The practicalities Group has not met to decide on this proposal, so I'm afraid it is not legitimate, Hamish, for you to present this propsal as if you are representing the mandate of this working group!

There will be a meeting of the UK Organising Committee to host the European Social Forum - (which was approved at Saturday's UK Assembly, subject to amendments) - on Thursday 29 January, at 6.30pm, in Committee Room 2, at City Hall, The Queen's Walk, London SE1 2AA.

At this meeting, I suggest you propose these items for discussion. They can also be raised at the next Practicalities group meeting (which may or may not be the last Practicalities group meeting if it is decided that the UK Organising Committee will propose to replace this working group).

I strongly recommend that people prepare their own proposals for a new overall working structure for the ESF that includes the UK Organising Committee, Culture and Programme Working Groups and UK ESF Volunteers Group all working in tandem.

National and regional organisations which have agreed to affiliate to the Organising Committee are invited to send one representative to this meeting. I would imagine people attending will have to be representative of a trade union/campaign group/civil society group/NGO/social forum.

Adios,

M

Firstly I am not speaking for the practicalities group, note I sead "one of the practicality group" I am afraid you have missed the point about openness and transparently - this is open and transparent - can you point out another agenda that shares this defining ESF factor (check the WFS Charter of Principles if you are confused).

You say add to the current agenda – but earlier you were saying that an agenda hasn’t been posted for this meeting so how can I add to it?

I talked to David Holland of the Greater London Authority and it seams I am not invited... And that everyone who put down on the form - with amendments - is not invited. Who decided this it wasn’t the practicalities working group and the is no other group who can.

It would be good if people actually stop trying to course confusion and fear and got on with what's need to be done - the Proposal will almost certainly be passed - subject to amendment - every one whonts it.

The problem lie in the facilitating of meetings and blatant disregard for ESF principals.

Hamish

hamish,
The ESFs and WSFs in general have (so far) lacked transparency. If the United Kollectives activists can get the London ESF to be a radically transparent, consensual, non-hierarchical forum, that would be a *huge* contribution to the whole peace and justice struggle. So please keep going even though it's a hard struggle!

My feeling is you might need to insist on something like formal consensus for decision-making, though clearly there are all sorts of manipulative tactics that the SWP and so on probably use (whether intentionally or not). Activist groups in the US have written a lot of excellent texts about all sorts of meeting techniques.

i very strongly recommend that you and other non-authoritarian people *read* through all this stuff below. Maybe having some sort of "practice" sessions where some people play the devil's advocate and deliberately use certain techniques to be manipulative, and everyone else practices reacting and using techniques to disenable the manipulation, might be useful.

If you think it's too much to read, have pity on activists in non-English speaking countries who need to translate it all (or find equivalent stuff in the local language). Appreciate the opportunity of already having this ready: read it, apply it!

There's no need to reinvent the wheel!

*  http://www.consensus.net/formal.html Food not Bombs have some articles on formal consensus procedure. Quite good, useful for reference, especially  http://www.consensus.net/ocac2.html

#  http://www.geocities.com/collectivebook Building a book on collective process that focuses on recognizing abuses, power-plays and negative group dynamics that can occur in egalitarian collectives.

#  http://starhawk.org/activism/trainer-resources/consensus-nu.html - Starhawk

As for consensus itself, there's a long discussion by michael albert, which more or less says that in practice, consensus methods are often more a method of improved communication than the actual decision method, and that different situations require different sorts of decision-making methods - as long as everyone affected can participate (this is the principle), the method itself is a technique, not a principle. Anyway, here is michael's text:

#  http://www.zmag.org/forums/consenthread.htm


Another idea: why not use the sort of software technology that indymedia is using?

At a minimum, using public mailing lists with public archives, but even better, why not use a wiki? The indymedia wiki is only used for indy documentation, which is not very controversial, but the wiki culture on the wikipedia has lead to *consensus* - at a meta-level - on a wide range of controversial subjects, e.g. Israel/Palestine. Have a look at, say,
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
to see how radical transparency can lead to quite impressive and original - and precise and (mostly) accurate - texts on quite controversial subjects.

Radical proposal for the ESF:
(1) the ESF web pages should be *entirely* wiki pages, so that anyone with internet access can restructure pages, speeches, programmes, etc.
(2) if email contacts are used, they should all correspond to publicly archived mailing lists (like on indymedia - usually)
(3) any *exceptions* to (2) (e.g. for personal data regarding participants' personal information) must be themselves *publicly* debated with proposals made on wiki pages and/or publicly archived mailing lists.

Indymedia and GNU/linux have been using these techniques for years and no big catastrophe has resulted from using them. On the contrary, radical transparency and non-hierarchy are among the reasons why both have been so successful and continue to grow. Since the ESF is about exchanging ideas, networking, communication about proposals for post-communist-capitalist social models - it's not for organising civil disobedience - there's no reason for not using the same techniques.