Since I returned from North America I’ve been doing a stint in the newly created role of WSM Internal Secretary. This weekend I get to step down from this role and pass it on to someone else. As the WSM has grown we’ve found it increasingly difficult to have good internal co-ordination but at the same time its been increasingly important that we do. Our first step a few years back was the activation of a monthly Delegate Council meeting where delegates from each branch would meet face to face for mandated decision making. Getting this working was difficult at first, in a part because it was a new process but also because at first we had too many limitations on the sort of decisions that could be made and a cumbersome ratification process.
Since I returned from North America I’ve been doing a stint in the newly created role of WSM Internal Secretary. This weekend I get to step down from this role and pass it on to someone else. As the WSM has grown we’ve found it increasingly difficult to have good internal co-ordination but at the same time its been increasingly important that we do. Our first step a few years back was the activation of a monthly Delegate Council meeting where delegates from each branch would meet face to face for mandated decision making. Getting this working was difficult at first, in a part because it was a new process but also because at first we had too many limitations on the sort of decisions that could be made and a cumbersome ratification process.
This has been slimmed down and we got used to it so it works pretty well now, for the details see http://www.wsm.ie/story/32 For a good while the organisation of Delegate Council was the work of the National Secretary who was also responsible for national external communication. This proved a little too much work for a volunteer position so the Internal Secretary role was created to co-ordinate DC and carry out other needed internal tracking and documentation processing. The title has a slightly sinister ring to it, the actual work is mundane (you copy and paste a lot) and time consuming (you get to travel to DC every month and chair the meeting).
Our most most important decision making body is National Conference which happens twice a year. All the members can submit motions and amendments, quiz officers on their reports and speak and vote on the motions. Conference generates and ammendments written position papers which define collective policy and present it in a way that new members and non-members can consult, you’ll find a collection of these at http://www.wsm.ie/documents/452
I tend to put in a lot of motions over the years but this conference I was so busy with the orgaznisation side that I didn’t get around to any except one that laid out some 10 year goals for the organisation. This was passed and is below
4.23 10 year goals
i.a The WSM sets itself the following 10 year goals to be completed by the end of 2018.
Establish 80 branches of the WSM with at least one in every town.
Have a website that recieves 500,000 unique visitors per week. Have weekly newspapers with a circulation of 100,000. Help establish libertarian networks in every industry Help establish libertarian neighboorhood centres in every city with multiple such centres in Dublin, Cork and Belfast and to encourage a networking of such centres.
i.b By ‘libertarian networks’ in industry we understand a network of workers in an industry that share a general libertarian politics and which will seek to
– Encourage the spread of organising skills among libertarians in the workplace
– Argue for democratic reforms and militancy in any unions that exist in that sector
– Produce a newsletter, website or both that reports on struggles, settlements and builds links
– Hold periodic conferences on issues within their sector Such networks should be involved in broader rank and file movements where the conditions exist to build them
i.c By establish libertarian neighboorhood centres we understand physical (ideally ‘shop front’) locations that have a distinct libertarian ethos. They should
– Not be dependent on state funding
– Based around a written libertarian statement of principles
– Able to provide education, organising skills and advice to the communities in the neighboorhood where they are based
– Produce a local newsletter
– Work in broad local campaigns
i.d As the number of WSM branches increase in a city each branch should increasingly be based around a particular groups of neighboorhoods or a workplace.
ii.a We recognise these goals are extremly ambitious and a significant new departure in the ambition of the WSM. Setting the goals is that start of a process in which we will need to educate ourelves, research experiences elsewhere, formulate collective plans and experiment with implemention. This process will involve a considerable input of time and money by the organization as a whole.
ii.b It is probable that the first experiments will take place in the areas where we have the greatest concentration of members, in terms of neightboorhood in western Dublin 7 and in terms of industry in education. 2010
ii.c A 10 year goal will be filled in multiple shorter steps. As an initial goal we would expect
– To see the first publicationse of a libertarian industry network by the sping of 2009
– The first libertarian neighboor centre come into existence by the end of
– A monthly paper by the end of 2010
Actually I also submitted a house keeping motion mandating the incoming Internal Sec. to locate and eliminate duplication within and across position papers. Once disadvantage of our very open method of policy generation is that members don’t always carefully check to see if a policy already exists before they submit a motion so you can find policy on more or less the same thing in two or more places and they don’t always match 100%!
Conference went well in particular considering there were over 57 distinct things to be voted on and we suspended standing orders twice (normally this gets very messy). Unlike a lot of Political Parties who stage manage conferences for TV ours are argumentative affairs although over the years we’ve developed an excellent but simple set of standing orders that mean we pretty much avoid fights over procedures now. There is nothing more frustrating that a discussion about how to have a discussion, I reckon repeated exposure to these burns out a lot of anarchists. There is now a public report from our new National Secretary on the conference online at http://www.wsm.ie/story/4699