Attending hundreds of conferences and demonstrations, and professionally videotaping many, has revealed certain patterns. Organizers proceed as if the transmission of information is the main point. Programs are often celebrity-based and stage-centered. Attendees for the most part sit and listen to panels or individual presenters.

Little attention goes to enabling participants to meet up socially or to relate to each other their personal passions. Many times activists travel far distances to converge at major actions, yet barely come to know anyone else new. The result of this lack of concern for the human dimension can too often be haphazard networking, minimal inspiration, and missed mobilization opportunities.

Moreover, videos rarely appear in the main program, accorded at most a motivational ten minutes. Full length documentaries tend to play if at all opposite live sessions in a continuing series and thus to empty rooms. The overall gathering transpires in a virtual vacuum. Rarely does local commercial news cover it more than cursorily, let alone examine the issues in any depth. Alternative media reporting has scant effect. The public remains generally uninformed and unmoved.

The event designs that follow utilize a different framework. They assume that the purpose of a convocation is for people to connect with each other, hopefully to form lasting links that can keep them working together over time to realize their highest ideals. So workshops become interpersonal: in small subsets group members share with each other often. Every meeting points its energy toward a real world result. An interlocking of like-minded persons promises the possibility of making a difference and enjoying doing it.

The proposed setup usually also includes a dramatic participational staging, to give individuals first hand experience of operating in the altered mental world of their dreams materialized. Then too, moderated conversations, energetic performances, and stately ceremonials also look good and are fun to be in. These kinds of presentations reliably make the cut into the final tape.

Built into the conference program, video segments compactly transmit information with greater density and clarity than even the best speaker. During showings of full length programs, at key break points viewers join into two, four, and eight member wisdom circles. A facilitator then asks probing questions for all to answer in turn within these intimate groups. People reconsider their own deepest values. Such interactive screenings bring everyone into the same mindscape.

These conference write ups also in each case recommend a public outreach plan. Why go to all the effort and expense of putting on such major assemblies and rallies, yet budget nothing for local publicity or TV? Why not self-generate well-promoted, professionally produced, affordable television programs based on live happenings? We can format talk shows, theatricals, and interactive processes in on-site studio settings. At marches our puppet shows charmingly portray cool alternatives. Why do so few folks ever get to see them?

When has there been a one hour show on TV funded by the peace movement directly challenging, as an abrogation of the UN Charter, the legitimacy of the Iraq War, while delineating the advisability of an early US withdrawal? Have you ever seen a TV special explaining the simple sanity of taking nuclear weapons off hair trigger alert, and recommending their rapid abolition, as promised in the Non-Proliferation Treaty again up for review soon at the United Nations? Do you think people would like to watch a program proposing a standing UN peace force to prevent another Rwanda, East Timor, or Darfur?

Why are we content to produce our events for ourselves alone? Our penetrating authors now speak only to the choir, when the masses might hunger to hear their scintillating revelations. None of our intellectual stars is a household name. Ordinary people have never heard of Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, or Arundhati Roy. Let us have 100,000 or 200,000 people attend our events through television, along with the 200 to 1000 who show up in person. Polls consistently register the overwhelming support of the public for the United Nations. Let us take that reservoir of good will and engineer smartly staged, media savvy events that reach and touch millions.

The following event descriptions reimagine three scheduled upcoming occasions, as if they utilized an alternative design. Building from a set of likely available elements, they reconceive each event as a dramatic experience intended to thoroughly inform and profoundly transform participants. On the stage of the happening, each person declares his intention and has a setting to hook up with others who share similar visions. Skilled resource people channel this precious human life force into grounded projects to bring about named UN reforms.

Each write-up also includes a depiction of a proposed made-for-television staging that places celebrity talent and recognized authorities where their contributions can interplay entertainingly in pre-set studios on site. Promotion of live events and telecasts creates validation in the public mind.

If people read about something in TV Guide and see it on TV, they believe it is real. If not, they will wait till they do, before paying the subject any attention at all. They have been taught that any project that cannot budget marketing is unlikely to deliver results. Put UN Reform on the map, and it will start to matter. This year's sequence of gatherings can serve as stepping stones for the global movement toward conscious planetary administration.