Chicago Social Forum

[Ted Ernst]

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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