Published Date 2/18/15 11:39 PM
DRAFT
In the last few posts I have looked at a failed organising strategy realmedia gathering, outlined a positive way out of this failer, the focused unconfrunce. But for wider understanding I think the content so far is lacking some background, lets look at an old post http://hamishcampbell.com/en/home/-/blogs/the-21st-centery here I outline how we ACTURLY organise alternatives rather than how we pretend/think/do, this is important for a good outcome.
Grassroots as it’s very nature is small, we grow from this smallness like grass, savannah and wide plans, we have loots of entwined grass’s making up the whole. From this distributed and federated ecosystem we compete with the monolithic traditional corporate media.
The link above highlights the ways we organise, only 3 have rarely good outcomes:
Open affinity group
Opaque affinity group
Invisible affinity group
The top is the best, the bottom for its limitations still works, the top is the hardiest to hold in place, the middle the longest lived, the bottom the easy fast/transitory root to social change.
With this understanding in mind, how are the all important affinity groups formed?
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination http://www.labofii.net/ spend most of their time forming such groups
Good squats form them, most successful direct action grows them like weeds.
The can come from workshops like LOII which lead to direct action, or from repeated direct actions. They can come from long term working relationships, affinity springs from people interacting around and in places of action, try to do something together and you will know who you have affinity with.
How would we use this knowledge to kick start the (re)growth of alt-media?
* We don’t organises speaker events with top down platform speakers – this is deadening.
* We don’t organise passive workshops were knowledge is thought one to many.
You seed events, with questions and processes then grow DIY
What we do do is get people to do practical things together were ever possible, most useful outcome happen from chopping vegetables in the kitchen than at a big hall event.
We have go rounds at the beginning, middle and end of every workshop were feasible. This is to bring confidence, but most impotently to allow each other to hear each’s voice/sense and sensibility repeatedly over the weekend.
The practical workshops are were the afererty is formed into connections then networks.
Cross fertilisation is needed for grassroots growth this like pixie dust can be liberally sprinkled by thouse who have an art (hart) for it over the weekend.
The weekend will plant seeds, some will grow some will fall on fallow ground, the ones that sprout should be watered with publiserty, conections and funding.
The event should be rinesed and repeted in different areas/diffrent groupings and lifestyes etc.
The whole organic network is then held together by a the 4 open on the web. Do not fall into the trap of failbook at this point.
This is the first time I have seen tredtional media talking about this http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/01/26/why-do-managers-hate-agile/