FIVE DAY CONVERGENCE

Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 25 ­ 30, 2005

This plan proposes to formally constitute a Campaign to Empower the United Nations at the November 19 ­ 20, 2004 Tavola della Pace (Peace Roundtable) international seminar in Padua, Italy. Participants in Padua can pre-establish areas to develop. Such a cooperative could then conduct a purposeful, participational, ceremonial experience, over the five days of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

The idea is to replace the usual format of having participants listen to panels and speakers, each ending with random question and answer periods, resulting in little of immediate personal consequence. The productive part of the event can generate excitement and engagement.

We propose to hold instead a Model World Parliament to frame the campaign and choose a Top Twenty set of UN reforms. Deliberative plenaries decide priority agendas and back practical plans to over time cohere international support. Porto Alegre presenters would stake territory within this map of specific UN enhancements. Their ongoing expertise and networks can facilitate progress toward enactment.

Rather than the grab bag of minimally coordinated workshops the World Social Forum traditionally features, Track 11's seminars can become group formation nodes, working meetings forming action teams. Attendees would be able to hook up with each other around willing workshop leaders creating a series of UN transformation projects.

The schedule should find an appropriate time and place for Earth Television Foundation to screen interactively its two specially designed UN Reform programs: the 42:00 Action Agenda for the Earth Summary and the edited 58:00 Article 109: Chartering and Empowering the United Nations.

These videos create in audiences a unified mind, through emotionally gratifying presentations of a comprehensive set of proposed changes to the world system. Such contentful audio-visuals can outperform the data transmission efficiency and interest level of most speakers and panels. Emotionally graphic pictures can draw people in and cause them to want to do something about it. Viewers share common ground on which to base their responses in small focus groups.

Additionally, other possible event elements can create personal solidarity by fusing customarily isolated activists into affinity groups, clans, tribes of the initiated. Lived comradeship has the power to enroll people into devoting their time and caring after they separate to keep working together to achieve global goods.

The five days in Porto Alegre can have the structure of a growth seminar with a recognized master teacher. The International Democratic Order assemblage will meld better if it programs numerous theatrical presentations and bonding occasions. An outline sketch of such would commend:

SKITS. Local acting companies and student groups can dramatize issues creatively in personal terms, so audience members can try on their own self-fulfilling roles.
PAGEANTS. Processions and tableaus represent at a stroke complex social ideas like global governance, fair trade, and UN democratization.
PERFORMANCE. Political entertainments convey liberating truths. While they laugh at or empathize with on stage characters and their predicaments, audiences grasp the message.

PARTIES. Socializing together, even getting drunk and dancing sexy, encourages people to trust each other with their intimacies.
OUTDOOR GATHERINGS. Folk communing beyond four walls suddenly have to relate in a wholly different way.

ENVISIONMENTS. The gathering stands holding hands, chants, and joins in guided visualizations of harmoniously realizing our best intentions.
RITUAL ENNOBLEMENTS. Native peoples and shamanic guides lead us in consecrating sacred spaces, connecting through spirit to our mutual desire to serve the whole.
DANCES OF UNIVERSAL PEACE. Participants move around the room interfacing progressively, mirroring simple gestures while singing a mantra from one of the world's wisdom traditions.

Both Track 11 and the entire World Social Forum would be well advised to develop our own television outreach plan. At the 2003 Forum in TVE's studios, David Lionel laid the groundwork for broadcasting from the WSF. TVE is a local Porto Alegre station similar to a US Public Broadcasting System (PBS) metropolitan educational channel.

In a taping for later national telecast, Professor Carlos Milani conducted an interview with Lionel in English and Portuguese. They discussed the recent history of the social movements. TVE showed some of its footage from the first three World Social Forums plus clips from several of Lionel's videobooks, which encapsulate the import of global civil society gatherings dating back to 1979.

In 2005, TVE could telecast locally, nationally, and globally live nightly studio conversations, featuring celebrated activists and international authorities attending the World Social Forum. These discussions would wrap around video excerpts culled from the day's happenings and short segments from documentaries that elucidate selected issues.