[Street] Summary of call re: pushing the event back

Brett West heavyriser at gmail.com
Sat Nov 26 11:44:18 EST 2011


Ravi, thank you for this insightful email and getting this conversation
started on the list serve.

Certainly, the possibility of changing the date this late in the game is a
bit awkward for all the folks working so hard to organizer this. There are
so many good reasons to delay the event and not to delay the event.
Overall, I am looking at this as a huge lesson in event organizing.

I think its fair to say, perhaps echoing Katie, that we have been a week or
two behind in organizing this event all along. I feel like 3 weeks in we
started the talking, 2 weeks in we started planning and 1 week in were
hitting the ground. Oops.

Nonetheless, some people have already done really great work in reaching
out to their communities/networks. Importantly,* I don't see any student
actions listed on the google docs*. I do see Occupemos. Where are the
Occupy Boston events? Are they being planned

*The best thing we can do between now and Monday if we want to have this
event on Dec. 3rd get GROUPS/ ORGANIZERS to the Monday planning meeting. *If
we don't have a good turn-out, I suspect we will postpone the event until
Dec. 10. If we do have a good turnout, the community may decide to keep the
date and churn out some serious action items.

Thank you all
Brett

On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 9:22 PM, Ravi Mishra <ravi at occupyboston.org> wrote:

> 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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