[Imc-africa] preliminary thoughts about the imc-africa convergence (2)

[C.T. Lawrence Butler]

On Sunday, February 4, 2007, at 09:35  AM, terna gyuse wrote:

> our horizontal structure consultant, CT, initially responded to the 
> crisis by taking a permanent facilitation role. frustrating for 
> everyone involved, and subsequently relinquished.

Thanks and praise to Terna for this frank and direct assessment of the 
recent convergence in Kenya. I could not agree more with what he has 
written. In fact, from my perspective, it was even worse.

While it is true there was a period of days when I was the "permanent 
facilitator", it was not my "initial" response to the crisis. By the 
time you arrived at the convergence, Terna, I had already completely 
given up on my role as "horizontal structure consultant". While it is 
true I was asked to participate because of my experience with 
consensus, I realized within the first five days of my being there that 
there was no basis or foundation on which to build a cooperative, 
egalitarian, consensus-based collective for the convergence.

The original "vision" (as I remember it) was for the first week (Jan 
8-13) to be organizing days, the second week (Jan 14-19) were days of 
workshops for IMC at the house in Karen, the third week (Jan 20-25) was 
the World Social Forum and the final few days (Jan 26-28) were clean-up 
and evaluation days. I arrived on Jan 9. Valentine had proposed a daily 
schedule that included a morning and evening plenary/decision making 
meeting. It was very difficult to bring this into actual practice. 
During the first week, key players (those with the most information) 
were frequently absent during the evening plenary making 
decision-making completely impractical. It was a struggle just to have 
one meeting each evening.

I tried "rotating" the facilitation; I tried scheduling a facilitator 
training; I tried making facilitation a "working group". None of these 
things happened. No one step forward. Generally, the "working groups" 
as a whole did not begin functioning until the second week and even 
then, rarely as a "group". The facilitation group never met once (or 
more accurately, no one else besides me (and Sulaiman, once) showed up 
at facilitation working group whenever we broke up into working groups).

Even working groups provide a good example of how bad it gets. The idea 
was to have the basic things that need to get done be assigned to 
working groups and everyone would be on at least one working group. We 
originally had six: 1) finance, 2) food, 3) house logistics and 
transportation, 4) technical resources, 5) scheduling and 6) 
facilitation. Although we created the working groups on the second or 
third day, they had not yet met by the end of the first week so we 
starting using the morning plenary as a time to break into working 
groups. This worked to a degree. Some work got done, collectively. Most 
everything that happened, however, happened because of someone's 
"heroic" effort (including mine) and not because of some collective 
awareness and consensus decision-making.

More . . .

C.T. Butler
"There is nothing more unequal than
the equal treatment of unequals."