SF People
Like many on San Francisco's Left, I spent most of Saturday at the SF People's Organization founding convention. It was an interesting event, and I came out of it with some mixed feelings. Readers of this blog are no doubt aware of the disagreements and ruckus that occurred here, at the Guardian, and in various other online locations. Much of the ruckus was focused around the question of queer inclusion, a problem that seems to have been dealt with, at least at the convention level.
From the sessions I attended and the ones I got reports on, there seemed to be a mixed quality to the discussions. By all accounts the housing discussions were of high quality, and the people who participated in them seemed happy with the results. The sessions I attended, however, which included the Environmental Justice and Planning, Neighborhoods, and Transportation workshops, were less productive. The latter was especially disappointing, since many of the folks there seemed to only give lip service to the questions of displacement and gentrification.
A more important criticism, however, is the nature of the results of the various workshops and caucuses. Each session came up with a resolution that was a result of its discussion. In some cases, these resolutions were a broad summary of the discussion, in others they were a laundry list of the dozens of topics discussed. Others, more usefully, came up with a short list of the top priorities. Since all of the resolutions were passed (by acclamation!), there ended up being probably several hundred bullet points that were passed. Clearly, an umbrella organization cannot have hundreds of policy priorities. The work of sorting through the priorities seems likely to fall on the SFPO Board.
The convention elected 17 new board members to add to the 8 appointed members to make a 25 person board. I can't find a list of the elected board members, but everyone seems to be happy with the folks elected out of their caucuses. These folks committed to (I think) 10 hours a week, which is good, since it seems that they'll have a lot of work to do, just reconciling the giant pile of resolutions they have been handed.
Overall, it's not clear what the SFPO will amount to. It's clear that there is, as BeyondChron says a "thirst for unity among progressives". Is SFPO the vehicle to move progressive issues forward? I don't know. The convention was certainly broader-based and more constructively-oriented than I expected, but much of the stuff that took place seemed to be more oriented toward giving people a sense of ownership than toward actually trying to accomplish anything. Which means the work of forging an actual program that can both unite and drive people is up to the board.
So we'll see how that goes. As I said, the board appears to be made up of good people. But the task is not an easy one.
A couple other things I noticed:
There were suprisingly few Bike People there. Many folks (including myself) rode bikes to the event, but even in the workshops in which you would expect it, there was very little articulation of the Bike Coalition platform, for example. Pro-transit folks, on the other hand, including quite a few from the Coalition for Transit Justice, were very much in attendance.
It was quite amusing to see that as Bruce Brugman and Tim Redmond from the Guardian wandered from workshop to workshop, the frequency of discussion of public power increased drastically whenever they listened in.
From the sessions I attended and the ones I got reports on, there seemed to be a mixed quality to the discussions. By all accounts the housing discussions were of high quality, and the people who participated in them seemed happy with the results. The sessions I attended, however, which included the Environmental Justice and Planning, Neighborhoods, and Transportation workshops, were less productive. The latter was especially disappointing, since many of the folks there seemed to only give lip service to the questions of displacement and gentrification.
A more important criticism, however, is the nature of the results of the various workshops and caucuses. Each session came up with a resolution that was a result of its discussion. In some cases, these resolutions were a broad summary of the discussion, in others they were a laundry list of the dozens of topics discussed. Others, more usefully, came up with a short list of the top priorities. Since all of the resolutions were passed (by acclamation!), there ended up being probably several hundred bullet points that were passed. Clearly, an umbrella organization cannot have hundreds of policy priorities. The work of sorting through the priorities seems likely to fall on the SFPO Board.
The convention elected 17 new board members to add to the 8 appointed members to make a 25 person board. I can't find a list of the elected board members, but everyone seems to be happy with the folks elected out of their caucuses. These folks committed to (I think) 10 hours a week, which is good, since it seems that they'll have a lot of work to do, just reconciling the giant pile of resolutions they have been handed.
Overall, it's not clear what the SFPO will amount to. It's clear that there is, as BeyondChron says a "thirst for unity among progressives". Is SFPO the vehicle to move progressive issues forward? I don't know. The convention was certainly broader-based and more constructively-oriented than I expected, but much of the stuff that took place seemed to be more oriented toward giving people a sense of ownership than toward actually trying to accomplish anything. Which means the work of forging an actual program that can both unite and drive people is up to the board.
So we'll see how that goes. As I said, the board appears to be made up of good people. But the task is not an easy one.
A couple other things I noticed:
There were suprisingly few Bike People there. Many folks (including myself) rode bikes to the event, but even in the workshops in which you would expect it, there was very little articulation of the Bike Coalition platform, for example. Pro-transit folks, on the other hand, including quite a few from the Coalition for Transit Justice, were very much in attendance.
It was quite amusing to see that as Bruce Brugman and Tim Redmond from the Guardian wandered from workshop to workshop, the frequency of discussion of public power increased drastically whenever they listened in.
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