to make a big recruiting push for a big
> early sepember meeting with a theme of connecting local to global
> (not open space, I'm afraid), but also decided waiting until then
> for another meeting might prove a momentum-killer.  A suggestion
> was floated to not invite new people, but to have "just us" for
> the next one.  I stepped in at this point to suggest OST again as
> it doesn't take any planning time and people would get a chance
> to see how they like it.  The group accepted and off we go!
>
> It seems the "big event" will happen in January.  I'll keep you posted.
>
> peace,
> ted
> ___
> Humanize the Earth! http://www.chicagohumanist.org
http://www.tedernst.com

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