While there are countless incarnations of political “open houses” and “town hall meetings” and the like, what makes this different is the lack of a prescribed agenda or experts. This is, quite simply, a room and a format for creating small discussions and relating those experiences to a larger group.

In my interpretation of RootsCamp — which, I should point out, is not exactly the same as the people who started the site: to be a forum for progressives to reflect on the past election and strategize about grassroots campaigning — I am looking for an all-inclusive, learners-as-experts-as-learners kind of atmosphere. I am talking to progressives, libertarians, republicans, democrats, senior citizen living communities, college organizations, etc., etc. I don’t know what kind of turnout there will be, but I hope to put a lot of people of diverse backgrounds in the same room with the charge to explore and understand other perspectives and compare them to your own.

You are implying the very thing that I feel is problematic about American politics — the need to arrive at consensus or convince others of a position. Those kinds of motivations, ideally, have no place in my concept of mutual politics, an idea I hope to discuss in this forum. The goal is understanding not persuasion.

To qualify, you just have to show up. Nothing more.

It sounds good.

There have already been experiments of this sort for many years.

There was a movement several years ago called “Planetary Initiative” which held such meetings and tried to bring them all together to create a “Platform” statement.

To be effective and appealing to everyone, there has to be widespread inclusion of all such groups, whatever they may call themselves.

In other words, there may be such groups already taking place, but which call themselves something other than “RootCamp” or any other term.

The goal then is to somehow bring them all together into a common project. And this project must be designed to appeal to all of them.

What criteria would each group have to meet in order to “qualify” for inclusion as a RootCamp?

I like the word “conference”. But I’m not sure about the “RootCamp” term.

In order for the concept to succeed, there can be no authoritative leadership of the movement. It has to be spontaneous without appointed leaders.

Somehow decisions have to be made. Perhaps each “conference” could hold a vote on one matter or another, and the result would somehow be official, at least for that particular “conference”.

But then how would the whole network of conferences adopt any measure? Would it require unanimous agreement by all the conferences?

Could an earlier decision be revoked by a new conference that meets?

This idea needs to be developed further.