• PGA is not an organization, it is a network There are no members, no representatives, no one can speak for pga and pga can speak for no one.
• PGA is a space for people to meet and share experiences. It is politically defined by hallmarks and there is also a manefesto.
• Hallmarks
  • Rejection of capitalism and the institutions of globalisation
  • A rejection of domination, sexism, racism, patriarchy, etc.
  • A confrontational attitude that embraces direct action and not lobbying
  • A call for direct action, civil disobedience, and the creation of local alternatives
  • An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy
• PGA only decides about the network itself, and not about local groups - we can decide about how to organise the conference and this role is filled by the convenor. The convenor is the only structure within pga that has a mandate to organise.
• There are also support groups but they do not have a clear structure. The first meeting about support groups was held in December where convenors met and discussed the support groups. We will have to think about how to organize these at this conference and make a decision about them.
• PGA also does other things that can be collective projects, such as the intercontinental caravan and global days of action, where we decide jointly and it is called out.
• Tools: website of pga www.agp.org, the conference website, and a new initiative to start a global archive for notes of meetings and general outcomes of the conferences, caravan99 email general list - caravan99@lists.riseup.net, but it is not completely clear, as there is also an email list for convenors and support groups.

II. History of PGA

• Started in 1998 - focused on opposing free trade and commercialism, 300 people from 74 countries met and worked out a basic structure of PGA, the first global day of action at first WTO conference, actions at Geneva and Birmingham
• Just after the convenor meeting it was decided to have intercontinental caravan in June 99 to bring groups and people from global south. This created some of the basic network of PGA.
• Also planned to have a global day of action against financial centers in June 1999. A huge action tool place in England, but there were also actions in many others places.
• Had the next global conference in Bangor India in 1999 - decided to focus more broadly - not only on neoliberalism, but also capitalism
• Decided to have global days of action around WTO meeting in Seattle and May Day 2000
• Also involved in mobilisation against IMF/World Bank in Praha in Sept 2000
• First European PGA meeting in Milano
• Sept 2001 - latest global PGA conference in Cochabamba in Bolivia - most importantly decided that all groups would have autonomy to work on what they want and therefore the hallmarks and manifesto changed slightly
• Many groups have been involved in PGA so far.

III. Decisions that need to be taken and what has been proposed so far PGA European Network presented by someone speaking for EuroDusnie

• Decision 1: Who will be the convenor for the next conference, what is the convenor, do we want to have a convenor?
• Decision 2: communication tools - European conferences, European website, and European email lists - do we want to keep it this way or change it especially as related to conference do we want to have them each year, 2 years, etc
• Decision 3: Support groups- there was is no approved structure, but there were proposals from December to create support groups for 1.finaces, 2.communication tools, 3.global contacts, 4.european conferences
• Many proposals: EuroDusnie, MRG, and maybe more? Proposals will be published in newspaper, but in the end we will have to make a final decision at the plenary meeting.
• EuroDusnie wants to make sure a decision will be made so they want to have the consensus in the three days to develop the proposal through the meetings and the conference newspaper, and then ratify the proposal with ¾ majority b/c they are afraid of discussion in a three hour plenary
• Others disagree with voting and want consensus in plenary

Question - There was something about global contacts that the note-taker did not catch

Comment - there is one other proposal that is not in paper, it involves more local meetings and decentralisation, and then a delegate structure that would send regional delegates to the European structure [I am not quite sure if I got all of this right] This could get more people involved, prevent from big plenaries, and [something I missed].

Eurodusnie Proposal

• Convenors - best is dual convenorship, build structure to pass knowledge, convenorship should last two years - for example one would organise a conference, then choose a new convenor, the new convenor organises the next conference with the old group there to help.
• Communication tools -
  • action announcements
  • strategy and tactical list
  • convenor list
  • general list for al people doing support work
• Conferences should have a definitive date every year so people can better organise for them and prepare
• Technical support groups
  • have one technical support email list so they are not split up

MRG Comment

The fact that the structure was already strictly defined beforehand about how to talk about the process was not good. MRG has proposed a fourth point for decision as a part of this - talking about PGA as a global network (not about how PGA Europe relates to other PGA outside of Europe) They don't want to loose the spirit of PGA as a global network - this is especially important for the Spanish State, as they have lots of contacts in Latin America. They question if we going to open this process and make a decision about which issues we will talk about or is it closed?

MRG Proposal

• The specific proposal will be in newspaper, so he will talk about it generally
• Support Group: technical differences between what EuroDusnie proposed for the support group, but wont talk about it here
• Convenors - also two, but one should focus on the European conference and network and one on global contacts and networks, focus on more of a concrete definition of what convenors should do. Also think that the role of the convenor should be discussed, and that the convenor should be there to circulate ideas and proposals and provide communication between ideas, but not to actually create proposals themselves.
• Subdivide Europe into different regions, and then each region would have their own process and convenor to give more strength to the local level

Other Proposals or Ideas?
[each bullet should be one person]

• Why a European framework for this conference, why not a more local structure and then related directly to the global?
• PGA used to exist in eastern Europe, there is nothing PGA related in Czech, but in Russia there is a network of 5 groups that want to have an autonomous network
• Again, an advocate for more local organisation
• We should have local, European, and global networks
• Wants to clarify how we can improve our support for Latin America
• Improve local level and circulation of information from local levels
• Level of motivation locally would depend on how open the process is and how consensualised. He thinks consensus is very important.
• Not to make too much of a structure and make sure organisation and information is decentralised
• We can come and go as we want, no need to make decisions [note-taker did not completely understand]
• We should balance between the need to coordinate and bureaucracy, we should try to improve coordination, but we should be aware to not go too far.
• Does not want to participate in voting here at all, as locally they have a commitment to the consensus process
• It seems that there are two levels of thought - local and european levels, structure should reflect ideas of how localities can strengthen each other. And also, bulletin to distribute info non-electronically, but this should be combined with ideas of how to finance this
• It should be flexible, certainly not to create a bureaucratic structure, the reason why pga first started was to create a global network structure to interact. Also, it is important to outreach to groups that do not use the web, email and who cannot even read, so maybe we should see how we can use a radio structure.
• Decentralisation - decentralise pga, find 10 or so groups across Europe to make meetings (does not have to be based upon borders) people would go to the nearest meeting, all regional meetings would talk about the same thing, and then each meeting would send delegates to a european level meeting, local decisions should be made locally
• Change will be necessary in order that pga survives as a workable structure, but s(he) is still suspicious of change, PGA's weakness has always been its strength also, as this has allowed us to avoid domination even if we are extremely effective this could serve to make issues of the global south invisible and until now we have focused on making it visible. S(he) is suspicious of local pga networks, as it should be the local groups that work and have their own face so effectively PGA should be invisible and does not work as an organisation but as a spirit that encourges new ideas, for example in Prague- although the idea to plan the Prague demos came out of pga, INPEG was formed out of the local situation and had the face for the local situation - it did not have to be pga organising the demo, also likes the idea of rotating the convenorship as EuroDusnie proposed and making it easier, while still finding a way to make it more transparent for new people to get involved
• Decision making - consensus is the most important, but we should find a way to deal with blocks, make sure information is spread to local networks, through email distribution lists, but to also move beyond like to radio or video. It is also important to connect struggles from north and south and show the richness of southern struggles.
• Issue of visibility, good to have invisibility, but still we need to be visible to get people to become a part of the PGA network - if we just say well we have a meeting every two years and take a look at the website it does not do much, so how can we walk this balance? Ideological framework of PGA - are we focused too much on actions? maybe we know what we are against but don't have a clear idea of what we are for. We should start an exchange on alternatives and what we are for on the global level.
• PGA does have an identity... something about PGA becoming some label... [note-taker cannot remember the rest]
• The local level is very important and it is also important to avoid a top-down approach, so as not to promote pga as a label, but rather the hallmarks at the local level and practicing them in a collective search process - find ways like “preguntando caminamos”. It is clear that we need to improve the structure that we have and broaden the access to the support group in accordance with the hallmarks, without becoming bureaucratic.
• Level of organisation -the conference is mandated to organise on the european scale, in terms of connectivity with other regions that is a strategy question - there is nothing that prevents people from organising on the local level, examples of Israel, if only one group volunteers that can facilitate email, web, and conferences it is better than none - which we saw in Milano, you can organise what you have. there is no point to talk about what we will do when we are thousands, s(he) thinks there are four or five serious stable groups in pga, there should be two levels - a groups responsible for convenor tasks for the conference, and then have other groups responsible for the coordination of the other tasks - they do not have to do themselves, but rather coordinate them. This would give us accountability and transparency, decision making - to adopt consensus decision making it is clear that we must consense to consensus. But the reverse is not true - if there is voting, the people that are for consensus can stand aside, if there is a time limit and it is important for people to decide for this maybe we can use a 75% support
• All of the time people are calling for formal structure, s(he) is very suspicious of structure, structures cannot substitute a local movement, rather than develop structures we need to develop at the local level. Does not want to have a ___ between global and local structure, we had a lot of good experiences with global actions, but now we need to put it back on the floor, we need to connect the rest of the world and the global level with the local level and the continent we are limited in our experiences, and there is a need for a local level, a european level, and a global level. our target is not to be efficient because this is a capitalist word and thinking. The system we fight tries to destroy human connections and behavior, we need friendships and personal relationships not business relationships.
• Does not want a process for how to talk about and how to discuss thing - finds it boring, the pga meeting is about meeting people, seeing people, and hearing dreams and visions and that is it. Whatever will come out will come out of it.
• The way we discuss things and the way we make decisions are important and the way we come together to make collective decisions and process are more important than strategies - process is fundamental not boring. In terms of decision making, maybe the most important problem now is not consensus versus voting, but rather how we talk about things. S(he) introduces their proposal of a spokes council idea for the final plenary. Meet in groups of 20 people and discuss ideas and proposals and then meet in a spokes council meeting. Decentralised pga does not conflict with the global or european level, we need to enforce our human relations.
• PGA should not be top heavy, but we should make sure that whatever process, structures, and communication we do have should be transparent and open. Nice to talk about local work, but from this meeting we cannot mandate that people do local work, but we can build better communication and relationships between us all working locally.

Clarifications

• Does not want different mailing lists for each issue
• Clarify that when we talk about convenors at the regional and european level, we are not talking about structures but just communication
• Convenors have concrete proposals and tomorrow we should try to address those rather than get bigger and bigger and more abstract.
• When talking about decentralisation it is not about creating lots more local structure, but making it all decentralised. Consensus should be taken seriously, and maybe it is better to not make any decisions here if we do not have the space and time to properly consense to anything.
• Should not talk about this now, but it is not the same thing working on something and taking a decisions, consensus is a process not only a decision.

Quick Summary for Newspaper

The Introduction to the Process Working Group took place Sunday morning with over 25 people. The agenda items included a definition of PGA, a brief PGA history, a look at decisions that need to be taken at this PGA conference, proposals made by EuroDusnie and MRG thus far, other thoughts and ideas about the process, and general clarifications of the issues brought up.

More about PGA and its history can be found in this paper as well as on the website. While only one person from EuroDusnie was present, their proposal was presented and can be found in the first conference newspaper. MRG's proposal will be printed in this paper, but they also expressed criticism at the strictly pre-defined structure for the process debate that has shaped how we discuss these issues.

Additionally there were many other thoughts that came from people outside of EuroDusnie and MRG. They included a strong sentiment that people have a commitment to the process of how we work together rather than being overly concerned about efficiency (which is a capitalist concept in itself.) To this end there was a strong but not unanimous support for consensus.

Many people acknowledged that change in the PGA process is necessary in order to survive as a workable structure, people were still suspicious of change, especially as related to defining more structures and PGA visibility, which may not only lead to bureaucratic tendencies but also to domination and centralizsation.

As such there were several proposals to decentralise the European PGA process into regional conferences which would send delegates to a European conference. The European conference would then send delegates to the international PGA conference. There were many variations on this, but they all seem to highlight that such a process would allow for greater participation and access to information on the local level which can make the European level more transparent.

And finally a note from the note-taker - as the meeting lasted for three hours and there were a diversity of thoughts, it would be impossible for this short summary to represent accurately what was said. Furthermore computer problems, time constraints, and article space constraints have made this report very short. The long version of the notes will be posted on the internet.