The kids at Zucotti Park are modeling new forms of collaboration and consensus building.

by Douglas Rushkoff | December 07, 2011 | (2)

THE STREETS MAY SEEM AN UNLIKELY PLACE TO LOOK FOR HIGH-LEVEL STRATEGIES AND INNOVATIONS, BUT THE MEETING INDUSTRY MIGHT ACTUALLY BE ABLE TO LEARN SOME LESSONS FROM WHAT IS TURNING INTO THE ULTIMATE REAL-TIME MEETING—OCCUPY WALL STREET.

After all, how many meeting planners do you know who have hosted and fed hundreds of people, outdoors, for free—and seen their meetings reproduced and scaled in hundreds of cities throughout the world? 

Put politics aside for a moment, look past the bongo drums and dyed hair, focus on the ways in which the Occupiers are conducting their business and you’ll find some extraordinary innovations in how people gather, set agendas, communicate and achieve results.

Start with the basics: site selection. In New York, the Occupy Wall Street movement realized that police could easily evict them from a public park, and property owners could easily expel them from private property. So, they chose a quasi-public, privately owned park with blurry jurisdiction. This gave them enough time to set up camp and become entrenched.

The lesson? Consider locations where they don’t see you coming. Some folks look at event organizers as if they’re wearing signs that read, “Rip me off.” Approach non-traditional venues—particularly ones likely to be aligned with your values—and receive unexpectedly warm receptions. (I got about 70 percent off rate card for my last event by approaching a venue whose owner was a fan of my books.) And don’t drag your entire group into a public space where you have no control. I’ve seen entire afternoons lost to “spontaneous” adventures in the city, as disoriented participants wander aimlessly or end up accidentally standing in line for a movie.

Occupy Wall Street enjoys free Wi-Fi, courtesy of the Free Network Foundation’s “freedom tower.” It sets up in a couple of minutes and creates an instant, robust Wi-Fi hotspot. While the FNF’s goal is to provide inexpensive, secure and uncensored wireless access to communities, the technology is a terrific alternative to high-priced and poorly functioning Wi-Fi. It frees up sponsor money for something else.

The kids at Zucotti Park are also modeling new forms of collaboration and consensus building. If you haven’t seen any video of the General Assembly in action, take a look here: http://bit.ly/qoBNrA (or search General Assembly on YouTube). Instead of engaging through panels or debates, Occupiers take a cue from the ancient Greeks. The objective is not to win arguments, but to reach consensus. So, instead of debating, they create a “stack” of ideas and objections by watching for hand signals from the entire crowd. Everyone gets to speak.

The conversations themselves are all directed toward action, concrete steps to move forward. The news media is looking for a list of “demands” the same way a conference organizer might hope to emerge with a “mission statement” or “declaration of...” something. But how many such declarations have you seen actually “achieved” during conferences, and just how effective were they at inciting anything to happen in the real world?

The Occupy movement works like an open space un-conference, where ideas are hammered into actionable steps. Occupiers have a campaign encouraging people to transfer money from corporate banks to credit unions. Another operation is developing alternative currencies. (There is already a fledgling currency in use at Occupy Wall Street.)

So the “conference” is less about hearing opinions or making statements, it’s about agreeing on projects, working together in person, achieving actionable results and then recording what happened well enough so that these techniques can be modeled by hundreds of other similar gatherings around the world.

Yes, all this and more is going on at an occupation site near you. Maybe it’s worth walking over with your notepaper and trying out some of the Occupiers ideas at your next event. Of course, that might just make you an occupier yourself. One+

Douglas Rushkoff

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF speaks and writes about communication, values, culture and organizations. His latest book is "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age." He can be contacted via www.rushkoff.com.

TAGS: future of meetings , Occupy Wall Street , column , collaboration , One+ December 2011