IPPS Archive

The International Project for a Participatory Society (IPPS) is a group of people concerned with inspiring, facilitating, and supporting efforts to develop, share, and promote vision and strategy for attaining a new participatory society.

IPPS stands for a classless economy based on self-management and equality, for democratic and participatory politics, and for the elimination of patriarchy, racism, and all other hierarchies and oppressions.

IPPS seeks to elaborate a vision of a participatory society in order to demonstrate that there is an alternative to current race, gender, political, environmental, and other injustices.

Overarching policy decisions on editorial priorities, financial decisions, and new members will be made in annual meetings with all group members welcome to participate either live or online.

Voting in yearly policy meetings will be most often by majority vote with attention to a strong minority. Deviations will respect the concept of self management - decision making input in proportion as one is affected by issues at stake. Individual task forces will set up their own participatory decision-making process.

As a basic component of membership in IPPS, all members are encouraged to be involved in the creation of vision and strategy through participation in autonomous “editorial threesomes” (or other combinations, or singly) as people choose. By autonomous we mean as long as they apply the general principles and values of our mission statement.

-> by group members (where possible in aforementioned threesomes)
-> commissioned and solicited by threesomes
-> from unsolicited submissions that will be distributed somewhat equally among threesomes for approval Other activities will be overseen by appropriate task forces constructed for the purposes at hand.

At Woods Hole Massachusetts, on June 6, 2006, we designated the June 2006 Z Sessions on Vision and Strategy gathering as the founding and first policy meeting of the International Project for a Participatory Society. At this June meeting we decided our mission statement, name, project definition, basic principles/values, a date for the next policy meeting--in Atlanta at the U.S. Social Forum from June 27-July1 (possible online hookup for those who can’t be there)--and to present a Participatory Society program (building on the Life After Capitalism experience) at the Atlanta events.

We decided to focus on the following in the next six months:

-> Creating content for the IPPS website
Responsibility: All members organized into editorial threesomes or other combinations, as well as operating singly. Those who presented vision/strategy papers at ZSVS could improve on it; others who didn’t make presentations could do so; still others could cover new areas of concern such as law, education, environment, etc.

-> Creating a blog system for members (public) dialog and debate
Responsibility: Justin Podur, Brian Dominick

-> Creating an internal newsletter
Responsibility: Marie Trigona, Andy Dunn, Lydia Sargent

-> Develop program for the Atlanta Social Forum
Responsibility: Kendra Fehrer, Jamie LeJeune, Thomas Ponniah, Lydia Sargent, Michael Albert

-> Assisting members with publishing their work
Responsibility: Ezequiel Adamovsky, Sonali Kolhatkar, Jeremy Brecher

Key aspects of IPPS activities are generating and disseminatinginformation that bears on vision and strategy - whether it is new ideas, criiticalaccounts, historical reviews, surveys of projects, etc. - and creating contacts andlasting ties among people around the world concerned with such matters.

All members participate in such work in diverse ways including writing, speaking,hosting events and other members, working with organizations, etc. Reports, analyses,vision, strategy, etc. appear in essay form on this site. Discussions occur via ourblog system. Outreach occurs via speaking engagements, publishing, this web site,face to face organizing, etc.

As we are first forming, there isn't much to report at the moment...more later...