[Street] Summary of call re: pushing the event back
Ravi Mishra
ravi at occupyboston.org
Fri Nov 25 21:22:40 EST 2011
We had about 6-8 people on the call. We pretty quickly decided that the two
dates were going to be the 3rd or one week later, the 10th. There were a
lot of reasons to keep the march on the 3rd that David, Michael, and Simon
went into. From what I remember, Katie voiced her concerns and seemed
undecided. Brett seemed convinced to keep it on the 3rd.
I thought it would be useful to keep the conversation going, especially as
I'm pretty in favor of pushing it back and giving us an extra week. I
wanted to go into my reasoning below, and start a thread so we could
discuss. We made no conclusion other than to bring it up on Monday at the
meeting, first thing. Without further ado, why I think we should push it
back:
1) The "open source" piece of demonstrations is just doesn't have enough
momentum behind it. To me, the promise of this event is that we empower
individuals to use their creativity to come up with novel types of actions
- hopefully ones that, long term, serve as a blueprint for more effective
demonstrations in the future. Right now, we have very few actions listed (
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ah3pFB7dtoJJdERLcDU3WG1WMHpaSDZkeE03X1d4SHc&hl=en_US#gid=0)
- people knew to the concept of the event are hearing about it and then
seeing us not have any cool, crowdsourced events planned. Further, we've
made none of the materials we talked about - the flyers about the various
issues, personal stories, etc.
2) The rally. As far as I know, we have nothing planned, nor have we
reached out to the police or done much prep work.
3) Community orgs - outside of a handful, we haven't really reached out to
many. Judging by the reaction of the ones we have reached out to, having
more time to do more outreach could be huge.
4) The amount we gain is much more than the amount we lose. Ultimately, I
don't think pushing it back really has much downside - people are listening
to us, and we can easily get the message out (and spin it as a positive for
us: we have a lot of interest and we want to give both the various
communities and ourselves more time to prepare a great event - Simon's
great idea for how we could frame it). And more time gives us some
breathing room to make sure we pull off a great event.
*Ultimately, the beauty of this event, in my mind, is that first that we
would take over the city with a variety of demonstrations, and second, that
we would create a culture of innovation when it comes to actions, and get
people thinking about how to make them more effective, informative, and fun.
* Right now, with the event 8 days away, I feel like an extra week would be
a great idea.
Finally, I think I speak for everyone on the call when I say that, whatever
the final decision, we'll be diving in 100% to make this a great event.
--
Ravi
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