wiki:projects/leadership-committee/dec-2008/discussion/us-movements

Version 13 (modified by alfredo, 15 years ago) (diff)

--

Proposal: Outreach and Inreach

Return to agenda

Outreach

Currently, Alfredo and Jamie make a lot of decisions around what meetings, conferences and campaigns to attend and put our resources behind.

Although the leadership committee does not need to be involved in every decision, we should provide a broad framework of the political movements, tendencies, and types of organizations that we should be supporting. This framework should be informed by the direction the left is moving and how we want to influence it?

Membership

We think people join May First/People Link for three reasons (and usually these are all present in a new member):

  • Good services at a reasonable price
  • Really good service (especially tech support)
  • Politically solid people to work with -- and this is more present now than ever before in our new members.

Ground work

  • What ideas or themes do we expect the left to coalesce around in the next year?
  • What sectors (e.g. alternative media, immigrant rights, etc.) are gaining in momentum? What sectors are fading?
  • How do we expect the Obama presidency to affect the left? What positive effects? What effects should be prepared to fight against?

Proposed sectors to focus on

  • Youth
  • Alternative Media
  • Indigenous movements
  • Farmworkers/Migrant workers/Immigrants
  • Techies

Inreach

Project: Membership constituency workshops

Goals:

  • Make membership more conscious of technology capabilities in their work;
  • Make members more conscious of what membership actually means and what this organization is doing and capable of doing;
  • Develop a new and more "democratic" approach to technology development.

Proposal: Dividing our membership into "constituencies" (labor, community-based, arts, etc.), we would bring together these members into workshops during which we would discuss how the current capabilities we have can be better used by them in their "area-specific" work and what other capabilities they feel they need from MF/PL. Flowing from this discussion, we would then work to develop these capabilities.

This would be the first time that MF/PL has actually sought to involve all its members in a unified activity, something which can become very significant in the coming period.