General Assembly

The General Assembly (GA) is the decision-making process for OccupyPrescott, a way to discuss issues and make decisions as a group. The GA is a horizontal, leaderless, consensus-based open meeting.

Attend an Assembly

The OccupyPrescott General Assembly is held on Saturdays at 1pm in the town square, Courthouse Plaza. On these days formal proposals will be presented and the consensus process will be used to make collective decisions on issues related to the movement and matters pertaining to OccupyPrescott specifically.

Thursday’s are “Spark Meet” days, where proposals and other ideas are discussed in preparation for the Saturday GA. We encourage everyone, especially existing or new working groups, to meet on this prep day in order to facilitate our GA as efficiently as possible . Check the OccupyPrescott calendar and get involved with our working groups.

Consensus

Consensus is an inclusive and non-hierarchical process for group decision making, based on the concept of mutual consent. It is a method by which the input and ideas of all participants are gathered and synthesized in order to arrive at a final decision acceptable to all. Through consensus, we are not only working to achieve better solutions, but paving the way for an egalitarian model of community decision making.
General Assembly Meeting Minutes

General Assemblies are recorded by the required note-taker. We make a best effort to post all the GA Meeting Minutes in a timely fashion on this website.

Dazzle Fingers and Other Hand Signals

We use a series of hand signals during General Assembly to express our level of consensus for proposals. Hand signals are useful as they give real-time feedback about every participants view and opinion. Here are some of them:

People’s mic and mic check

The People’s Mic is used when amplified sound is not feasible and there are too many people to easily hear the speaker.

The speaker says a few words at a time, then pauses as the people who can hear what she said loudly repeat the phrase so people further from the speaker can hear what was said. For very large crowds, multiple echos might be necessary.

The Assembly or the speaker indicates that they want to use People’s Mic by saying “Mic Check!”
GA roles

Facilitator: GA can be facilitated by one or more people who are consensed upon at the beginning. The facilitators serve the group by keeping discussion on topic, introducing new agenda items, repeating proposals, helping clarify the GA process, and calling for consensus.

Stack-taker: Takes the names of people who have raised their hand in the order raised so the crowd can hear them as they are called to speak.

Note-taker: Records the progress of meetings in short concise notes.