New Site Looks To The Future of Occupy

Across the country, demonstrators with the Occupy movement are confronting freezing temperatures and burnout, with a number of local encampments packing up their tents and many more depopulated by the cold weather. In Iowa, organizers are wondering how they are going to maintain momentum following the end of the caucus season, where the response from presidential candidates “ranged from stonewalling to disdain.”

Collective group The Future of Occupy intends to confront those big-picture questions by publishing analysis and planning documents related to the future of the movement.

But the idea isn't to provide leadership, according to organizers. Rather, they hope to serve the movement by providing a curated platform for conversations about what Occupy stands for and where it is headed.

“We feel like there is so much good thinking, group process going on,” said Future of Occupy contributing editor Mary Beth Steisslinger. “We're pretty confident that new directions, models, and even institutions will come out of this process.”

The Occupy movement is an umbrella term for protest movements that are related to or grew out of Occupy Wall Street.

The Future of Occupy grew out of the School of Commoning, a community interest company based in the United Kingdom that promotes the communal use of shared resources. The notion of an academic and social commons is central to The Future of Occupy, which publishes all documents under the Creative Commons license.

By curating documents judged to have “broader scope and relevance” to the Occupy movement in a central location, organizers said they hope to help define the purpose and long-term relevance of the occupations and related events, a process they call “movement sense-making.”

“What we're hoping to do is get a sense of what is really driving the process, inspiring the process, helping to culminate things and come to a consensus,” Steisslinger said. “The challenge here is that we don't want to continue with the same old ways of doing things.”

The first issue of the group's newsletter, released this week, focuses on the role of the nightly meetings organizers call “general assemblies” in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The theme is significant, according to Steisslinger, because of the pivotal role of the assemblies in the democratic ideal of the Occupy movement.

“The general assembly is really the heart of the potential of change around the world,” Steisslinger said. “This is where people can create the deliberative democracy that they need.”

The Future of Occupy is recruiting volunteers to edit, maintain, and contribute to the project.

Jon Christian is a staff writer with Campus Progress. Follow him on Twitter @Jon_Christian.

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