Members of Occupy workshop: how to be diplomatic when talking to members of the public.

George Por did workshop on listening skills, how we listen to other people (public etc), as this is what they want. Being empathetic, finding out where they want to get to, and where we together want to get to. We can show that Occupy has an answer.
Technical point: Quick discussion downstairs about where next conference will be.
Following on from what was being said before; listening to other people, has to be real. I really want to hear what you've got to say, because what you've got to say will help me to understand more. Really wanting to include people so people want to feel you care about them.
We are the 99%, that means the Occupy people and almost every class. They have just as much say on this as we have - we are self selecting, they aren't. 

We see ourselves as the 99%, we must think who that includes. Every right wing voter in the conservative party as well as everybody else. We must be open to this wide range of opinion.
Along with training facilitators on a large scale. We have as of yet failed to be able to do this. Face to face conversations with the public are vital. We've gone to great length to discuss this but we haven't done a great deal.

As we're doing facilitator training, I think all the camps need to place priority on having regular discussions, workshops training, having general assemblies, etc. You measure things success by the success of the outreach.
Max proposes an addition to this; One of the big successes in global protest that happened this weekend: Wikipedia protest with SOPA blackout. It's important to go with the flow to learn what's actually working.
We are the 99%, but wiki systems are also the 99% in this respect. The two things I would focus on is that they're very organized and very polite. The ways in which they operate in terms of the way people participate, they've very polite.
I think we need to be careful - we've produced a common statement, I'm not sure 99% of the people would actually agree with it. If we say we are the 99% that's also problematic, because according to one poll 49% of the public want us evicted from St Paul's. What I would suggest is that we are fighting for the social and economical interests of the 99%.

If we do not recognise that we ant to reach out to a much wider range of people than we have been, then we are going to fail. I'm asking for a much more imaginative and relaxed basis of dialogue.
I was going to say, what we've done in Norwhich is: we've only agreed 3 things by consensus, but at the bottom of that we wrote "consensus mootable", but some people may not know what that means exactly.
We have to be flexible, to suggest our key values that we want a fairer world and that we fight for social justice, etc.
I think that really is why we need to listen to people.
In terms of action points, I'm actioning that I'm going to put a listening skills workshop on the wiki. (John Sinha outreach London)

What Exeter have done is they put up at the front of the camp the most important information, and then a person would stay at the desk to explain that information to people as they turn up. This is working quite well.

In Norwich we also have several information boards: they need updating, we need more materials to do that, trying to source that. I had a particular idea that might intrigue people, to have an information wall with a handful of statement, and to write at the top: True or False statement, can you guess which is which?
For example: If height were directly horizontal to income, the richest guy in Britain would be 200 miles tall. Most people guess the answer to this incorrectly. It's a good way to bring the information home to people in a format that they can readily understand.
It might be worth having a look into marketing. With the camps and their display, successful camps displays change very often, but generally it's the same stuff shifted around with added new bits. Just trying to get into that cycle is important.
It gives that impression of institution that people respect, and I think that's important for Occupy to give.
A simple image to show the situation to the public is that of the 99% slice of the pie and the 1% slice of the pie.
I would love to spend time on the pavement just spending time engaging with people and asking what would make things more interesting or attractive to you. We shouldn't assume that we necessarily know the answer, other people in the street are just as likely to know.
People love to come every time and see something different. It's very important to remain fresh.
Some very useful common threads coming out of this: All national conferences should also be about talking big things rather than just getting bogged down in details. One phrase that works well for me (MAx Occupy London) is "Stop Looking inwards start looking outwards".
A lot of the campsites have a lot of lovely posters, but they are often falling down or out of date. A lot of camps still have their Christmas decorations up.

Next sub-heading is the appearance of people who are doing the outreach.
If we did a weekly or maybe a monthly move round of the noticeboards this could help.
I heard a story that the Occupy movements in America, there were groups that came out and gave people second hand suits so people can look smart.
Em: For me it's more important not how people look, but how people behave. If you approach someone smiling they'll be more likely to come around to your point of view.

Following directly on from that: If you dress up in a suit, then you're not being yourself. Being yourself is the first step in sincerity and genuine behavior.
Some of the best guys we have have long hair and beards!
It's almost like by being who we are, and being very polite, kind, listening and so on. We can help dispel some of the prejudices people have to long hair, dreadlocks etc.
We shouldn't worry too much about people's appearance, but if we do create teams of people with various appearances, if we're going to do say a lecture in a school or something it's important to have a good range of demographics approach this to show our diversity.

If we follow this through it means we'll need to recruit a much wider range of people to be themselves.
I think it's an ideal to have a range of people coming from different backgrounds, ages, appearances etc. That would be great, but we should go with whoever we have available to do this.
Next agenda item: Meetings, doing outreach and approaching groups. Going out into community.
What I'm thinking of is that the camps are not necessarily the only part of the movement. There are many people who don't necessarily want to camp but we do still need to take the message of consensus democracy and people's assemblies out into these communities. It's bout trying to get village groups like for example Women's Associations, the Women's Institute, these are people who are just very straight and conventional, but just might respond to or begin to think about our way of thinking.
We had to explain when the first camps were evicted, we went out to the communities and we still do have lots of assemblies in the villages around, even though we don't do so much in the central square.
We need people to understand that they are not outsiders to what we are doing, they are also the participants. A lot of people just don't know where to start.
 We've had a long talk about how people who can't camp can get involved in the movement. One way is that we can get a lot of people to put their name to the common statement, to show they identify with us. Another is to identify the different groups that we wish to outreach to and to go out to approach these groups to attend their events and for them to attend ours. In the future we're going to be moving to connect groups, we're focussing now on anti-cuts groups, trade unions etc, but this will be added to over time.
Action point: we can compile a list of groups we think we can effectively outreach to.
I'm thinking of brand image of the Occupy Movement. The sort of people we recruit first are the image of this movement. I think we have to go not so much beyond the usual subjects, but even outreach to parties like the BNP(?) - we need to reach out to people who are most alienated and at risk politically. I just don't want to do the standard thing that would turn us into "yet another left wing movement".
Rotary clubs want speakers - they constantly have programs where they want groups to come and talk to them.
Action point proposal. We create a space on the Wiki for outreach, we all swap email addresses and everything we discuss will go into this section.
When it comes to recruiting people who aren't on the political left, it helps to be able to use the broadness of Occupy to our advantage in talking to them. If I was doing outreach in Exeter and talking to a Tory voter, I would talk about discrimination and social inequality, but it doesn't get through to them. We have to be quite careful with how  we talk to these groups, and focus on ideas we have a common agreement on, for example anti-corruption in the business world - most people can agree on this.
There's an image that has been going round my head for a while of banging one's head against a brick wall. I have a faith in most people but the reason they won't support us is that they can't see any point in being lead to a new brick wall to bang their head against. As well as offering a different model of democracy, I think we have to motivate people by showing them some kind of hope in the things that will concern them.
I was standing with a lady in her mid 30s, early 40s. Laden with shopping bags in both hands. I asked her what she thinks about Occupy, she tried to say like: "sorry, I'm not bothered", tried to walk away. Explained we are trying to do things about unfairness in the world, asked what is unfair to her. She said she thinks it's unfair that a lot of people working less get paid a huge amount more than her. Within about 2 minutes of that type of conversation she was smiling and engaging, she wanted to know what she could do about it, and she went off and smiled.
She appeared to be trying to just shut it all out, like she believed there was nothing she could do about her own worries. It's important to show that we don't really know the answers but we are engaging with people and finding out what they really care about, so they can start to think themselves and with others about what they can do to resolve their problems and the problems of the world.
John will create a wiki space for outreach on occupywiki.org.uk. It's a document you can add to and edit.
Some situations where you can use publicity and media attention it can be useful to draw on media like celebrity, like during an eviction or similar legal process.
You can get tripped up by using celebrities inappropriately. 
One excellent example of good use of celebrity as an outreach opportunity was that Get Cape Wear Cape Fly demonstrated understanding and employment of our consensus democratic process on stage, using mic check and taking technical points from the crowd. 
It's possible for celebrity to have the opposite effect as intended though, they can water down the politics of the movement. 
One campaign in Australia used celebrities to show they support the carbon tax and people actually rejected that strongly. 	
Occupy artists writers designers and musicians, film producers etc, there are a lot of sites out there where a lot of significant people are putting their names to Occupy. Perhaps these people can be called on to come in to Occupy and do workshops.
Also important to make sure we have a good mix of establishment people mixed in, for example local bishops - it would be good if they even could do a workshop on something. People who are just regular run of the mill establishment figures voicing support is very important.
Perhaps we could make a list of all the people who would gain through living in a post-Occupy utopia.
Proposing a post-Occupy utopia may turn some people off to the whole idea.
Discussing a post-utopian vision maybe isn't the best way to discuss outreach.
The reason I was saying that is, if you can imagine it as a utopia you can consider who will gain from it.
One of the most effective forms of outreach, around the world, is bringing people to discussion in small towns, community centres. Just bringing people into discussion, generally. To do this we need to establish which form of process is the most effective. We have to have working groups, to train them and facilitators, so people can figure out general strategies of open discussion. We're kind of assuming it's there but for most people it is not.

We should also focus on allowing the Occupy spaces to be used for other people's points and ideas.
As outreach it would be great if we could do serious training of facilitation, because when it works really well people see this. We have a tool kit that describes really well how to run an assembly - it works really well and gets across the idea of what Occupy is and how you can employ this idea for your own benefits.

I just heard downstairs that there is one Occupy camp, and one of their campaigns is that everyone should have a right to carry  a gun (editors note: I believe this was a personal view expressed by one of the occupiers at that camp, never one that was decided by consensus in any way).
Up in Edinburgh we call GAs "Public Assembly". If we call it a GA then people feel it is a bit more exclusive.

People's Assembly can sound a bit too socialist. In Britain you would alienate a lot of people like this! A lot of people do not empathize with this idea "People".
On the subject of assemblies, what we've done in London is to make a distinction between having a political GA or an internal camp style GA. By making that distinction people can attend the assemblies that they will best relate to.
Downstairs we have the web team doing really amazing stuff online - but something people say about the web is that it brings people close together who are far apart, but it brings people further apart who are close together.
There has to be a training working group established that will travel around to the occupations and literally go through the methods of facilitating the meeting, a workshop for people's public general assemblies.
Outreach is a really important way that the movement grows and spreads out, we have to share the knowledge. Direct democracy downloading kits, explains everything about process etc. Online Wiki helps with this. From experience in setting up squat centres, we can open Occupy backup buildings, etc.
We need everyone's ideas in this, including business sector etc.
My concern is that the outreach project of getting out there into the community, is that making a situation where people all understand the process and can stick to it, is difficult, some people will seemingly take over, process breaks down people can leave etc.
Brief summary of the discussion we had on outreach already:
Discussion of speaker training
Having casual conversations with passers by
Appearance of the camp and the people in it.
Bringing the message of the occupy movement to other groups by use of speakers invited to events.
Getting support by prominent people/celebrities.
Action point: Putting all notes on the wiki, email addresses taken down for update on this
Listening skills workshop
On wiki agree to compile list of organizations to approach and talk to, (anti-cuts groups etc)

On that wiki, people need to make well edited, well made films that you can click on and find out basic information about how consensus works etc.
It needs to be clear what sort of things can be discussed at GAs: It's not just about economic justice.

There are massive networks already established: Rather than reinventing the wheel it may be good to tap into the groups that already exist. Whenever we went into an area to do a protest, we would spend a few days trying to find out all the established groups that are in that town and city, permaculture groups, students, pensioners etc. It's a good idea to try to get as many of these groups down as you can and then target them all independently.
These established networks already exist in most towns. Occupy the Neighbourhoods came up recently as part of outreach. Flash GAs in parks is a major outreach to people who just happen to be walking through a park on an afternoon.

People can get turned on or off this movement by just coming to one GA. It's important to try to stay focussed and useful, keep to safer spaces policy strictly in GA, no personal attacks etc.

Hopefully Occupy can bring some focus or shed lights onto the route causes of the problems that drive many other movements - Occupy can be the wider network to bring these small groups together.

I'm thinking how we can publicize these large meetings - mainstream media, going on the web? It might be an idea to write that it will not be a traditional political meeting, it won't just be a few people speaking on the stage and then opportunity to speak at the end, the whole thing will be participatory.

On the Wiki we will have a list of organizations to contact - we have created for the Occupy London website, a form that helps to train outreach speakers.

Mic check flash mob style GAs that announce location in advance and people can gather for this through social media and mailing lists etc.
Walk into a large bank with as many people as you can gather and start doing mic check, general assemblies etc.