Evaluating the GA

NEW YORK, June 23. 2012--Tonight's discussion of the General Assembly, held at Liberty Plaza, aka Zuccotti Park, was intended to analyse the working of  GA over the past six months and to try to fix its flaws-- through break-out groups. Proceedings took off at 6pm sharp with a detailed report of last week's meeting.  Excerpts from transcript: "If some people at the GA are well fed [but others] are thinking about where their next meal is coming from, that's not really equal". . ."we wanted to check in with other occupations to analyse how they've acted and what their GAs have done so we can learn the lessons of their mistakes, not just the lessons of our own..."We want to bring back the community, that's kind of a hard thing" . . ."We also wanted to take personality [ego] out of the decision-making. We want to get the right answer, not 'my' answer. The group by discussion should find the right answer"...."We talked about rebuilding the squandered good will and trying to bring back the people who left because they couldn't put up with the b.s. the longest ...finding some way to fix our process so that it's not so inhuman and leads to fist fights. Maybe some way to have a more human conversation, instead of the point of process fight. Perhaps this could suggest some break out groups we want to work on." Video of other speakers at the meeting continues on Part 11. Filmed by Squaring Off.

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NEW YORK, June 23, 2012--In Part II , individual occupiers get on stack and nail down aspects of General Assembly that have proved particularly irksome and make suggestions for fixes. 

Excerpt, first speaker:" One, GA became too centralized. People began to feel it was gatekeeping for the movement and that some people were using GA to restrict people's activities in ways that were not empowering and not horizontal." 

Excerpt, Second speaker: " From September 17th ...I watched something I loved a lot come under accumulating abuse with no one there to defend it."

NB filmmaker's note: while this re-evaluation of the GA is taking place on a weekly basis, the activities of other working groups continue and are open for participation.

Transcript and more speakers TK.