Take the recent Occupy the Board of Education action. There was a public process of deliberation leading to it. Parents, activists, etc. organized the protest ahead of time. They communicated, met, discussed, etc. Then they went and carried out the protest. These venues, this process, etc. is what you would call the "General Assembly" of the protest.
Julio
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I watched several short videos of this action. It was unsuccessful in the sense of getting this board to change its vote. But it was reported that the number of schools closed dropped from 25 to 23. It would be helpful to know the details of what schools and why they were taken off the list.
Thinking outloud...
On the other hand. It was one event in what should become a chain of events where the word occupy seems to hint at the next event, which would be somekind of take over of a closed school. Take back the schools.
The education system is so tightly controlled and there is so much at risk for kids, that I wonder how such an attempt could be designed. Much older kids, first of all.
Maybe, a Revolution Summer Program, where credits and grades don't matter, and there is much less risk for kids' future. A reading and writing summer, which a lot of kids need anyway...only a fun one with trips around the city to support an urban geography unit, which turns into the content of the reading and writing and discussion. Certainly another unit on NCLB and why nobody likes it, and its designed to be bad, and fail, creating a vicious downward spiral, etc.
Staging this? The most obvious way, is not to leave, something like the opposite of a strike.
The counterforce maybe too easy: lock the gates, shut off the electricity and water... Declare the school is unsafe, violations of fire department regulations, police serve arrest warrants for health and safety violations, etc.
I just remembered I know something about the above kind of occupation, in the remote passed. It was the occupation of the old SF Federal building by disability rights groups. It was a stand-off (wheel-in) in 1978 with Carter's secretary of HEW, Joseph Califano didn't sign 504 regs into law, so none of the provisions could take effect.
Here is an excerpt:
``The San Francisco federal building sit in, the only one that endured, lasted 28 days and was critical in forcing the signing of the regulations almost unchanged. It began with a rally outside the federal building, then we marched inside where between 1 and 200 people would remain until the end. The composition of the sit in represented the spectrum of the disability community with participation from people with a wide variety of disabilities, from different racial, social and economic backgrounds, and ages from adults to kids with disabilities and their parents.
We all felt that we were acting on behalf of hundreds of thousands of people who were not able to participate, people all over the country who were institutionalized or stuck in other dependency situations.
In the Bay Area, a broad cross disability coalition, the Emergency 504 Coalition, began building for a rally on April 5th, knowing we'd sit in afterwards. We set up committees to take on different tasks such as rally speakers, media, fund-raising, medics, monitors, publicity, and outreach.
The outreach committee was very successful in garnering broad community support: from churches, unions, civil rights organizations, gay groups, elected politicians, radical parties and others.
The work of that committee proved to be invaluable once we were inside the building. Those organizations built support rallies outside the building and the breath of the support made it more difficult to move against us. The International Association of Machinists facilitated our sending a delegation to Washington. Politicians sent mattresses and a shower hose to attach to the sink.
Glide Memorial Church and the Black Panther party sent many delicious meals that nourished us between days of coffee and doughnuts.
The other committees also continued inside the building. The media committee met regularly to review the coverage and discuss how to make our purpose more clear, how to use the press to get particular issues across. It directed reporters to appropriate spokespeople, called news conferences and so on.
The committees had a great deal of work to do and kept many people involved. This was good, because the conditions were physically grueling, sleeping sometimes three or four hours a night on the floor and everyone was under stress about their families, jobs, our health, the fact that we were all filthy and so on.
All the participants met daily to make tactical decisions. These were flowing, creative meetings but they often went on for hours, which meant very little sleep. But they were important in developing consensus and arriving at a course of action.''
http://www.dredf.org/504site/histover.html
Nevermind the liberal politics and just think about the process and concrete conditions. It should all sound very familiar. Over in Berkeley (I was working at UCB), my contributions was all technical-mechanical. We organized some of the simple communication systems by buying a bunch of cheap toy walkie-talkies that had enough range between the people inside the building and supporters outside. These days that taken care of through much better telcom technology...
It has to be said that the very vulnerability of the disabled who carried out the sit-in, posed a serious political problem for the cops...and their tactics. Storming the building was off the table...So they resorted to locking people in, controlling access. Food and water was allowed in the lobby...
Some Saturday morning thoughs.
CG