Rooms vs Assembly and the Museum of Care as a whole.
(Nika’s blog’s post.)
When we started the Museum of Care, we didn’t know how many people will participate. I was behaving the same way as during the Carnival. We were about ten people – the organizes, most of whom do not participate in the Museum of Care all the time.
Now we are over 400 people on the mailing list. Many people come and go in and out of the Assemblies.
Demanding to share responsibility and make decisions on every issue in this mode is difficult. Not only because there are so many people, but primarily because there is no permanent membership. Even 1000 people, when they are together all the time: living in the same village or working on the same project for a long time, I am sure, can work out the rules of an egalitarian dormitory. The advantage and disadvantage of the Museum of Care — we don’t have such a commonplace.
But, we are in so many different countries, from Russia to Mexico, to the U.S., to Japan, that it’s very useful for organizing international companies or creating distributed projects.
At the same time, from my experience, the working group or room shouldn’t have an amorphous “we’re all in this together.”
It is better to create a small group of people who can work together, trust each other, and take responsibility for their actions, the people who have some time or other resources to share.
This Thursday, instead of the General Assembly or reading group, we will have two such projects/rooms/working groups:
- The Library of Care. It was a part of the reading group we’ve been running in recent months with Vassily.
- Visual Assembly is a project we started with David and which, right after Carnival, I wanted to make an event to be held on the anniversary of his death.
Then come the idea of Madrid and the arrival of the Zapatistas.
Both of these events are organized by the rooms of the Museum of Care and by specific people. They are open to the public, but the decisions will not be made by all those who wanted to come to one or the other Assembly but only by the working group members, which will be small.
On the other hand, if someone wants to curate their rooms using a more open model of decision-making and organization of the process, that is, of course, his or her choice. The more diversity, the better!