A. Founding goals.
On Sunday March 29, 2015, eight persons gathered for the first time in Leiden to discuss their ideas about society. During that gathering, the following things were decided upon:
1. We have officially started a discussion/action club that will henceforth be gathering weekly on a set day.
2. The set day at which the gatherings will be held will be at Sunday, starting from 20:00. The location for these gatherings will for the present be Nieuwe Rijn 2 in Leiden. (The day and location of the meeting may change over time.)
3. In order to challenge the traditional concept of identity and what it means to be a group, the group will not be given a Set Name. Instead, a new name will be chosen at the start of each meeting which the group members present find fit for that meeting.
4. In order to have a raison d'être, the group has made it its first official goal to come up with an utopia, as a desirable alternative to the current state of affairs in society, an end-state that we would happily work towards. After the establishment of such an utopia, the group may come up with new practical goals in the spirit of the utopia and start to realize these goals through the means of action.
B. Discussion questions.
In order to reach the group goals, we will focus on answering the following discussion questions:
1. What concrete societal problems are there (if any) that we can identify?
2. What possible solutions to these problems are there (if any) that we can identify?
3. Can we create an utopian vision that encompasses those solutions and (if yes) what will this utopian vision look like?
4. In what way(s) can the utopian vision (if we succeed in shaping one) be achieved and what is our (group’s) role in the process?
C. The manifesto.
In order to keep track of our progress, each discussion question will be concluded with a written document containing a detailed answer(s) to the discussion question. This will result in four written documents which could be titled (1) Societal problems, (2) Solutions to societal problems, (3) An utopia, and (4) Working towards utopia.
These written documents will be combined in what will be come to known as our 'manifesto'. This manifesto will include all our thoughts that have come up in the discussions overall, and will serve as a nice summary of our findings.
Do note that discussion questions might change during the course of discussion, resulting in a different structure.