Agenda:
Proposal to decide what we stand for
Climate Caravan
Occupy May
Subject of undercovers and how we deal with that
Who can speak for who
Global dialogue and democracy
Future of tented protest, and alternatives or varieties of it such as flash camps, and forms of outreach that occupiers can be doing.

CLIMATE CARAVAN:
John (London outreach);
The idea for the climate caravan arose out of a pamphlet that was produced called "1 million climate jobs", by a campaign against climate change trade union group + activists. The idea is it's not simply promoting the ideas in this book: In the occupy movement we talk about alternatives. What we're talking about for this climate jobs caravan, is how we can fix the economic climate.
We're seeing a collapse in renewable energy investment in the UK. Same thing in Spain, due to neoliberal austerity. 
In this environment what we're saying is let's talk about how we can solve the unemployment issue, how we can create jobs that can de-carbonize the economy. The point of the caravan is to spark this debate among a diverse range of groups, and to demonstrate to society that we do have ideas, we do have alternatives.
I'm not suggesting that here we can formally agree to do this, but just to see that people are interested in doing it, and for people to report back on this discussion to their respective camps.
What the caravan entails: There are a number of cities, with caravans of many cyclists going from one town to another hosting events talking about unemployment austerity and the climate crisis.
Activists here may have their own ideas. This is proposing a national policy framework for dealing with the climate crisis, but people may have more grassroots ideas, ie grow heathrow.
The space where we would do this would be like in church halls, trade council meetings, etc. We could create these local mini events in these different cities.
List of cities so far who are interested: Manchester, Aberdeen, Oxford, Newcastle, Portsmouth.
So for example a group may stop off at Portsmouth, another setting off from manchester, etc. The idea would be to start around the middle of may, could even start on the global day of action: May 15.
It would go around for about a month and then probably convene around London after this. People could decide to do different legs of the journey.
Idea is to put this out for people to see if they may be interested and give them an opportunity to get involved.
Jamie: Clarification point. It's climate and economic justice being tied together - has a title been decided? 
John: Provisional title "million climate jobs caravan", or "climate jobs caravan".
It's suggested that some people may misunderstand the word caravan to mean an actual physical caravan.

Lots of possiblities, film screenings, discussions, meeting with groups, meeting church groups, press releases publicity stunts etc.
It's just going to be in the UK, it will have different starting points, which ultimately converge in London sometime around June/July. Details and dates still to be worked out.

Jamie: In a lot of the camps there are thinness on the ground, and a lot of numbers could be drained from the camps and our efforts would become spread even thinner. Not saying it's not a great idea but this is a definite concern.

We need to outreach to other groups who might be up for helping other than the Occupy camps, to fill out the numbers in an event like this.
Ruth: There are a lot of people who are involved in the pamphlet, a million climate jobs, a lot of different organizers. If this event is going to be promoting just what this pamphlet is saying, then it should have a lot of organization coming from these organizations, not just relying on Occupy.

John: Explains that it is not exactly just Occupy who will be organizing it, although there will be organizational input. The demographic who would be doing this are not necessarily the same as those who will stay at camps.
It's also an opportunity for people within the occupy movement to bring their agenda to this discussion, and a way of involving more people. The only thing I;m asking Occupier to do is to talk about this and let people know it's happening and how people can get involved if they're interested.
Different demographics are definitely being targeted - a person who's willing to cycle around the country is probably a different person to those who will Occupy in a static space.
Question: is there any form of contact for coordinating this? Several groups in Nottingham should be interested and iyt would be very useful to get a contact for this.

If you are interested in getting involved in the Climate Jobs Caravan, John's email is sinha.john@gmail.com - put on subject line: Climate Caravan

MAY EVENT:
For those not at outreach meeting yesterday, we agreed that from 1st of May we will agree to call for 2 weeks of action nationally, with multiple objectives. Calling for international action on the 12th and 15th of may, when a different walking caravan will be going through Athens (currently in Italy)
People want to talk about taking that forward and pushing it out as an idea.
Working group set up for the future of Occupy, got together this morning and wrote up a draft. Draft proposal for the 4 days: 1st, 7th, 12th, and 15th.
Ragnhild: An elaboration on what was agreed by consensus, that we as a movement want to take part in international calls for action, to have something for this we can take back to our local camps and be ready to enact these plans in May.

COPY ALL OF THIS FROM RAGNHILD!!!!
COPY ALL OF THIS FROM RAGNHILD!!!!
COPY ALL OF THIS FROM RAGNHILD!!!!

Can I ask what your reference in that to Economic Growth was?

Essential services are being wiped out as we scrabe for promise. Austerity methods are strangling economic growth.

I don't think economic growth is a good thing, in the common sense of the word.
 Proposal for change: Austerity measures are killing jobs
Ruth: Killing us!

Points on this:
I would like to see this proposal also include the possibility of already building the alternative. Not that we are just protesting and saying that the alternative is known, but that we can put the energy into creating the alternatives. A may day call has been sent out (m'aide). This is a good title to use for this, it is a call for help, a stop to this current position and for people to change and put their energies into building the future. I would like t o see this call not just calling for protest marches and linking with people that have happened in the past, but really putting energy into building the future, which we already know is beginning in co-operatives, communities, and all the ways that we know this is already starting.

There was a discussion yesterday to call it "Occupy Mayday", for that whole two weeks of may, using that idea for occupy mayday, there was also discussions that that term has a lot of conniptions attached to it due to many uses in the past.
We wanted to know whether we should be part of the protest, but should we be open to all groups participating in Mayday anyway.
The second thing about building on communities and success that has already been had, it is important to have this noted, but we only have two months to start formulating our own material in each camp that will include the pros of what each camp has done anyway.

Ragnhild: A lot of us talking about concrete actions that we can take, it's not just about protest but that we are deciding actions for changing the world and about what we want. That is already the 3rd to last sentence.

I'm suggesting that this is a point at which we should start, and that May is a day or time when people can decide to switch, that there would already be an alternative in place. If we start now, then it can be there ready.

Saskia: I think the point of this proposal is to do just that, so that each Occupy group can between now and then work out how they wish to approach this.

The 99% include folk across the political spectrum. As part of that, I have responsibilities as a private sector employer. I would remove the reference about people pulling a sicky, it doesn't necessarily help.
Because it;s across the political spectrum I think around Occupy Jobs the mayday call, if it's perceived to be around 1st of May, for obvious reason folk will associate that with the left and it will potentially prevent a whole bunch of others in the 99% who still have residual problems with some of thee beliefs and things. If we put a focus on the word Jobs, people are less likely to object than if we put focus on the words May Day.

Making it a jobs emergency should be the focus, so it will involve the 99% across the political spectrum.

Tension about the 1st of may: In the drafting process we tried to take note of that - Occupy Work is a generic idea that we could take through. If you don't think the balance is right, that thinking was actually brought up at the drafting process.
Occupy Jobs can also alienate people who actually don't have jobs.
It's not just people in work who are affected by the cuts anyway, it's also students and other demographics.

It will be a public document, as with anything in Occupy. It will hopefully be something that the occupations can use if they hope to put out a press statement, rather than each occupation having to write their own statement on this.

I know it's important for people to get their meaning clear, but adding far too many points and far too much academic language can confuse people. It's more important to get things crisp and clear.

A lot of it sounded great, I don't like that it suggests that it's entirely up to us to solve the problem. It's up to us to stop this, but it's not up to us to "solve the problem". I really like the Mayday mayday phrase, because it shows an emergency which this year is. 
As for Occupy Jobs, as part of the 99%, reluctantly I feel it's necessary to say we do need jobs, but most of the things in this country are just geared to creating profit, not just the things that people need. Anything that looks like it's geared to creating work, will not necessarily resonate with some parts of the 99%.

I heard you use the term employment, and people being underemployed, domestically. My feeling is that employment is not what we want. I agree that for many people there is no choice and to be in paid employment is a way for having a livelihood. I think the statement needs to be much more implicit on the fact that employment is not the only form of work. A lot of the more meaningful jobs in our society is not necessarily paid or recognized work.
What we need to be building is the alternative opportunities for doing meaningful work, giving people opportunities for moving out of that profit based economy and doing the stuff that people need to be doing. It's not a mobilizations we're looking at in the usual sense, but a way of getting started on the solutions in a practical way.

Necessary and sustainable jobs and services is a good way of referring to it.

Last night the discussion group was about getting this international day of action together. It was part of the Occupy future discussion but really about linking in with the international movement. May 1 is currently an international day everywhere in Europe besides England.
This is not the final statement, it is just what people created this morning in like 30 minutes, we can probably put it up on the web after this meeting, we cannot incorporate every single concern now.

Temperature check on this as an overall idea, and putting it on the minutes (largely positive)
In the end this is a starting document to help the individual occupier work out how they can tie in with these international days of action.

Just clarifying: We did cut the sentence "austerity measures etc etc", that is being replaced by: We do not accept the cuts as either necessary or inevitable. Also cutting the bit about taking a sicky. 

(temperature checks for popularity of agenda points: Future of Outreach and Tented protest is most favourable)

FUTURE OF TENTED PROTEST AND OUTREACH IN OCCUPY:
Josh: Important to remember few points raised about this yesterday. Recap these points:
One recurring theme for Occupy across the world is that camps are hard to manage when you have to handle a court case or homelessness. How to make more manageable camp sizes, do we have to scale down or protect?
Community outreach is essential in order to fulfill the words that we are the 99%.
What are we doing on the web - direct actions nationwide, growing food and vest, occupying land - guerilla gardening..

In Manchester we have discussed finding ways of getting groups to join in on a collective event, and getting into the habit of joining these events.
One of our supporters started an event and asked us to take part in it, to celebrate global peace day, it wasn't part of Occupy, but a discussion popped up in town in which Occupy had a little tent - we were basically a small circle around, with paper like a plate with "democracy?" on it. Very inexperienced people mostly, we had a quiet discussion, "imagine if you go to bed one night and you woke again, and things had changed for the better, what would it look like?"
Everything was very gentle, nobody needed to raise their voice. People were asked to write something on the plate, and each idea would prompt the next idea from the next person.
At one point it was quite a closed circle, then we had Occupy "shockers" slowly joining the circle. We had the meeting on a crossroad, with 4 discussions on different subjects. 

We could aim to have certain things done in the next 2 weeks or so, for example delegates can go home and make sure there is a facilitation workshop straight away, mic check flash mobs straight away. The immediate future is as important as the distant future.
 Jamie: One of the things that a lot of camps have been spending about 60% of their energy on, is working on just living in the harsh tented environments. The idea of flash camps would be that you take the idea of an occupation and just do it for a day, you tell police that you will just go at like 10 o'clock, and it'll probably be fine.
You can contact local community organizations so they know that the camp will be coming, and can get involved.
It can have the tent city university, teach outs, teach ins, general assemblies, and then we're gone at 10pm!
I don't care about the media anymore! I care about worrying about the 99% who are still going "What is Occupy, what are they standing for?" all they have to do is go to their local square in the morning and there is Occupy, they can take part direction.
We're putting in a huge amount of our time and energy into an operation that we really care about, so to waste 60% of this golddust is crazy!
We have great teams of techies and others working round the clock to make this work and we have the facility to do conferences every month.

We did a J15 thing in central Manchester, we had tents, candle, paper tents that we gave out to people, there were things they could do in their day to day stuff. There was a flash mob mentality that was much more effective in that sense as an event.

I just wanted to say, the thing that's sad about loosing the tents, so we should be careful not to lose this entirely. Flash assemblies and occupations could dilute our efforts considerably.
We can do mic checks in the train stations and the bus stations, to really get the word out there.
Concur that this is a necessary move for us to go out into spaces and do this. We started this discussion by saying we spend a lot of energy maintaining our structures, we should think about limiting things temporarily in terms of time, as well as a physical scale. The point I was making is I understand media isn't everything, but flash happenings are actually quite media friendly. 
We did a flash occupation that gained us a lot of positive press attention and got a lot of good messages out there.
Our wordpress site has included a lot of stuff about eviction. These things really work.

Media is a key way of getting our message across to people. 10s of 1000s of people read these.

Having had quite a reputation for doing stuff for a few years in manchester in marks and spencers, I got a bit brassed off with having to keep repeating arguments. If you do something like a mind-map, big, A0, and just blow it up, it can end up as a whole series of these things. There was a street exhibition, it's so much easier to point to something like this, it frees you up to be able to explore the wider possibilities of the arguments. I ended up with a whole series of these posters, you can get them laminated, it would even be possible to get sponsorship for people who want to get their own laminated posters done.
The point is we can end up with a street exhibition that can be very effective. It's possible to make structures with bamboo canes and gaffer tape. Most councils let people get on with this without issues.

Venus Occupy London: Been doing reclaim love for 9 years. Put on a massive street party. If we constantly look at things that divide us we'll end up dividing ourselves .If we focus on the things that unite us, we can bring free sound systems, food, everything. We do it around valentines as it's a time of commercializing love. 
This project can join directly with all the other Occupy popups around the world. We're putting so much of our love and our passion into this and it would be great for us to come and celebrate that. Police tend to be quite supportive of positive popup events like this.
www.reclaimlove.org
There is also an interactive map, so everyone can put their details about what time they're going to meet, so we can cover that map with events about people celebrating what unites us across the world.

Earthian: I want to emphasize on what Jamie said. We don't want to get people walking by the camps every day saying "get a job, get a life". I don't want to have to put up with this every night for 3 months. 
We can go to local communities, town halls, spaces that have been closed down, etc. We need to have healthy environment to work in. We have to be more practical, we have to get on and find alternatives.

People from UK Uncut are going to be doing a demonstration on this soon and a lot of these themes tie in on that. We will have the opportunity then to go over this in more detail there.

Hannah, part of Seeds for Change: We would like to support the occupy movement, we get the sense that.. we would like to offer more facilitation training, just trying to establish how, but one way is that we can come to different occupy groups around the country, so please get in touch with us. Website seedsforchange.org.uk, look us up on the Internet.
 Since September we saw a large increase in the amount of downloads we get, lots of documents on facilitation and consensus that can be useful.

We have a guide on our wiki where we share practical information about how we do things. If this information could be put into the context of our guide as a handbook that would be very useful, can this be offered? (discussion will happen after meeting)

Back to Jamie's point on burnout: I think the pop-ups in the community are really useful, maybe make it just for the weekends. I think this is a way where a lot of people will be going. "If it's one day, it's not a threat" - well it is a bit of a threat. The fact that we have had encampments is a sign of our determination, a sign of how serious we are. We're proving that people can work together, even if there are a lot of issues that people can deal with.
I'm in a bit of a week position when it comes to talking about bankers pissing on tents, but there are a lot of people at St Paul's and other occupations who are determined to be there and are determined not to go. The people who are feeling that they're burnt out need to publicly stand by those who wish to stick it out to the bitter end. 
We don't want to lose what we've built up by some people feeling built out, stand by the ones who are determined.

Venus: I would also like to say that I am somebody who is prone to burnout, I would like the other way round to be true: If I burnout and go away for a while I want people to respect that and not criticize me for being away.

I have seen a couple of places around the world where camps have broken up, and camps have struggled to continue the commitment and the energy that we see here now. There are a lot of occurrences where protest movements had a lot of strength and energy, but over time that energy did continue to dissipate. By having a centrally located camp, it really helps to solidify things and bring people together. 24/7 there is a camp where that's happening, people can walk past it and glimpse it, they see what's going on.
We are about to get through the hardest part of the year in these tents! Why would we suddenly as the world starts to warm up, give up and say things are getting too hard?

Let's not cut off any part of our movement. It's silly for us to try and amputate limbs - we should have 10 arms and 30 legs, let's not go back to that one arm and hope that arm will work.

In my experience at Occupy London, unions across the world want to work with us, and they see us as a platform for uniting the mass movement. There is big public dissapproval of the cuts, and this is a practical way to start building in the communities.
In Venezuela it was the assembly that brought about the revolution. This is our tool for undermining the government, it is our power.
When people realise they have a voice, that is our power.
The assembly is such a powerful tool, keep adjusting it. If there is a tyranny of the veto, then that needs to be modified. We keep adjusting and improving. Unity is a key thing, talk to all the movements and unions in your area.
Everyone, all resources on one campaign is incredibly effective.

Another thing we're doing in Leeds: Next weekend there's stuff going on around the campaigns in fuel poverty which is really an issue which brings a lot of problems together and a lot of sympathy and public support. A group of people are going to occupy a building and do their winter warmup. The Occupy Leeds group will be outside doing a flashmob micc check, that's something that ties in and people recognize it as a characteristic feature of occupy.

Everything we have here is great, however we do have some issues: Some people are not online, some people want to be part of this conversation and cannot. What is consensus? There are a lot of questions that I do not have an answer to from any occupier. If everyone who is involved in the outcome is not involved then it's not true consensus.
People from outside of the camp need to feel they can also be heard.
I'm still part of the 99%, I still want a voice. Maybe at the next GA we can sit down and try and listen more.

Sam Tech: Occupy has changed my life: it started in St Paul's in October, I have given everything up for Occupy and I am not stopping there. If you want this to stop being a fad and a fashion, occupy your entire life.
I have given up too much and refuse to stop now (Large amount of jazz hands)

Ragnhild: Bear in mind if we do flash mobs and engage with local groups, we need to keep in touch, we need to come back and say to people: What do you need help with in your community? It's not enough to do just one day - we should come back on a regular basis so we become an established part of that communities operations.

Technical point: Security risk of writing physically on paper when people can add their names into a secure encrypted system.

Suggest one guest can come and do a 3 hour workshop on community organizing. 

A list we an use immediately from sam that people can find out about going into a town hall or a bank or an energy showroom and doing a protest against fuel poverty. 

Occupy yourselves, Occupy everywhere, we are together we are bright and we are going to make it because we are growing!!