>From: "Snehal Shingavi" <snehal100 at hotmail.com>
>Reply-To: studentsnowar at yahoogroups.com
>Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 16:12:00 -0800
>To: <studentsnowar at yahoogroups.com>
>Subject: [studentsnowar] In defense of the West Coast Conference
<snip>
>Now, were there some short-comings? Sure. We (CSAW) only scheduled one day
>(Sunday) for decision making; we learned that we need to give this more
>time. Any suggestions about how to do this in a two day conference are
>welcome. With over 180 delegates, it is not possible to have everyone speak
>to every question they would like to speak to (for instance, if every
>delegate simply spoke once for two minutes that would be 6 hours!).
>Necessarily, some people didn't get to speak as much as they wanted to, and
>some people spoke too much. We could have better explained the voting
>procedures that were agreed on at the preliminary CSAW conference of 20
>schools on September 29th, that would have helped clarify the process. Also,
>after the meeting on Saturday night, when reps from every campus met to
>discuss the agenda, it was clear that there were way too many proposals to
>deal with in one day. We didn't come up with a good solution, so many good
>ideas got tabled.
I couldn't attend the conference, as leftists in Columbus, OH had our own conference on the same weekend. I'm glad, however, that CSAW didn't spend 6 hours just debating whether to go by the majority vote or consensus decision-making and other "process" questions. If it had, even more good ideas would have had to be tabled, and even more people would be complaining now. Under the circumstances, it appears that CSAW organizers did a good job. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Anti-War Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Anti-War Organizing in Columbus Covered by the Media: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/media.html>