general assembly

The General Assembly (GA) is the decision-making process for OccupySF, a way to discuss issues and make decisions as a group. The GA is a horizontal, leaderless, consensus-based open meeting.

Attend an Assembly

The OccupySF General Assembly will now be held on Tuesday and Thursday at 6pm and Saturday at 12pm at 101 Market St. On these days formal proposals will be presented and the consensus process will be used to make collective decisions on issues related to the movement and matters pertaining to OccupySF specifically.

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are Working Group Assembly days. We encourage existing and new working groups to meet on these days. Check the OSF calendar and get involved with our working groups.

There will also be community discussion forums on the 1st and 3rd Sunday of each month. This forum will rotate to different neighborhoods throughout the city.

Consensus

Consensus is an inclusive and non-hierarchical process for group decision making, based on the concept of mutual consent. It is a method by which the input and ideas of all participants are gathered and synthesized in order to arrive at a final decision acceptable to all. Through consensus, we are not only working to achieve better solutions, but paving the way for an egalitarian model of community decision making.

General Assembly Meeting Minutes

General Assemblies are recorded and available in various formats (written posts, audio, or video).  We make a best effort to post all the GA Meeting Minutes in a timely fashion on this website.
View and post General Assembly Minutes on our wiki

Dazzle Fingers and Other Hand Signals

We use a series of hand signals during General Assembly to express our level of consensus for proposals.  Hand signals are useful as they give real-time feedback about every participants view and opinion. Here are some of them:

people’s mic and mic check

The People’s Mic is used when amplified sound is not feasible and there are too many people to easily hear the speaker.

The speaker says a few words at a time, then pauses as the people who can hear what she said loudly repeat the phrase so people further from the speaker can hear what was said. For very large crowds, multiple echos might be necessary.

The Assembly or the speaker indicates that they want to use People’s Mic by saying “Mic Check!”

GA roles

• Facilitator: GA can be faciliated by one or more people who are consensed upon at the beginning. The facilitators serve the group by keeping discussion on topic, introducing new agenda items, repeating proposals, helping clarify the GA process, and calling for consensus.
• Time-keeper: Simply put, this person keeps time. If time limits are set, this person makes sure no-one speaking, or agenda items go over that limit.
• Stack-taker: Takes the names of people who have raised their hand in the order raised so the crowd can hear them as they are called to speak.
  
• Note-taker: Records the progress of meetings in short concise notes.

Here is a video from New York about their facilitation process. It contains some specific cultural differences to our process here in SF but has a really great intro to facilitation.

Declaration from Occupy San Francisco General Assembly

This declaration was consensed upon by General Assembly on April 5, 2012.