What follows is my original post on the GA. The only addition I'll briefly add is that the criticism of the facilitation for the GA was not intended as a critique of the facilitators themselves. I think that problem of process and facilitation is bigger than the issue of the individual facilitators. I welcome continued exchange.

Here's the original notes:

I wanted to type up my impressions on the GA8 meeting to keep the conversation going about what we need to do next. Also, after a year and some change, I'd like to reiterate a few reasons that I think Nymaa is not working and suggest positive changes.

I think most of us felt frustrated at the end of the GA8--with perhaps a tinge of camaraderie--in that "we made it through the marathon." This was best summed up by the person who said we were in "agenda purgatory." The GA has become a live listserv where we catch up, do simple reportbacks, and announce upcoming events. In addition, a lot of time is spent on long drawn out contortions about consensus and/or the structure document. Meetings are long, unproductive and scare too many people away.

Someone else smartly pointed out the enduring confusion about whether or not NYMAA is an organization or a network. I thought that Nymaa was formed by people in search of a new radical organization that spoke to their anarchist visions. In forming, we talked about a structure that essentially funneled everyone into working groups and locals, where the work would actually get done; the GA itself would be a place to coordinate and strategize. These comments are meant in the spirit of returning to that vision and finally enacting it. I'm sure not everyone will agree, but you can respond with a tap of button, so let's get started:

1) We should meet more often but for a shorter time.
The very length of the meeting scares people away and prohibits meaningful work. More importantly, social movements come out of social relationships, not out of the acceptance of a political line. Monthly hour-long meetings with extra time at the end for informal break-off conversations would allow more people to attend and get to know each other. (There could still be time for maybe an annual or bi-annual cultural event/long meeting.)

2) The form should serve the content.
While I am a true believer in consensus, things sometimes need to be a little messy. A recurring problem with Nymaa has been weak facilitation in which we've confused facilitation with keeping stack, mob management, and ensuring everyone's chance to speak. Good faciliation takes the above into account while navigating a large group to a positive democratic decision that advances our goals and solves an issue. The structure document should never be the source of a single person's block, especially if everyone else is ready to vote yes. We profess to advance radical political struggle, but we only reference the radical activism while we focus on the mechanics of process. This is absurd and has to be reversed.

3) We are only as radical as our praxis.
At various points, I thought that I heard people suggest the following: offer childcare to groups we approve of politically (and have that be our activism); reach out to groups we approve of and ask how we help them (other than childcare, I guess); or show up at various events and give our support (or infiltrate from the inside, someone suggested). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I heard these suggestions offered not as components of comprehensive strategies to advance a particular goal, but as the total strategy we should be pushing.
We are not missionaries and we're not here to crash everyone else's party. We have to do our own work, develop it, own it and reconfigure it when it isn't going well. Only through this can we build alliances and coalitions with other formations on shared terrain.

The sixty four thousand dollar question is how do we conceptualize radical activism that makes
a difference. To me, this means more campaign work (which is still sorely missing from the Nymaa vocab) and fewer isolated actions. We had a great example in what the RHA is doing: they picked an issue (the queer community's relationship to the state), identified targets, ran their shit, and succeeded in meeting early benchmarks. Unfortunately, this is the exception and not the rule. Not to belabor the point, ha ha, but this becomes interesting when people talk about doing more labor stuff. I would be interested to hear what people are envisioning as the radical role in labor, inside and outside the IWW strategies. Overall, we need campaigns. The three fracture points in the city are labor, land, and the war--all good places to start.

4) Telling people what anarchism is, or only working with anarchists, makes no sense if we want to make anarchism a reality. It is symptomatic of a subculture when people are so quick to enforce delineation. Maybe it's just not my style.

So, to sum up...
We need more frequent, but shorter meetings, with stronger facilitation and less emphasis on structure document. The meetings will focus our vision and allow us to get some real work done, which is, after all, what we're about. And once we start getting shit done, there will be less of a need to define ourselves through alignments and strict nomenclatures.

None of us have sinister motives and Nymaa's potential is not yet squandered. I know that this is difficult work and I hope that this criticism is taken in the spirit that it was given: constructively, so we can become the beast that will take down the masters.

love
Sam

p.s. the note in number 3 about childcare is not intended at all as a criticism of the childcare collective. I think that work is great, but I think that it would be dangerous to make the bulk of our coalition work.