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"The spokescouncil process enables consensus decisions with hundreds and thousands of people... In this process the whole group breaks up into smaller groups who then communicate with each other through 'spokes' (also called delegates or reps/representatives)."

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The spokescouncil process enables consensus decisions with hundreds and thousands of people. It is used by many groups such as social centres, workers' co-ops, peace and environmental movements (see Case Study: Radical Routes for an example.)
The spokescouncil takes the models for consensus in small groups further by replacing the need for everyone to come together in one meeting with a system of delegate meetings. It is an effective way of allowing all members of a large group to actively participate.

If you are unfamiliar with the basics of consensus you may wish to take a look at our guide on consensus decision making first.

How does a spokescouncil work?

In this process the whole group breaks up into smaller groups who then communicate with each other through 'spokes' (also called delegates or reps/representatives). Small groups could, for example, be based on work teams within a business, local groups within a national network or affinity groups within a mass action, or be a random split.

People in each small group discuss the issue(s) to come up with concerns and ideas. A small group may develop a preferred proposal or come up with a range of ideas.

The role of delegates (or spokes)

Each group sends a delegate (or 'spoke') to the spokescouncil meeting, where all delegates present the breadth of ideas and concerns of their groups. The spokes then come up with proposals that they think might be acceptable to everyone and take these back to groups for more discussion and amendments. This process is repeated until agreement is reached. The power to make decisions remains with all members.

The remit of the spoke needs to be clearly defined for a spokescouncil to work effectively. The task of the spoke is primarily to feed back information between the small group and the council. The spoke needs to act as a voice for everyone within the small group, communicating the breadth of collective thought rather than their own personal point of view. Generally spokes do not make decisions for their group, but will always check back for agreement before a decision is finalised. However, some small groups might also empower their spoke to take decisions within agreed parameters.

Being the spoke is not easy - it carries a lot of responsibility. You might like to rotate the role of spoke from meeting to meeting, or agenda item to agenda item. It also helps to have two spokes, one of them presenting the viewpoints and proposals from their small group, the other to take notes of what other groups have to say. This helps to ensure that ideas don't get lost or misrepresented in the transmission between small groups and the spokescouncil. Spokescouncils require good facilitation by a team of at least three facilitators, who work well together and who are skilled at synthesising proposals.

The fishbowl format

If all the people involved in making the decisions are together in the same place and the space is big enough, it works well to have groups sitting in a cluster behind their spoke during the spokescouncil. This way, groups can hear what is being discussed and give immediate feedback to their spoke. This can make the spokescouncil more accountable and reduce the need for repeating information (see diagramme on the right).

Long-distance spokescouncils

The spokescouncil model also works for long-distance decision making. Rather than all members of all groups converging in one place to make a decision, groups can discuss the issue at home and then send a spoke to a meeting, which may involve the spokes travelling to meet in person or communication via telephone conferences, chat rooms or online decision-making tools such as loomio. The spokes come back with a proposal that the groups either accept or amend.

Scaling it up - tiered spokescouncils

In some situations such as mass actions you might have more than 20-40 small groups. In this case you can add more tiers, where each spokescouncil sends a spoke to a second or even third level spokescouncil. This can work for many thousands people, e.g. 9000 people involved in the blockade of a Castor nuclear waste transport in 1997. With this number of people it becomes even more important to think carefully about which decisions need to be made by everyone and which can be left to individual groups. Often the tiered spokescouncil mostly acts as a channel for information and consultation rather than being used for actual decision making.

Radical Routes is a UK wide mutual aid network of around 40 member co-ops. Decisions are made by consensus using a delegates' meeting structure. The network comes together in Business Meetings four times a year to make a variety of decisions, including dealing with proposals by member co-ops to the Radical Routes loan fund.

Each co-op sends a representative to the meeting. An agenda for each meeting is sent out beforehand so that member co-ops can discuss the agenda items, and tell their representative how to respond to proposals in the meeting. Representatives may have a remit of what's OK to agree to, and when they have to go back to their co-op for instruction.

If a new proposal comes up or a proposal is changed significantly over the course of a meeting, it always goes back to the member co-ops for further discussion and approval.

The running of the network is delegated into working groups, such as finance, secretarial and co-op support. Working groups get on with day to day tasks within remits set by the whole network and within agreed budgets. Working groups are accountable to the membership via the business meetings, where they report back on their work.

Spokecouncil flowchart

Below is an example flowchart of a spokescouncil. Exactly how a spokescouncil is structured depends on the group involved. The process outlined here was used for some of the decision-making at the Horizone camp at 2005 G8 in Stirling, where several hundred people were together in one space.

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The Spokescouncil: A decision-making process for large groups - Seeds for Change

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The spokescouncil process enables consensus decisions with hundreds and thousands of people. It is used by many groups such as social centres, workers' co-ops, peace and environmental movements (see Case Study: Radical Routes for an example.)

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The TAA is committed:
to cultivating the power inherent to all workers;
to the liberation of all peoples from white supremacy;
to restoring the products of workers' labor to ourselves and our communities;
to holding ourselves and our communities accountable for our roles as perpetrators of racial capitalism;
and to stand in solidarity and co-conspiratorship with all workers and collectives who share these goals.

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Ideas for Principles:
- build relationships strong enough to withstand harm
- check in with victims coming away from harm, assist and empower them to recover and/or take action
- enable perpetrators to return power to the person(s) they have stolen it from, while introspecting for growth
- transform the conditions in our environment + community that enabled or encouraged this harm

Ideas for Practices:
- for every "just following orders", we must disobey the racial capitalist system (admin, govt, etc) in a way that benefits our community. Keep an accountability journal!
- whenever a Black person is killed by police, people write to every union in this town to ask what they’re doing about it. What can unions demand of each other?

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Interviews with scholars on racism, feminism, electoral politics, criminal justice and any issue relevant for a new socialist movement

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The Dig podcast goes deep into politics everywhere, from labor struggles and political economy to imperialism and immigration. By Daniel Denvir.

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"A podcast on the media, power, PR & the history of bullshit." Hosts Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson do a really great job at breaking down implicit media frames about issues like policing, immigration, and U.S. imperialism (to name a few things). They also have really great guests on their show. https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/

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Practices that set up effective consensus decision-making (from Dean Spade's Mutual Aid)

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Practices that set up effective consensus decision-making (from Dean Spade's Mutual Aid)

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1. Creating Teams
2. Creating a Decision-Making Chart
3. Practicing Proposal-Making
4. Practicing Meeting Facilitation
5. Welcoming New People

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It is important to connect to the communities which surround TAA. It is equally important to ensure that there is a sense of community for all members in the union.

1. Consider creating support groups inside of TAA for common Graduate student issues (Problems with advisors, changing departments, housing issues, lab/classroom concerns etc.).

2. Consolidate information regarding important resources which UW admins may not provide. This could be as simple as knowing the correct people to contact for guidance with specific issues on campus (Graduate Handbooks are not always accurate or helpful in this regard).

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Our mission is to improve the wellness and working conditions of graduate workers through organizing (to pressure the university) and mutual aid (to lift the burdens placed on us by the university). Together we politically educate ourselves on worker struggle, antiracism, and organizing, and plug our community of graduate workers into struggles for justice in our city and in the wider movement.

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Proposal: to use the Stewards' Council meetings to discuss worker struggles worldwide, by supporting and asking stewards to submit agenda items more proactively and playfully!

1. Suggest a media diet for our community and stewards
4. Create a flowchart for kinds of support TAA can offer and actions the stewards' council can take to support!
2. Ask that all stewards weigh things to contribute to the agenda as they go about their day & read
3. Continue to directly reach out to stewards to submit agenda items about current events

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Local Madison publication with a socialist perspective
https://redmadison.com

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I believe the TAA can be a space where people practice and experience accountability in community, not tied to carceral structures, and feel safe (but pushed) to rely on these structures rather than harboring harm. We want to center mutual care in big and small ways, support the most marginalized while connecting, play to everyone’s strengths, and avoid burnout and respect people’s boundaries. We need to aggressively combine class and race consciousness until they’re indistinguishable in the way the TAA talks and acts (because they are indistinguishable in people’s lives).

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We hope to make transformative action consistent with care and make our transformative actions themselves inclusive. The TAA can be a hub (in the least techy way) of connections to interconnected workers’ rights and antiracist movements (also feminist, queer, etc). Being in the TAA means you are also in these movements and the barrier to involvement (in i.e. CLIP, lectures, rallies, work) is super low.

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We are a grad worker union here to build community and solidarity while working against exploitation in all forms, requiring abolitionist antiracism because race and class are inseparable. We believe the university works because we do, and accordingly choose to work together for justice, safety, antiracism, recognition, solidarity, and our shared dignity.

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As the TAA, we salvage our own worker power from the late racial capitalism of Wisconsin, USA post Act 10, using creative and co-conspiratorial approaches to get shit done for grad workers beyond typical labor approaches.

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Conflict, Safety, and Justice Officer Role

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Conflict, Safety, and Justice Officer Role

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Some of us have been working on an abolitionist/transformative justice/nonbudsperson type role. More info here (very in process):

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A wild and crazy, very long-term idea - if we want to do more mutual aid and we know rent and food are issues for us, can we create a grad worker coop that specifically invites families and international students to live in it? And we cede the land back to the Ho-Chunk nation. Directly bites into predatory landlord culture, participates in landback, and makes the lives of some in our community instantly better, creating more community space where organizing can flourish.

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Madison / Dane

Cap Times

Madison 365

Forward Lookout

Red Madison

Wisconsin

Wisconsin State Journal

Wheeler Report (Statewide Press Releases / Articles)

WisPolitics (Statewide Press Releases)

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As a union, we work towards ensuring a University that properly compensates its workers on multiple levels, including financially and democratically, and acknowledges its role in the perpetuation of white supremacy on and off campus. Our role as teachers and researchers makes us central to the operation of the university, and our representation guarantees the freedom for our educators to nourish students.

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Local Activist Orgs and Groups

Freedom Inc

Freedom Youth Squad

Urban Triage

Community Response Team

Allies for Black Lives - Madison

Impact Demand

Black Umbrella

Dane County Timebank

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Grad workers should know HOW decisions are being made, WHO is making those decisions, and HOW they can make those decisions.

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We must highlight that organizing—fostering intentional, personal relationships with other workers and community members—is essential for collective action and change.

If we seek to change the status quo, we cannot wait for others to come to us. It is our responsibility to provide political education and avenues for building collective power.

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Another world is possible. Social structures wielding power at this moment are contingent and unnatural. They exist because of decisions and actions from those who came before. They can be changed with our decisions and actions.

Self-reflection cannot be done in isolation; self-care must center on transformation.

The union is the collective experience of the workers in the struggle. Workers are made of clay, not glass. We must love each other, but this also involves pushing each other.

Every interaction with others is a chance to learn. Ask questions: You do not possess the only answers.

Our efforts for social and economic justice at our workplace are inherently connected to movements for social and economic justice in the broader community. We must act that way.

We cannot take it as a given that broader community members will understand our fights within the university or that graduate workers will understand our fights within the broader community. If we believe that our fights are interconnected, we must work to make the connections explicit.

There is no salvation beyond our own power.

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The Teaching Assistants’ Association is the union of graduate workers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. We are a volunteer-led, democratic organization seeking to educate and empower graduate workers in our fights against the corporatization of the university and global racial capitalism. Our power comes from our ability to work collectively against systems of oppression, to stand in solidarity, to support each other as we take risks. We must work within our geographic communities and across the labor movement to construct alternatives to imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy.

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Higher Education

Chronicle of Higher Education

Inside Higher Ed

Labor / Unions

Labor Notes

Jane McAlevey's column

Uncategorized

Democracy Now

World Socialist Website

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We are a part of local, state, and national federations and organizations. We should intentionally use these relationships.

Labor

AFT-Wisconsin Higher Education Council

AFT-Wisconsin (through VP of Grad Employees / delegates to convention)

AFT (through AFTW President / TAA delegates to convention)

South Central Labor Federation (through TAA delegates)

Wisconsin AFL-CIO (through AFTW President / delegates to convention)

AFL-CIO (through Wisconsin AFL-CIO)

Coalition of Student Employee Unions (international)

Community Coalitions (Formal)

Dane Sanctuary Coalition

Defend Democracy Alliance (defunct)

Madison Left Rising (?)

100 Strong (follow up w/ Damita)

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- "Constituency groups "ensure a mechanism for the voice of the most oppressed groups in the decision making process" of the union." (Garcia, 2002)

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Principles Next Step: Distill this down to 8 to 12

Accountability

1. Collective Written Response

Transformative Action

Connection to Movements

Solidarity with Other Worker Efforts

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We are a union of UW-Madison graduate workers dedicated to caring for one another. We believe in care that simultaneously recognizes our roles as individuals, as a union, as a university, and as a local and global community.

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https://www.thenation.com/
https://jacobinmag.com/
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/