"Occupiers! Stop Using Consensus!"
A very important post (and no doubt soon to be opposed). Read it all, but here's the proposal:
When it comes to deliberative process for larger groups that can’t be considered teams, start off with what's been known to work and has stood the test of time, like Robert's Rules of Order. It’s not the ideal system to prevent all forms of hierarchy, but it’s at least been proven to work in organizing democratic assemblies that are capable of functioning. Why must we reinvent the wheel? The only clear explanation is that it’s fun to fetishize process rather than accomplishing work. There are actually people who've devoted much of their careers as activists to unnecessarily reinventing process, and for years they've been using entire activist communities as guinea pigs in their experiments. Why must we allow ourselves to be pawns in someone else's game? Our goal should be fighting power and injustice, and we should settle for no less than the best tools for the job.
Yep. The Archdruid posted the same idea a while back. I commented:
So, the social context for Roberts Rules is America's westward expansion (slaughtering as we went, I grant): That's how we ended up with a requirement for a lot of new organizations, all over the country, to adopt rules, and to adopt consistent rules, because geographical and social mobility meant that meetings would find it harder than they otherwise might to get themselves bootstrapped. Notice that Occupy faced an equivalent organization problems: A sudden or at least new requirement to organize meetings on a continental scale, in a context of geographical and social mobility. The 1860s solution was to write and distribute an operating manual or rule book. (This was the solution for AA in the 1930s as well.) The Occupy solution to bootstrapping, so far as I can tell -- readers with more experience please correct! -- was to rely on volunteers with practical knowledge to initiate the bootstrapping process; sometimes these volunteers were enthusiastic newbies; at other times, they came from other Occupations, in a form of apostolic succession. (I'm guessing that when the history of Occupy is written, Occupiers traveling between cities, by bus, bike, or on foot, will seem more important than they do today. [Adding: See this "Eulogy for Occupy"] The problem with Occupy's approach is two-fold: (1) It relies on the personal authority of whoever bootstrapped the meeting, and for myself, I'd rather have a rule book to refer to;** and (2) it doesn't, based on outcomes, scale continentally. As a result, Occupy seemed like a canopy fire that, paradoxically, never reached the ground and burned out prematurely.
It's also worth noting that knowing how to run a meeting is one of those skills that's going to atrophy -- along with spelling and making machine tools -- if we don't exercise it.