Occupy Canada Consesus Of Consensi.

 

 

First, the results: 

 

1.Major reform of the economic system towards a system of universal equality and cooperation and away from competetiveness and individual accumulation of wealth and status. 

2.Major, universal action to prevent further damage to the earth's natural systems and repair as much of the damage done as possible. 

3. While definitions of discrimination, particularily racism and gender discrimination vary between and within camps, and no definition was consistent, all Occupy camps in Canada had statements and/or internal policies opposing discimination, particularily based on race, gender, sexual preference, and disability. 

4.Almost all Occupy camps in Canada began meetings with an acknowledgement that we are on stolen land, and had demands regarding accountability for institutional crimes against First Nations. 

   5. Opposition to Stephen Harper's Conservative government, and demands for repeal for specific legislation from Harper, was nearly universal. Many remaining Occupy groups work under the 'Stop Harper' banner in their public work. 

 

A careful study of every available Consusus statement from Occupy camps across Canada, looking specifically for what the statements have in common, and what specific demands had the largest approval rating among a majority or near totality of people involved in the Occupy movement with the intent of establishing a common consensus to 

base future submissions on behalf of the Occupy movement to various international bodies and continue working for the causes that brought all of us together in the first place. 

We also examined the 'meme consensus',ie, political posts, image propaganda, etc. of Occupy supporters leading up to, during, and shortly after the formation, engagement and shut down of the camps. 

 

This kind of analysis has been essential for the 'continuing Occupiers', that is, volunteers who have continued to do whatever they can to get the reforms demanded by the Occupy movement implemented at the international level. 

A decision was agreed on by most of the remaining Occupiers in late 2012 that we would suspend public actions and statements under the Occupy name or drawing publicity to what we were doing until we had made a significant progress towards

achieving those goals. 

 

People from Occupy Canada have been involved in many ongoing international Occupy-originated projects. 

 The article was focused on Canada, but in the US some major breakthroughs continue to be made. One is Occupy The Securities Exchange Commission, who have managed to influence the reform process through constant lobbying since they started in 2011. 

 

Another is the Occupy Rolling Jubillee, which raised money to buy debtloads at 'wholesale' prices, the prices that debt collectors pay to the companies, often as low as 5% of the debt itself. In the process, Occupy has paid around 15 million in debt with just under 7 hundred thousand.

 

The Consensus Of Consensi project began when the Occupy-United Nations Liason group was formed in the fall of 2012 and needed a policy base to work from that would give voice to the positions Occupiers had agreed on. 

Our work within the United Nations, and the global social impact of the Occupy movement through our various actions, especially the camps, can be seen reflected in reports coming out of the United Nations MDG 2015 Global Open Consultations, a major change from the corporate 'vs' state bureaucrat dominated process of the late 1980s, early 1990s that culminated in the Rio Summit 1992, birthplace of the infamous 'Agenda 21'. 

 

 The spirit of October 2011 can be seen in the general direction the consultations are taking as a whole.

 

 Just the quote on the back of the recently released http://www.worldwewant2015.org/node/382890 Report Of The Thematic Consultation On Environmental Sustainability sounds like an Occupy statement: 'In the world we want, poverty has been eradicated and nature thrives; every woman, man, boy and girl, now and in the future can equally fulfil their rights and have sustainable, reslient, livelihoods that operate within planetary boundaries.'.  The report reflects this, and is one of the core documents given to world leaders and other delegates at the recent UN General Assembly. 

 

Other data were analyzed included media statements by various organizations supporting or opposed to Occupy, as well as various social research studies regarding Occupy as a social or political phenomena. 

 

We'll begin with what some studies of the social media data collected on the Occupy movement as a whole has shown. 

We already knew each other. We were already connected. 

 

Occupy was closely watched by those in power and by people who analyze social dynamics for the benefit of those in power. 

 

So it's no surprise to see high level social science research regarding social networking trends involving Occupy. These studies make for interesting reading, especially if you're thinking towards the future and the next movement and how to avoid the mistakes and divisions that prevented us from keeping the focus on common cause during Occupy. 

 

One interesting thing is that we were mostly connected prior to Occupy. Many Occupiers didn't personally know all the people at their local camp at the beginning,  but knew someone who did know them previously, at least enough to be on the same person's Twitter feed, as one of the studies confirms something many observers noted while it was happening. 

 

Assuming similar research is being done relating to Idle No More, what can be learned from the analysis of Occupy that might help INM maintain it's presence longer and possibly narrow it's positions to the main central environmental issues that it centered around to beging with, which will allow it to expand itself into the full mass movement based on common ground that we need. 

 

The Digital Evolution Of Occupy Wall Street , from Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, Analyzes Twitter feeds starting a few months before the first action on September 17, 2011 in New York and continues for 15 months after that, showing the fast rise and slow descend of Occupy as a commonly tweeted word (the movement is still very much alive) from beginning to near end. 

It can be found at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667169/

 

From the abstract to the study: 

 

We examine the temporal evolution of digital communication activity relating to the American anti-capitalist movement Occupy Wall Street. Using a high-volume sample from the microblogging site Twitter, we investigate changes in Occupy participant engagement, interests, and social connectivity over a fifteen month period starting three months prior to the movement's first protest action. The results of this analysis indicate that, on Twitter, the Occupy movement tended to elicit participation from a set of highly interconnected users with pre-existing interests in domestic politics and foreign social movements. These users, while highly vocal in the months immediately following the birth of the movement, appear to have lost interest in Occupy related communication over the remainder of the study period.

 

Another study that utilized data related to Occupy from the same institution is The Geo-Spatial Charactaristics Of A Social Movement Communication Network . 

 

It can be found at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23483885

 

This study is another analysis of social networking posts with a different question in mind. I see a bias, or at least a piece of misinformation, in the abstract when they refer to Occupy as an 'anti-capitalist' movement when it was distinctly not anti-capitalist in the beginning. From the abstract: 

 

Social movements rely in large measure on networked communication technologies to organize and disseminate information relating to the movements' objectives. In this work we seek to understand how the goals and needs of a protest movement are reflected in the geographic patterns of its communication network, and how these patterns differ from those of stable political communication. To this end, we examine an online communication network reconstructed from over 600,000 tweets from a thirty-six week period covering the birth and maturation of the American anticapitalist movement, Occupy Wall Street. We find that, compared to a network of stable domestic political communication, the Occupy Wall Street network exhibits higher levels of locality and a hub and spoke structure, in which the majority of non-local attention is allocated to high-profile locations such as New York, California, and Washington D.C. Moreover, we observe that information flows across state boundaries are more likely to contain framing language and references to the media, while communication among individuals in the same state is more likely to reference protest action and specific places and times. Tying these results to social movement theory, we propose that these features reflect the movement's efforts to mobilize resources at the local level and to develop narrative frames that reinforce collective purpose at the national level. 

 

The Deptartment of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong did a similar study called Discussing occupy wall street on Twitter: longitudinal network analysis of equality, emotion, and stability of public discussion. on centered on Twitter communications involving the Occupy movement, this time looking at posts to get a sense of the emotional state of the person commicating. 

The study can be found at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23656222

 

"To evaluate the quality of public discussion about social movements on Twitter and to understand the structural features and evolution of longitudinal discussion networks, we analyze tweets about the Occupy Wall Street movement posted over the course of 16 days by investigating the relationship between inequality, emotion, and the stability of online discussion. The results reveal that (1) the discussion is highly unequal for both initiating discussions and receiving conversations; (2) the stability of the discussion is much higher for receivers than for initiators; (3) the inequality of online discussions moderates the stability of online discussions; and (4) on an individual level, there is no significant relationship between emotion and political discussion. The implications help evaluate the quality of public discussion, and to understand the relationship between online discussion and social movements."