After months of being promised, the online component for the July 4 Occupy National Gathering Visioning Process is now available.

We cannot let democracy be decided by only those with the luxury to travel to Philadelphia for the National Gathering. The Occupy Philly Visioning Working group, in conjunction with Open Assembly and InterOccupy, has developed an online component to allow anyone with access to a computer to take part in the visioning process. The online platform features chat, voice over internet protocol (VOIP), proposals with collaborative document editing, and real-time straw-polling. The online model follows closely to the visioning process that has been developed for July 4th in Philadelphia. The documents produced in Philadelphia and online can then be synthesized together to create a single document.

The process is simple. When you register and then login you will be presented with the option of joining the National Gathering Visioning Process. You can then choose to join a group formed around the values produced on the Occupy National Gathering brainstorming board. Then you can either create your own personal vision that others can support or collaboratively edit documents together. Real-time communication will be made possible using the InterOccupy VOIP servers and embedded chat function. As the process goes on, participants will decide which visions for the future rise to the top.

In the spirit of the egalitarian Occupy movement we cannot simply restrict the democratic process to those able to attend the National Gathering in person. This online component is therefore imperative to allow the greatest amount of access possible to the visioning process.  This experiment in direct democracy will help move Occupy forward into a new era of interaction and collaborative decision making.

Check out OccupyNationalGathering.com and OpenAssembly.org for more information.

http://occupynationalgathering.com/

http://openassembly.org

Ethan Genauer

Occupy Santa Fe

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