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Hi, I noticed a bunch of Incubator (Summer 2015) group members here don’t have peer-visible profiles, which makes “getting to know you” kind of difficult, so I thought I’d start this thread for that purpose. I’m maymay, an Information Technology professional turned hardcore anti-capitalist after consulting for C-level execs at Fortune 100 banks for a little while. Everything about that world is shit and misery and I want it burned down ASAP. Feel free to ask me about it, but don’t push me on my ideological position; I’m not interested in having debates about the merits of money or capitalism, I’m only interested in discussions about how to destroy and obsolete them. To that end, I’ve been writing as much software as I can to undercut other people who sell programs that should be free, and then I give that software away for free. An example of that is the popular Inline Google Spreadsheet Viewer plugin for sites that use WordPress. I also conceive and collaborate on projects that make use of free software for cultural and social impacts, a practice my collaborators and I have come to call “direct action software development.” We recently gave a short 10 minute talk on the topic at a Code For America meeting (here’s my blog post with a transcript of the talk), where the most common question we got was, “Wait a minute, isn’t the point of Code for America to work WITH the government?” My answer: Yes, and that is exactly why Code For America doesn’t do anything significant for positive social change. The most famous of these direct action software development projects I work on is the Predator Alert Tool, a suite of browser add-ons for dating websites that help people warn other users about sexually predatory consent violating behavior. A great intro to the Predator Alert Tools is available here. This project is generally liked by rape survivors, disliked by rapists. Hashtag Not All Men. lol And then there are a bunch of other community organizing I enjoy doing. Most recently, I hosted CryptoParty Albuquerque, which is a hands-on digital safety training and Internet privacy boot camp in the guise of a kick ass party. We taught folks how to encrypt emails, text messages, and the data on their laptops and smartphones, along with running a digital Know Your Rights training to educate folks on how to protect their electronic devices from search and seizure by police who are generally all too eager to violate civil rights. I wrote up a short blog post recapping our CryptoParty that includes links to videos of some of the intro presentations and pictures of the live band! The post is called: “What You Missed at CryptoParty Albuquerque.” Good times. :) And this turned into more of an auto-biography than I intended, so I’ll stop there and say hi, and that I’m looking forward to learning more about you all. :) Cheers, |
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Hi, |
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hi all, |
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WEIGHT: 145 pounds COMPLEXTION: fair |
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:D Hi everyone! Thanks for introducing yourselves and saying hi. :) Harold, I’d be particularly interested in hearing about the Palestinian solidarity work you described; I’m not as well educated on the topic as I’d like to be, and this issue has been a very divisive one in my family. I am no longer on speaking terms with most of my extended family over it, unfortunately—they are all Israeli military people who speak with what seems to me to be extraordinarily racist views towards Palestinian people, and I feel very much the outcast among my immediate and extended family around this issue. :( husik, I didn’t mention it in my introduction, but one of my other (slightly less “controversial”) software development as direct action projects is a free community seedbank/seed library software. I was recently in Eugene, not far from Portland as you know, helping an eco village there begin to use the software to support a local non-GMO seed exchange group. The software is free and open source, and was written up in PermaCulture News when it first launched in 2013: An Open Source Community Model to Save Seeds: A WordPress Seedbank Plugin I consider food justice one of my “big three” issues (alongside gender/relationship anarchism, and youth rights), so I’d be keen on dreaming up some intersectional animal rights and food justice schemes with you! :) Also, I just recently completed Coursera’s free “An Introduction to the US Food System” course, which was more pleasantly more political than I had expected it to be! The format was boring (lecture lecture lecture) but the information seemed good and definitely helped me grasp the whole-systems level picture of the current interlocking problems of food waste, environmental impact, and so on. jdmcguire, lol, love your “case file” style. And the “Wallart” idea. Clever! I’ve been known to plaster stickers on any clear surface I can find (mostly store shelves and bathroom mirrors), but I have yet to graduate to full-on signage. I don’t have a lot of artist in me, sadly, so I tend to stick to “improving” websites and their graphics. ;) |
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hey, I am a pipeline activist, film maker and troublemaker living in a sleeper cell less than 1 mile from bill and hillary’s house.Being a suburban mom of 3 daughters who grows food with little kids works well as a cover. I’m working to infiltrate and activate fellow comfy suburbanites before it’s too late. Just 10.5 miles from my backyard, a 42" high pressure gas pipeline will be coming in less than 105 feet from the aging Indian Point nuke plant, unless we stop it. I’ve been teaching little into to NVCD workshops wherever they’ll take me and making short films to help move the needle from apathy to awake. |
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Hello everyone! I joined this incubator in order to gain some creative activism skills in order to open up a new avenue of creativity. I am currently a student in Arizona, where I mainly study technology and sustainability. Although I am located in Arizona, I am willing to travel to nearby states to participate in actions! I have some activism experience, although I have never fully committed to any one movement. However, this is something I have been realizing lately that I do not focus on enough so I am going too change that. I also do stand-up comedy and other comedic activates so I figured why not combine the two. Looking forward to connecting, learning, and embodying the trickster archetype with all of you! |
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Hello everybody, I am a campaigner in Rio de Janeiro, brazil. I’ve been envolved with a lot of social mobilization process both online and offline. Our main target for actions has always been the local government, since we live in a city with many social inequality issues, such as unjustified evictions, human rights violations and public transportation problem, beside very bad public services. With the arriving Olympic Games in the city in 2016, we have a lot of opportunities for good actions. I would like to learn more about all here and be able to share it with my pairs that don’t speak english. |
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Hey Maymay, |
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Hello everybody, i am a scholar/artist from Brazil, currently living in NY for a post-doc research at NYU. I am interested in a pedagogical approach to the interface between art and activism, in order to implement a creative activist lab in my university (UFSC), in South Brazil. |
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Hello, I am a (retiring) professional beekeeper, so my main concern is the loss resp. the regaining of lost habitats. My favorite enemies are Bayer, Syngenta, Monsanto etc. Want to share experiences and finding ways not only to put sand into their gearboxes but also positive orientation to keep up an environment worth to live in for men and insects. Up to now I was too occupied with everyday activities, could not develop schemes of resistance against profit and power oriented private and institutional bodies, and organize civil disobedience. There are lots of ideas but no real structure to put it into action. |
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Hey all, I’m Rob. I spend most of my day organizing around open gov. & open data efforts, and usually my nights and weekends consist of volunteering with Student Net Alliance, a student-focused digital rights group. We’ve collaborated with groups like EFF, Fight for the Future, Access, and others to bring the conversation re: tech policy on campus and in the classroom. I’m looking forward to learning from others in the group and combining efforts as much as possible. |
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Greetings Friends. I am a 76-year-old man who lives in Hastings on Hudson, NY, and who has been working with others to stop war and other forms of violence, including police killing and abuse, for some time. For the last four years, I have concentrated my energy in the campaign to stop U.S. drone surveillance and attacks and operate the website DroneKnows.com A particular concern of mine is to explore ways in which to unite those of us who are seeking to end U.S. military intervention, particularly as it relates to the capture and control of resources on behalf of corporations, with those of us who are working to keep fossil fuels in the ground and in other ways preserve and rebuild our natural environment. As part of this effort, I see a need to educate on the dependency that our corporations and economic system have on violence. I have applied to join the Incubator because I feel a deep need to reach outside the circles in which I regularly operate and particularly to discover ways to engage, educate and encourage people in high school and their twenties. |
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Hello All, My name is Cheryl, I’m just outside of Portland, OR. I’m currently underemployed (independent social media work). I moved back to the Pacific Northwest to take care of my 90-year-old grandfather who had many health problems. He passed away in June and now I’m looking for work and looking to get active in social causes again. I applied to a job at a local non-profit which is a coalition for working-class families and one of their main focuses is raising the minimum wage to $15. So, I’ve been focused on that for the last month, hoping to impress them with my skills, experience, and talents. Wish me well… I’ve been organizing with Strike Debt Portland which focuses on cross-sectional issues as related to debt. Strike Debt grew out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have created the Rolling Jubilee which bought up collection market debt and paid them off. They also created the Debt Collective and have been focused on the Corinthian College debt issue and fighting the DOE to wipe out all illegitimate Corinthian College debt. I was also a participant in Occupy LA (OLA) and the named plaintiff on a lawsuit against the City of LA, LAPD, LA County (sheriff) for the encampment eviction in 2011. The law suit is being settled for $2.17million and we should hear back from the courts on this in August. I also helped create and maintain the Occupy Fights Foreclosure committee at OLA and introduced a strategic planning model that helped us win the home of a family with a severely handicapped daughter back from Bank of America. I was 1 of 5 occupiers to sit down with Wells Fargo in LA over the foreclosure issue and helped protest outside of the State Attorney General’s office after an announcement that benefited the banks more than families. Before that I was a student at UCLA and medical cannabis activist and jump into that by helping a man named Charles C. Lynch who was facing 20+years in federal prison despite the fact he had a business license and the testimony of his mayor and city attorney who said he was an upstanding citizen and didn’t violate any of the conditions they put on the business license. I also did some organizing with the LQBTQ community after Prop 8 passed in California in the 2008 presidential election. Before that, while I was taking a course at UC Berkeley, I joined a group called Constitution Summer and tried to impeach Bush/Cheney. We got the city council to pass a resolution in support of impeachment. I’ve liked to volunteer since high school and created a “penny drive” at my school to raise money for school supplies for needy students in our district. I’m very interested to hear more about destroying capitalism and the crypto party. I love the show Mr. Robot and figured I need to learn more in this area. I’m also interested in the Palestinian solidarity efforts as well. Along with factory farming & food justice and racism. I loved R. Mutt’s post style. I can only imagine my what my FBI file says about me and my activism. I would love to be a bee keeper or at least learn how I can help the bees. I let a thistle weed grow very tall in my backyard and the bees love it. I boycott Bayer not just because of the GMO participation but they also infected hundreds (if not thousands) of kids with the HIV virus by selling blood drugs that were banned in US due to contamination. Bayer turned around and sold all of it over seas. I also have a personal beef with them because I somehow ended up with their hormonal IUD (birth control) in my when I specifically asked for a cooper IUD. I would have never accepted the procedure if I had known bayer was the making of the device. I’m also very much against all the wars for corporate controls of resources. I don’t eat chiquita, dole or del monte bananas because they’ve paid to have people killed/hurt for organizing and fighting back against their corporate greed. |
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Hey all! I’m Fox. Based in the U.S. and currently on a big roadtrip around the country with my friend Maymay (above). I’m excited to meet everyone here. Some very inspiring intros so far! Probably the most interesting thing about me non-politically is that I worked for the US Antarctic program for several years after college, and spent a total of five seasons doing various support jobs (janitor, dishwasher, bartender, etc.) at McMurdo Station, Antarctica. I have background in academic research — mostly focused on support for underrepresented minorities (women and people of color) in math and science careers. And I currently make my living as a professional massage therapist. In terms of activism, I’ve been involved in political projects of various kinds since I was a young teenager. (I’m in my mid-30s now.) Some of my “big issues” include: queer and transgender liberation, community-based mental health alternatives to the psychiatric industrial complex, and working against sexual and domestic violence. I’ve dipped my toes into some other movements like reproductive justice, unschooling, and prison abolition, but never gotten as deeply involved as I’d like to. Since I started working with Maymay a couple of years ago, in addition to learning more about how to bring technological power to my existing political work, I’ve also become much more involved in the fight for increased digital privacy and against online censorship. We recently organized a CryptoParty in Albuquerque where we brought a big, diverse slice of the community (from activists to technologists to high school students to grandmas) together to install anti-surveillance technology, learn how to protect their data from search and seizure, and to eat pizza and party. (We also made a little bit of trouble with the very straightlaced tech-space owners, by posting a lot of anticapitalist and anti-government material, and bringing in a surprise band to play.) So, that was fun. ;-) Although activism has always been an important part of my life, most of my work so far has been in the vein of community-building and education; less oriented toward art/awareness raising/direct action tactics. I’m excited to be a part of the Incubator in order to expand my range, and get to know some other passionate activists with creative ideas! Maymay and I are on the road today, driving from Albuquerque to Austin by way of Carlsbad, NM. We’ll be calling in from the car, so apologies for any background noise or dropped connections. Very much looking forward to talking with everyone tonight! |
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Hi everyone! I’m Joe, a fellow member of the Student Net Alliance with snarob and a recent NYU graduate, currently living and working in Brooklyn. I was working at WNYC public radio in 2013 when the Snowden NSA leaks first came to light, and I immediately began discussing the role of students and young people must play in shaping tech policy with fellow cyber-minded students. This led to the creation of the Student Net Alliance in late 2013 with the goal of informing and involving students in the fight for their digital rights. During this incubator I hope to brainstorm new ways to focus these debates and policies in a way that gets students and young people to care about issues that may seem too abstracted or inevitable at first glance. In my personal life I am an avid photographer and occasional music producer with a manic Welsh corgi. She is insane and I love her very much. |
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Hello all, I am Sabrina and my aim in life is to give current and future generations of living creatures more meaningful, prosperous and secure lives, by supporting well-intentioned designs, systems and policies, i.e. those that care about the future as well as the present. I have experience with creating art, campaigning, and improving the design of buildings. |
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Hi friends! I’m RB, I’m a digital media developer. I’m very interested in utilizing the tech sphere in conjunction with meatspace actions. I’m a huge fan of Gabriella Coleman and Molly Sauter’s work on contextualizing hacktivism and other types of online actions by groups such as Anonymous. I think that access to digital tools are essential for activist organization, deployment, as well as every day access to the new economies that are developing with full use of the internet. I’m also deeply interested in public media and culture jamming, providing space within popular culture for alternative viewpoints, and anti-verticalization of media. I see these as essential pieces to the puzzle due to the potential for monolithic cultural narrative to silence dissent and speech de facto. Right now, I’m developing a platform for “lo-fi augmented reality” for the mobile web – it will be a tool that can be deployed in conjunction with protests, actions, or interventions, and allow people to interact remotely via Twitter — and provide a living archive that ties a particular place to cyberspace. So in a way I guess I’m kind of a meta-activist :) |
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Hi Everyone, My name is Sandy and I live in Albany, NY. My main concern are the oil trains that come into the Port of Albany. The Port is a choke point of these trains for all of NY. I think it would be a significant win if we could stop the trains at the Port which the Governor has the authority to do. In turn, that would stop all the trains coming down from Montreal and would be big national news setting a precedent for others to also stop their oil trains and all other fossil fuel nonsense. |
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Hello fellow Incubators! Thanks for all your introductions! What an amazing group to be a part of. My name is Stephon, and I’m a documentary filmmaker whose been quite passive in the topics I’ve told stories about, and I want to push the envelope when it comes to my core feelings about the way humans are making the planet inhabitable…BUT…who the f$#K wants to hear that! Instead, I want to do something that brings a lot of attention in a humorous way about a serious topic. I am deeply inspired by the work of the Yes Men! even if they often feel like they are not successful at what they do, at least they made an effort and keep incubating their own processes to do better next time! I’m grateful for this opportunity and have a project in mind that is aligned with a major injustice to the indigenous people of the U.S. Not only is the atrocious history well-documented that many hopefully know about American “Indians” but there is a even worse story about the oil, timber, mineral rich lands that the govt. was responsible for and mismanaged over a century. Instead of Natives getting their fair share of the royalties from their lands, the majority died in poverty. A film I know about will reveal to the world, and I want to pull a press conference prank where someone from Chevron, et. al makes a statement about how this is the most important film ever made, how they want to publicly apologize for the loss of a quality of life for multiple generations due to the greed of oil companies, etc.—-need some more thought and finessing but the focus is definitely there, and I hope the prank will ignite Americans to watch the film and raise their awareness about American Indians inequality due to a broken trust that still has problems. Thanks and let’s get prankin’! |
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I have been activist on and off for decades, through different careers and geographic moves. Since retiring a few years ago, I have become involved with Move to Amend. I have some background in theater, and a couple of years ago penned a short theater piece lifting language from the Citizens United decision for the actors, and tying the piece together with a moderator. It included music and action, and would have been more successful were we not “preaching to the choir”. ( I still have the script if anyone wants to mount it elsewhere.) I have worked with Bill Moyers of the Backbone Campaign in Washington, and recently took the Climate Reality training to give presentations on climate change. My current project is to stop a Canadian energy company from building an LNG pipeline in southern Oregon, terminating at Coos Bay, where they would build an LNG export terminal to ship the gas to customers in Asia. I seek help from the YesMen and the Incubator team to help me design actions that stop this project in its tracks. And as drsuru observes, when the construction begins, so begins the stiff resistance of blockades and other means of harassing the project to a standstill. |
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Hello All, I am Nisha. I live in Durban, South Africa. I am a media activist and a business consultant and business coach in the film industry. Sounds in congruous, but I train film makers about the business of film and Tv and to run sustainable businesses. I am currently producing a TV series on global game-changers in sustainable business and living; and a documentary film on economic activism and the alternative economy. I have been part of social, political and economic justice movements and campaigns forever. I joined the incubator to meet and collaborate with creative activists like you and to develop some ideas and inspiration for engagement campaigns for my films and campaigns and movements I am involved in. For example, a world congress on forestry is taking place in Durban next month. We are expecting over 10 000 official delegates to come to Durban. I am working with local activists on a civil society alternative programme- CSAP-to run parallel to the official congress. I am organising the film programme for the CSAP to get people involved and inspired to take action. (We will be seeking permission to screen the 3 Yes Men Films, of course) We will also be organising a mass march and demonstration to the official congress. And I am looking for creative ideas for action that we can engage in during the CSAP and the march. So I am looking forward to hearing more about your ideas and experience; getting to know you all better and working with you on schemes now and in the future. Yours in mischief, Nisha |
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Hi all, My name is Tatiana and I work with VOCAL-NY. We’re a statewide grassroots membership organization that builds power in low-income communities affected by HIV/AIDS, the drug war, and mass incarceration. I do mostly administrative/operational duties at VOCAL, but want to learn more about organizing, creative action, and policy. I’ve only been in the organizing world for about 3 years so there’s much more to learn! |
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Hi! I am a long-time conscientious objector public War Tax Resister and nonviolent activist who almost became the first atheist martyr sic to be sent to jail in NJ for refusing to answer the IRS’s question “Where’s the money for us to seize?” in court. I would have died by asthma attack in tobacco-smoky prison. My pro bono lawyer got them to back off before it came to that. (Martyrdom would give the IRS an even worse PR problem than it already has. No one has ever actually died from IRS harassment yet.) I am a would-be actor and singer, with improv experience. I can write. I was an intern for the WBAI News, and did radio production, co-hosting, and journalism on WBAI for many years, back before it moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn. I would love to be in actions that use these skills. Yes, I live on the same island as the Yes Men, and helped distribute the fake NY Post. I wore a SurvivaBall at one of their movie premiers, and explained the concept of having a B-team to one of them, primed to sneak by and take over the mission if the recognizable ones are recognized and caught before they can do anything. I was psyched to get involved with Yes Man hijinks, when I was in yet another bike/motor vehicular accident and disappeared into the hospital + rehabilitation scene. I have been in a few too many cycling accidents to be fit to be prime civil disobedience material in group actions leading to possible arrest (aside from hijinks that would require upscale clothing I don’t possess), so I would like to do support work to free someone fitter than I to go out there knowing they have their back covered. I now have a cool-looking recumbent tricycle that can be used amphibiously to get through police blockades of pedestrian activists by cycling as traffic with the un-stopped cars, OR get through traffic blockages as a pedestrian in a pseudo-wheelchair. “Portia”(/“Porsche”) has a back basket that will hold up to 30 pounds (including my bag-of-bricks back pack) if someone else will do the lifting in + out of literature or whatever. I also offer expertise with sick cats, if someone needs to make sure their baby is well-taken care of while they’re elsewhere. I can pill a cat! I can give subcutaneous fluids. I also like friendly dogs, and other species. Peace! |
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Hi, I’m from London UK, lovely to meet you all! I am a member of a fair few campaign groups including Friends of the Earth, where I am trying to organise a campaign against gentrification, and to increase the sustainability of housing in London. I have become increasingly interested in creative activism which engages people in long term change. I am also very interested in anti TTIP campaigning, and general social and economic justice. |
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… it’s lazy I know (but I’m feeling a little ‘time-poor’) … I’m just basically pasting in my academic bio (yawn) … “Sharon is currently completing doctoral research at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Her Ph.D. is a joint theoretical and practical/creative project. The focus of the theoretical component involves synthesising ideas channelled through the thinking of experimental composer John Cage and visionary designer Buckminster Fuller, with the intention of finding ways to apply these ideas to creative practice. The practical component of her research project involves exploring designs for sound installations that facilitate collaborative music-making. Sharon is currently employed as a casual academic at the University of Western Sydney, in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts.” |
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Hi everyone, Although it’s a concept that’s often overlooked in many discussion, environmental health goes way beyond pollution and contamination. Health is critically impacted by the political and social environment that we live in. I’m therefore equally passionate about cleanup of contaminated industrial sites as I am about fighting for justice and representation for race, sexuality, and gender. I’m very much looking forward to collaborating and learning with you all! |
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Hi folks: I run a small struggling nonprofit in the Wash., D.C. area called Climate First!. We are currently all volunteers, but look to be hiring sometime in 2016 as our fundraising efforts continue to bear fruit. We organize people around the global warming issue, and mostly go after banks, power plants, and energy companies in an effort to get them to do the right thing as far as reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. We just started a coal campaign, which will target a large U.S. investment bank that funds mountaintop removal coal mining in the SE and also a few aging dirty coal-fired power plants in the Baltimore, MD area. I joined Incubator Summer 2015 to try to get my creative juices flowing. Climate First! needs to get away from the traditional protest/rally direct action-type stuff that we have been doing since our first event in Dec. 2012. I look forward to working with everyone to create attention-grabbing actions that will do good in the world. Thanks, Ted |
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I live in Yellowknife (POP 20,000), en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowknife Capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Territo... estimated population of 45,000 Unlike provincial governments and the government of Yukon, the government of the Northwest Territories does not have political parties, except for the period between 1898 and 1905. It is a consensus government en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_governm... called the Legislative Assembly. This group is composed of one member elected from each of the nineteen constituencies. After each general election, the new Assembly elects the Premier and the Speaker by secret ballot. Seven MLAs are also chosen as cabinet ministers, with the remainder forming the opposition. |
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Hi All- If you’ve managed to make it this far, here’s a link to a skit from my queer comedy Public Access show I did back in San Francisco for the Secret Prison Torture Playset: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIqA7zdLKpk |
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Participant introductions
Introduce yourself to fellow Incubator (Summer 2015) participants. Say hi, tell us about what motivated you to apply for this incubator, and, if you're comfortable doing so, a bit about what else you're involved with.
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