Saturday

I put my comments into the proposal … unfortunately you can’t see the changes … I am sorry for that!! hope you can work with that anyway.

Hi all,

It was good to be part of the skype meeting today. I’ve been involved with the group in Paris over the past few months and I’m really glad this gathering is happening in Brussels. It is a great opportunity to make something happen together!

For those I haven’t met yet I look forward to meeting you in person very soon. For the others it’ll be great to meet again.

I really appreciate the energy that this group has put on to organise the gathering. I hope you will allow me to make some general suggestions regarding the agenda for the weekend before discussing more facilitation details.

First as far as I understand these are the agreed objectives for this gathering: (thanks Sophie for reposting)

a) Getting people internationally connected for different actions next year.

b) Starting the Climate Action Year 2015 together (maybe with one frame/message, or at least with the idea of being connected)

c) Getting actions organised for the COP in Paris, as well as in other regions in parallel to this event. With a way forward for 2016

GENERAL COMMENTS:

Friday: keeping it quite informal/social sounds good to me.
Saturday/Sunday: I think that I understand some of the thinking behind the current proposed agenda but I think some key steps on Sunday should really be discussed on Saturday and that if we don’t we might miss an opportunity. So I would like to propose something looking a bit more like this:
1)"why have people come to this gathering?, what are they hoping for?, why do they think it would be strategically good for the movemement(s) to mobilise together around climate action in 2015?, etc…
2) Then to map/timeline what is already planned/hapenning in 2015 in our respective countries/places
3) Then to hear the different proposals for fulfilling the objectives of the gathering: see above a), b) and c)
4) To discuss/analyse the various proposals and to see where the energy is / to get an idea of what we could do together.
5) For those projects that we could do together, start getting people planning/working together etc…

All these can be done in a very participatory manner. In my experience these type of gatherings should work out quite smoothly especially as some experienced facilitators have volunteered.

I’ve tried to keep it general to help the discussion for now. I think we can work on facilitation details afterwords.

• Note that for it to work we would need to make a specific “call out for proposals” in the next email invitation as discussed in our skype meeting today.

• Again I’m sorry I’m making these suggestions a bit late in the day. I really think that we can work it out collectively in the next week though I understand some of you have already spent a fair bit of time discussing it and may not want to discuss much more.

What do you all think?

Yoaann, to be honest, I quite like your proposal. I think to have a fresh view on this programme by someone who hasn’t been thinking and over thinking it has it’s advantages.
As I’m not going to be running the facilitation but helping out as an extra I’m happy to go with that general idea. Keeping it very participatory and interactive would be my two main intentions :)
So it’s up to what the others in the groups think about it.

I think it would be good to prepare a general agenda anyways,
we still have 2 weeks to decide an the final agenda, at the moment i am more looking the practical things of the weekend.
I think the best is to discuss the agenda a final time when we see eachother person to person before the weekend started.

Second, it must stay a general agenda, it must be addabted to the feeling of the group during faciliatation and also from sat to sunday.( as it was the case also in Cologne where people were invated to help to prepare the agenda and facilitation the night before)

Hey folks.

I am keen to keep this conversation about the agenda going even if it does not get finalised until the morning of the meeting because it is a tricky challenge that does not have a quick or easy answer.

However I appreciate others are preoccupied by the practical organising – which is fair enough!

I have some amendments to suggest. Basically I think that we need to find the right balance between having a free space to suggest anything – and having a clear structure to the way that we discuss and analyse all the ideas.

By having structure I think we can get people thinking about strategy and tactics as two side of the same coin rather than giving primacy to one or the other.

I have amendments to suggest to the agenda that I think will help us do that- but they are pretty substantial amendments. Would you prefer that I make by edits to this agenda (so they will be the most recent version) or would you prefer that I start a new thread?

All the best,
Sophie

I like the proposal of yoaann as well … maybe you can try to make a time proposal for that as well? maybe as a text document?
@ sophie: for me it would be better if you make a new proposal … you could also make it with a textdocument and attach

Cool. I have made this a google doc – and marked the parts I have changed in red:

docs.google.com/a/greenpeace.org/docume...

Anyone can edit or comment.
Sophie

I think that Sophie’s proposal is an EXCELLENT basis for an agenda. It brings together everything that we discussed, leaves space for people to talk about projects throughout the year and projects specifically about Paris, it focuses on strategic objectives AND on practical organising.
I am happy to facilitate any of these sections.

There is just one question: do we know someone who is ready and able to prepare a presentation about previous successes and failures? If not, we need to take this out.

sorry – I never worked with googledocs before and I have no idea how to mark my changes … and I don’t understand dutch … so I will make my changes in another doc I guess and attach