There was a European movement strategy conference. We tried out something that we saw others experiment as well. In our case, it worked relatively well, so here is a small feedback from the organizing team.

Our issue was:

We want to design coordinated strategy for movements in Europe. We hope to push them for a transversal (across movements) and transnational (across countries).

We will be focused in Europe, so we don’t expect it to be a very international strategizing process.

This means we will (1) miss out a lot of perspectives on how to do things, and (2) might fail to identify pathways for going beyond the European scale.

Any strategizing activity is partial by nature. Our approach was not to think of our partial viewpoints as a problem to solve, but rather a fact to take into account.

We had moments of people experienced in one topic (say, data centers) participating or listening in to people working on a different topic (say, borders and migration). Sometimes we found intersections, sometimes we found interactions, sometimes we found nothing worthy of action. This contributed to a culture of transversal strategy-making.

How about the rest of this peninsula called Europe?

We made a small experimentation.

This was a three-day conference: arrive on Thursday afternoon, leave on Sunday midday.

We had organized ourselves into working groups by topic. (Have a quick look at the report here to get a sense of the content.) The working groups had half-a-day of meeting time for themselves.

When the first round of meetings ended, by the afternoon of Saturday, we made a feedback loop.

We had organizers from Global South participating in the working groups (and therefore in the process of the Conference). They were not “diverse”, they were not “representative” of anything beyond their contexts. They were simply a handful of experienced comrades operating in parts of the world where social movements have perspectives, experiences and analyses other than we are used to in Europe.

They had participated in the debates and working groups already. We asked them: “You already have an idea of what we are up to. The working groups will do whatever they said they would. What do you notice? Any blind spots? Any angles we should have explored better? Can you give us some suggestions that we can implement starting now, so that we can adjust our plans?” We had briefed the comrades before the Conference.

This was a plenary.

• Working groups presented their conclusions. This was, naturally, a lot of information.
• We gave a half-an-hour break.
• Then we introduced the idea of receiving feedback from our comrades from Global South. They commented briefly (something like five minutes per person), with suggestion that we all felt were very generous and very applicable. (This took us maybe half an hour.)
  As a matter of fact, they chose not to do individual comments; instead they had exchanged ideas among themselves about what would work best as feedback, and gave us a more collective reflection. In the meantime, they also involved other racialized participants (people that the organizers of the Conference didn’t know personally and hadn’t approach with such a request) and discussed together; those comrades also contributed to the feedback loop.
• We did a small moment of clarifications on what we heard. (This took us some twenty minutes.)
• Then folks went back to their working groups. In each working group, we discussed what we heard, to what extent it impacts our work, and how we can adjust our plans to integrate those ideas. Naturally, the comrades from Global South were in some of these conversations as they were an integral part of the Conference. (We gave ourselves around forty minutes for this.)

This is it.

Unsophisticated. Not very pretentious (hopefully). And (to some extent) consequential for our praxis.

We received good feedback on this particular experiment from the participants. So we wanted to simply share that this happened.

Many of us had seen other attempts at creating feedback loops, most of which had somehow aggravated paternalistic and/or colonial and/or tokenistic ways of thinking, coupled with feelings of white guilt that paralyzed us rather than grow.

We don’t have much more to say about this tiny, singular experiment. We just want to highlight a few key aspects that we found helpful.

• The feedback loop was an integral part of the Conference program: The comrades from the Global South were briefed in advance; when all the working groups finished, we still had an entire day in front of us (so that we could receive the feedback and still have time to digest and integrate); when the working groups presented, we gave a short break to change our register; we dedicated time to listen carefully (not at the end of the Conference, but perhaps at the peak energy moment); we dedicated quality time to receive and process the feedback.
• Those who gave the feedback were actively participating in the process: This has at least two facets. First, they had a clear sense of who was in the room, so that they could judge what kind of feedback, in what kind of wording would stick better. Second, they were not criticizing us, they were self-criticizing a process that they co-created: their feedback was definitely read and felt this (comradely) way by the European organizers.
• We had clear intentions and expectations: We were focused on actually making an improvement that has a strategic sense for the process. We concentrated our efforts on adjusting the plans of actions, and we processed the feedback as such. We did not problematize the partiality of our perspective or the colonialism within us – we took them as given, and we wanted to address them in praxis. We set our expectations practical and concrete: we wanted to consolidate some transformation in our activities, rather than being overwhelmed with the amount of transformation needed.

Some of us thought it would be worth registering this experience somewhere, in case somebody else would be looking for inspiration or an excuse to fail forwards in similar ways.