[OSList] protestors and process people on Wall Street

[Sandy Heierbacher]

Hi, Open Space and Art of Hosting friends!

I wanted to send a quick message out to both the OSlist and the AoH list to see if any process experts in these communities are working with the Occupy Wall Street folks who are doing direct action in NYC right now.

We had a thread on the NCDD Discussion list yesterday (I'm the director of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, if you've not heard of NCDD) about the timely opportunity to provide real assistance and advice with process to these activists.  Additional occupations (as they're being called) are being planned for DC, Boston, and other locations I believe -- and I wanted to check in with the Open Space and AoH communities to see if process folks were already involved (if so, let's talk about how NCDD members might be able to help you out, and stay informed about what you're doing).

The Occupy Wall Street folks are an intentionally leader-less, self-organized group.  Open Space and Art of Hosting-style processes seem like the best fit for helping them stay that way, continue to give all protestors a voice and to move more quickly to jointly-identified outcomes.

For those of you who may not be too familiar with what's going on in NYC right now, here's an interesting part of the listserv thread I mentioned (this segment is written by Tom Atlee):

NCDDers in NYC might find the occupier community (they call themselves "Occupy Wall Street") a challenging, exciting context to work in.  Process is being evolved on the spot.  The occupiers were using a traditional consensus process, but the police forbade microphones.  So they developed a fascinating "human microphone" system where the speaker says a few words and the crowd repeats what was said (which allows those in the back to hear). (You can watch all this on streaming videos!)  But that increases the already extensive time needed for consensus (checking for concerns, etc.), so the police have started issuing demands that must be met within 5-15 minutes, which the crowd can't respond to fast enough without formal leaders, which they don't want.  The evolutionary pressures to develop new forms are intense.  What comes out of that could be very good, very bad, or something else...

If an NCDDer joined them and created a self-organized "Talk to the Others" working group, something might happen along the lines you're thinking, Stephanie.  But there's no one in charge to talk to about getting other protesters to join in Activity X.  It is a self-organized system, for better and/or worse.  

If you/we want to do something more planned, best to start now planning for the parallel occupation of Washington DC by hundreds/thousands of progressive protesters that is about to hit the city on Oct 6 http://october2011.org.

For info on Occupy Wall Street, here's some fascinating links:
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/7468-occupy-wall-street-take-the-bull-by-the-horns
http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/64-64/7564-the-whole-world-is-watching-nonviolence-at-liberty-plaza
http://www.truth-out.org/occupywallstreet-more-hashtag-its-revolution-formation/1316784846
http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/09/chris-hedges-occupy-wall-street-is-where-the-hope-of-america-lies/
http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2011/09/20/police-occupy-wall-street-9-20-2011/
http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/785

Best,
Sandy

Sandy Heierbacher
Director, National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD)
email:  sandy at thataway.org (switching to sandy at ncdd.org)
website:  www.ncdd.org