Many changes have been introduced in the preparatory process of the next World Social Forum, which will be held in Porto Alegre from the 26 th to the 31 st of January and will only be composed of self-organized activities
The first step was the consultation that was launched in July. Its aim was to define the general outlook of the forum. More than 1800 organizations participated in the consultation, which was many more than expected. 11 ‘terrains' were defined on the basis of the results of the consultation during two meetings of the content and methodology commissions of the International Council in July and in August.
The second step was the registration and aggregation phase. More than 4000 organizations have registered and proposed around 2650 activities. The general idea was to make it possible for every organization to contact other organizations working on a similar theme in order to try to co-ordinate their activities. Co-ordination could take place according to at least four different schemes:
* Fusion. This is what happens when organizations registered for the WSF realize that two or more events they have proposed would be enriched if turned into a single one;
* Sequence. In this case, the registered events are kept but organized sequentially in order that all participants could join them all;
* Dialogue. The programmed events are kept and each organizer commits himself/herself to send to each other a representative member who could jointly inform and construct the debate.
* Meeting. Organizers of each event set up meetings between 6pm and 8pm, which will be booked in the coming WSF for new dialogues between initiatives.
The third step will begin in a few days and end only several weeks after the forum itself. It is the construction of the WSF's memory, the ‘memoria viva' project. It articulates 4 different projects:
* Nomad: live streaming and filing of some activities' audio files.
* Culture working group: this aims at building the memory of cultural events of all types that will be held at the forum. This project matches ‘diversity's living musuem', a project of living memory, etc.
* Communication working group: journalistic-alike work of the Brazilian committee's communication working group. This incorporates different formats: written, audio, video, photos, etc.
* Proposals: this project aims at collecting before, during and after the forum texts presenting the proposals of alternatives that organizations will discuss in Porto Alegre. Those proposals will be published online and on proposal walls that will be located in each of the terrains.
Every project will be accessible (through links or a common database) on the www.memoria-viva.org website, which will be launched soon. This website could then also be used to collect or link the memory of future social forums.
The changes that were introduced in the preparation of WSF 2005 show one of the aspect of the forums' dynamic: that this is also a learning process. This means that many problems occurred during the process and that not everything that was planned could be achieved. The consultation and registration phase have shown that there is a strong interest in building the forum as a deeply self-organized process. However, because of the amount of answers and, amongst other things, because of some technical problems, the results of the consultation could only be partially analysed in a methodical way and were not sufficiently mutualized. Nor have we managed to create more profound links between the consultation and the process of registering events. Indeed, there was insufficient time to enable a strong appropriation by every participant of the changes that were introduced. Moreover, as these were significant innovations, the organizers themselves were learning new aspects everyday about how to facilitate the organization of a social forum in this way. Despite this, the new methodology is already a success because it has strengthened the dimension of the forum as a learning process and because it has lead to the greater involvement of every organization in the building of the forum itself. Those aspects that were not implemented this time around could still contribute to the shape of other social forums. From this perspective, it is important to try to manage to our work on a long term basis and not only to dedicate everybody's energy to the preparation of one single forum.
Nicolas Haeringer
nicolas@mapeadores.net