General Assembly Tuesday July 10 to Address Big Questions About the Future of Decision Making at Occupy Boston

GA will be held July 10th at 7pm, at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument hill on Boston Common.

The agenda for this GA is to attempt to make decisions about what decision-process we will use going forward: will we keep the GA or adopt another format? How often will we meet and where? Do we need to create a series of meetings to address these issues? If so, which and why?

The proposal to have this GA was part of a proposal passed at GA 6/30.

Why have this meeting? According to proposer Carolyn Magid, this is a chance to address a problem: GA is our current decision process, but we have dwindling GA attendance at the same time that we are trying to consider proposals with very broad implications for OB (about spending on S17, setting aside money for purchase of land, freezing spending, etc.). We need a good representation of Occupy Boston to decide on these important questions and to consider more generally how we should be moving forward as OB. If the current GA plan doesn’t give us a good representation of Occupy Boston, we need to consider what changes we need to make so that we have a decision-process we support and want to participate in. So this GA is focused on the decision-process in hopes that we can move ahead to make other important choices with more buy-in from OB.

How will the meeting work? GA will use the Alternative Decision Making Process-Consensus (see General Assembly, Passed Resolutions 4/22/12 for more details) which allows us to consider everyone’s best ideas and to attempt to reach consensus in a much less rigid way than the original GA process. This meeting may be the beginning of a longer conversation before consensus is reached.

All OB members are urged to come and bring your best ideas.