We invited Occupy Toronto to kick off a DwD session, and continued with the dialogue engagement live at the camp, after it came down mid-week following the session.
Grad students and even president Sara Diamond from OCAD University were involved with sponsorship from the Design Exchange. Two major community events were held, located (ironically enough) in the deco-era original Toronto Stock Exchange used by the DX.
The goals of these sessions were to evolve a common framing and voice for (meaning “with”) the diffuse and diverse core members of the movement.
What we seem to be missing are the connections between similar events in other Occupy communities. Pay attention to the shift of medium here – Occupy is an emerging and embodied social medium for civil change. It is not like the Arab Spring or other social media narratives. This is embodied (situated in place) and broadcasted (livecast) and not tweeted and FB’d to organize.
People are working things out F2F – not online – its a classic McLuhan media transformation in the making.