Occupy Working Groups
Description
George Por:
'Working Groups are organs of the awakening social body of the 99%. Currently, they carry out functions essential to the well-being of the Occupations. I see them also as seeds for the new institutions that we’ll need for stewarding the well-being of the emerging, post-capitalist society.
They can be roughly broken into three categories: operational, sectorial, and strategy-focused. The first deals with everything needed to assure the viability of a given Occupation, including its finances, outreach, press relations, process, etc. The work of WGs in the second category is focused on such sectors of social life as education, health, economics, etc. In the strategy-focused WGs, members address issues of the emerging Occupy vision, strategic planning and navigation, and how the 99% can win." (http://thefutureofoccupy.org/2012/02/04/how-revolution-carries-itself-forward-by-the-working-groups-of-occupy/)
Example
Pittsburgh's Working Groups
Healthcare Working Groups
"Working Groups can be seen as social laboratories where new ways of doing things are tried out and improved. In the US, a number of active healthcare WGs have been built on the need for health systems that put people before profits. Collaborative efforts such as Occupy Healthcare and Health Justice for All are pioneering initiatives which stress the importance of listening to every voice in providing healthcare services."
Discussion
Leaderless or leaderfull?
Anna Betz:
"Although the Occupy movement doesn’t have leaders, it still needs leadership skills, and these are buried in various places throughout the movement if you care to look for them. But many people don’t know the first thing about leadership and strategy, because it is something they are inherently against. This means we are in a movement that is more or less like herding cats most of the time, because of a simple lack of understanding about the basic principles that we really need.”
“Ultimately, the Occupy movement must have leaders. However, these leaders must be each and every one of us in unison, as we self-govern ourselves. This is what leadership is about. Without it, the movement will struggle to gain traction.”
Jonathan Mathew Smucker in a forum for grassroots mobilization describes the difference between saying none of us is a leader and saying all of us are leaders?
He concludes: “We need a movement where we are constantly encouraging each other to step into our full potential and to shine as individual leaders who are working together collectively for a better world. So, let’s all be leaders. Let’s step up and do this.” Rotating responsibilities
To create a leaderful rather than a leaderless movement it was suggested to rotate roles in the WGs at regular intervals so nobody becomes the lead person for Occupy
“We should be strongly emphasising the importance of people sharing roles and power, rotating posts a strategic issue. The mainstream media and political establishment want very much to push us into acceptable (to them) representative democracy. …. Occupy makes a systemic and thorough critique of this system and as such will be experimenting with different structures. This avoids the danger of one person being identified with a particular role and the chances of their personal agendas coming into play more strongly than the others in the collective.”
“The issue with rotating roles is that a lot of roles in the working groups are based on expertise. Thus, the same people end up doing the same jobs in the same roles because of their expertise in that role. They become more efficient at it. It would undermine efficiency to force people to rotate to jobs with which they are not comfortable or lack the expertise for, unless they are willing to undergo some form of training for that role.The press team, for example, are likely to be the major spokespeople for Occupy London, and will be identified as such, simply because they are part of the press team. It makes little sense to rotate in a member from the Kitchen to do the duty unless it is relevant. With people in multiple work groups, there’s already a high degree of rotation anyway, but what is more likely is that you have a rotation of roles more than a rotation of people. Thus a person might be representative on one workgroup at one point, and then representative of another at a later point, and so forth.”
“Don’t ever let people tell you what you can’t do, think about how you can do it and suggest it…
If you’re clever enough to know, slow down and teach others
If you only help yourself you only help yourself. If you help others you help yourself.
People can do whatever they want to do. This is why there is no hierarchy in Occupy. There is still organisation. Occupy still functions very much like a business, and still has all the needs and requirements of one.
It’s just that rather than having people in fixed roles, with the idea of leadership and promotions, people can move about and do whatever needs to be done based on whatever skills they have or wish to learn. That is why the movement is fluid. We are all workers, executives, and chairmen.” (http://thefutureofoccupy.org/2012/02/04/is-occupy-leaderless-or-leaderfull-insights-from-working-groups/)
The dangers of Working Groups
How do we make sure that working groups are in a state of function rather than dysfunction? Here you will find some useful suggestions from Occupy London including WG health checks, the value of online forums and how to deal with the misconceptions on what the responsibilities of a Working Group should have.
URL = http://thefutureofoccupy.org/2012/02/01/the-dangers-of-working-groups/
The community art of working with “blocking”
"Blocking" in Working Groups and GAs is the power of a single person to veto a consensus. What are the appropriate circumstances in which it should be used? When does this power get abused? This blog is dedicated to all Occupiers, who want to become wiser about "blocking" and how to relate to it.
URL = http://thefutureofoccupy.org/2012/02/04/the-community-art-of-working-with-blocking/
More Information
Special issue of the The Future of Occupy newsletter!
How (r)evolution carries itself forward by the Working Groups of Occupy
What can Occupy learn from the evolutionary dynamics of differentiation-integration-transformation? What can that triad bring to the epic question, how can the 99% win? In this essay, George Pór guides us through how we can make use of the understanding of that triad for discovering the answer.
Working Groups: the self organising revolution
"Working Groups reveal the desire for a new manner of building community..." With them we could in fact be witnessing new systems of self-organisation that are creating an alternative to the current disempowering, unrepresentative democracies. This article points to various examples innovative practices introduced by Working Groups.
URL = http://thefutureofoccupy.org/2012/02/02/working-groups-the-self-organising-revolution/
Is Occupy leaderless or leaderful: insights from some Working Groups
Can we inspire the leadership qualities in everybody to manifest, without having to have “followers”? This article explores the need for all of us to become leaders in a movement without hierarchy, and some suggestions for achieving this.
A responsible Occupation? the fun and hard work of Pittsburgh's Working Groups
“It’s not that OP doesn’t challenge authority (many people have been arrested at OP actions) but perhaps it’s that they do so in ways that are seen as creative, thought provoking, and most of all, decidedly non-violent” This blog tells about how the Working Groups of Occupy Pittsburgh are creating actions that bring smiles to even the police and local council.
The dangers of Working Groups
How do we make sure that working groups are in a state of function rather than dysfunction? Here you will find some useful suggestions from Occupy London including WG health checks, the value of online forums and how to deal with the misconceptions on what the responsibilities of a Working Group should have.
URL = http://thefutureofoccupy.org/2012/02/01/the-dangers-of-working-groups/
Working Groups are sowing the seeds for a healthier healthcare infrastructure
Working Groups can be seen as social laboratories where new ways of doing things are tried out and improved. In the US, a number of active healthcare WGs have been built on the need for health systems that put people before profits. Collaborative efforts such as Occupy Healthcare and Health Justice for All are pioneering initiatives which stress the importance of listening to every voice in providing healthcare services.