Overall, I think this was a pretty successful plenary for the SFGP. Thanks to everybody who volunteered, especially Susan for organizing it and both Susan and Erika who stepped in as emergency facilitators to try to fix the LA problems. As Marc mentioned, Jim also played a constructive (although unsuccessful) role in trying to get some action on LA. The main good points were that enough people attended that we should have made some money (I hope Susan will give us an estimate), and that we got some positive news coverage. I put a copy of the TV news story on my website (http://sfgreens.org/070526_plenary_news.mpg; warning-- it's a 22M file), in which Charlene, Erika, Micheas, and our banner and buttons are all featured. Luke Thomas also took a lot of pictures, although I haven't seen coverage in FCJ yet. Ross gave a good speech at lunch, at Matt also made a brief appearance. The low point was that we spent about 6 hours on LA and failed to solve it, thus guaranteeing another year of GPCA dysfunctionality before we have another opportunity at the next northern CA plenary (it will not be solved at the Riverside plenary because almost all constructive input on LA comes from SF, Alameda, and Sacramento, and not enough delegates from those counties attend SoCal plenaries). About 4 of the 6 hours were not spent actually discussing LA, but on discussion of whether to discuss LA, whether we had quorum to discuss whether to discuss LA, or how to choose a facilitator to facilitate a quorum count to then discuss a proposal to pick another facilitator to have a discussion of whether or not we might pursue any of the above options. I also have constructive criticism for future GPCA delegates. The original agenda put all the LA discussion (less than 2 hrs) at the end of the 1st day, when it was guaranteed to run out of time without any action being taken. At the beginning of the plenary, I tried to make an ammendment to change the schedule, to take 4-5 hours from other items (proposals that clearly had no consensus, or were otherwise lower priority than solving LA), and move the resulting 6 hours on LA right to the beginning of the plenary after the consent calendar. My proposal failed by 2 votes, with several SF delegates voting in favor of the original agenda instead. As it turned out, none of the proposals I had tried to get rid of passed, and we merely wasted precious time that should have been spent working on the LA problem. Several were withdrawn due to lack of time, and others went down in flames to cries of "bullshit" (in one case, the presenter even tried to change the proposal after it was voted down, so it would retroactively pass). If my proposed scheduling change had passed, we would have gotten just as much GPCA business accomplished, and we might have also succeeded on LA. One proposal (the "CC reboot") failed by just 2 votes, with all SF delegates voting in favor. If we'd introduced that proposal on Saturday instead of Sunday morning, we might have had time to introduce changes that would have gotten something passed. Most delegates didn't realize that by the time they belatedly supported changes to the agenda (after it had passed on Saturday morning), it was too late and the status quo crowd was able to use procedural manipulation to run out the clock. We really blew a golden opportunity on the first vote of the meeting. I hope that in the future, SF delegates should be more organized and sit together so we can caucus and back each other up on important votes like this one. JMC -- John-Marc Chandonia (jmc@sfgreens.org) http://sfgreens.org/