When Occupy Harvard launched, I wanted to carve out a space for reform-minded students who were not ready to take the plunge and join the tent-encampment.  So we launched Occupy the Facts with this pitch:

So here’s the idea. Occupy Philly has come out with 20 demands (http://occupyphilly.org/9-2/). The media is going to try to spin these as radical, unreasonable, crazy demands. Blogs have already started burbling up calling it the birth of a “far-left” movement (see: here and here).

We can’t let this happen. What we can do as Harvard students — with access to resources and people (professors) that have the credentials to ‘legitimize’ (to the mainstream media) policy proposals — is be a think tank of sorts for these demands, showing — if our research shows it — that they’re mainstream demands, agreeable with a majority of Americans.

So here’s the specifics:

1. We find 20 people, who can each take on one demand.

2. Each person hardcore researches the demand: its origins, its history, its strongest arguments for and against, its status currently, if its good or bad, etc. This should not be hagiography or puff pieces on the demand…this should be real, public interest journalism. It should be an open possibility that our research determines that a demand is not good. We should come out of it with an understanding of which demands are the most controversial and least, the easiest and hardest, the strongest and the weakest.

3. We meet, share our research and determine the best way to display it to the public, with the following goals: (a) helping inform the public; (b) helping give talking points to Occupiers; (c) helping combat media misinformation. This could be anything: policy papers, infographics, puppet theater, youtube videos, speeches, podcasts, powerpoint slide decks…whatever we need to do to make the information engaging, accessible and convincing.

4. We blast it out, Occupying the Facts from the corporate spin…

Final pitch: Everyone is giving their comparative advantage to the Occupy movement. Those who have time, live there. Those who have food, bring it to them. Those who have money, send it. What is our comparative advantage: being Harvard students, who have the time and access to credible professors and research resources. If we want to seriously help the cause — and not just use it as entertainment — this is our best bet.

We need: (a) researchers; (b) facilitators to help organize researchers; (c) editors to help push back and fact check against researchers; (d) packagers, who package the research into designs, websites, infographics, videos, podcasts, plays, puppet theaters, songs, poems, etc.

Who’s down?

The pitch resonated and 20+ people joined in.

Here’s a Crimson story on our launch meeting:

About 20 students Sunday night launched “Occupy the Facts,” a nascent student organization hoping to combat charges that protestors in the Occupy movement are uninformed about public policy issues.

The organization seeks to conduct important policy research and make their findings accessible to Occupy protesters and the public. The group will spend the next three weeks developing information packages.

“I want to see if we [can] create something that could research public policy surrounding the occupiers’ demands,” said Peter D. Davis ’12, one of the project facilitators. “We want to be able to create fact sheets.”

One of the projects’ goals is to eventually transform their policy findings into various formats, including educational YouTube videos and info-graphics.

They also ran a supportive, but relatively sneering editorial on us:

Enter “Occupy the Facts,” a new, Harvard-grown student group dedicated to providing an intellectual foundation and policy platform for the headless movement. “Occupy the Facts” appears to be a direct response to these allegations of incoherence; its goal, according to co-founder Peter D. Davis ’12, “is calling those peoples’ bluffs.” His colleague, Talia B. Lavin ’12, likewise said that “I’ve noticed this persistent criticism that the demands of the movement aren’t specific enough. The goal is to reach out to people who have heard a lot about Occupy but aren’t sure what Occupy is trying to achieve.”

Our democracy is ill-served by blind, amorphous rage, and so we are heartened to see some effort to channel this populist energy into constructive issue advocacy. We are living today with the consequences of the Tea Party’s failure to provide intelligible solutions to our most pressing national problems, and the effort to better inform and orient this new upsurge of populist agitation gives us hope that the same mistake will not be repeated. Furthermore, students who are passionate about public policy and civic engagement can only be a positive force in our society and for our political discourse.

Nevertheless, we fear that “Occupy the Facts” is ultimately solving only half of the problem, while the other half is one that is in dire need of addressing. It turns out that while Lounge was spot-on in his critique of the Tea Party movement’s lack of policy proposals, he was misdirected in his criticism of its lack of political infrastructure. As a political organ of the Republican Party, the Tea Party was an unqualified success, sweeping into office a nearly unprecedented number of archconservative activists at every level of government. For all of its intellectual failings, it did rekindle a spirit of political activism across a wide spectrum of the country. Occupy Wall Street, unfortunately, has thus far demonstrated no intention of replicating this achievement.

“Occupy the Facts” may help Occupy Wall Street overcome its ideological incoherence, but unless the movement can overcome its aversion to engaging within our existing political system, its odds for political success will remain long. Remember, the Tea Party has yet to develop its own version of “Occupy the Facts,” and while it would surely benefit from such an outfit, it has somehow managed to change the trajectory of American politics without one. The Tea Party managed to succeed politically in spite of its incoherence, and until the Occupiers start spending less time forming puppetry guilds and more time mobilizing grassroots support for politicians sympathetic to its goals, it has little hope of, in Davis’s words, “making the kind of change that a lot of people in our generation have been dreaming of.”

…to which we responded:

Three points, from one of the facilitators of Occupy the Facts:

1) We are not complicated, we do not need analyzing: we are simply a group of citizens who are doing what has been a common act of citizenship throughout American history: researching public problems and issues, making judgments of those issues, and packaging our research and advocacy into things to share with our fellow citizens.  Its as simple as that.  It’s not something we’re in a privileged position to do, and its not something that only we are doing.  It’s just an additional act of citizenship from some college students.

2)  We do not have the hubris to think that we are “providing an intellectual foundation and policy platform for the headless movement.”   There ARE intellectual foundations and policies arising out of the Occupy Movement, such as the 99% Declaration coming out of Occupy Philly.  What we do, is we TAKE those policies and analyze them!  We do NOT think that OWS has ideological incoherence…in fact, we think the Occupy movement is speaking loud and clear.  All we’re doing is acting as citizens: addressing the issues raised by the Occupy movement, analyzing them, coming to fact-based judgments as a group of citizens, and advocating for those judgments by sharing facts on all sides.

3) The Crimson editorial board has had (and continue to have) trouble wrapping its head around the newness and participatory nature of the Occupy Movement.  It does not fit into any of the boxes and attempts to categorize it is like attempting to categorize “The Internet” into some previous category when it was invented or “Capitalism” or “The City” into some previous category when it was invented…or “Democracy” into some previous category when it was invented.   Occupy is many things: a church of dissent, a new platform for democratic expression, a movement, a “dress rehearsal” for democracy, a spiritual power source for a grander movement to take back our country, a new ‘place’ for civic conversations, a media machine to change the conversation, and much more!  Oh, yah…it’s one more thing: an open platform that you can participate in!  So, Crimson, stop encouraging people to throw pot shots from the spectator stand and start encouraging them to be what the Occupy Movement has encouraged us in Occupy the Facts to be: ACTIVE, ENGAGED CITIZENS.

OTF unfortunately fizzled out with the Occupy movement as a whole.  However, it showed the potential of the “dynamic report-writing process” — the same used by the Nader’s Raiders — for getting reform-minded people together.