Occupy Love Street, as a collective, is posting this Statement Regarding Transparency, inspired by the November 5th, 2011 Statement posted by Occupy Together.  More importantly, we are posting this statement in a collective desire to encourage and promote transparency in Social Networks and organizations all over the world. 

Occupy Love Street is supportive of individuals stepping up and making contributions that support the movement. In fact, this is how Occupy Love Street began, by independently taking it upon ourselves to add whatever support we could which resulted in our small contribution to the movement. We believe in keeping our name and our materials open for public use because we feel that they belong to the movement and those people that support it.

Each member of Occupy Love Street has the option to place the wish list of their local Occupy Movement camp or resource group on their personal member profile page.  We do this so that when people use this website to network worldwide, they also are promoting the needs of their local Occupy movements that otherwise might not have been known to the people they meet on through this website.  We are in no position to tell ANYONE what to do with their money and if these individuals wanted to use their funds for their local occupy causes, that is their prerogative.

To clarify, Occupy Love Street, as a collective, has nothing to do with the production or funding of local or regional Occupy Movement camps all over the world.

Occupy Love Street has no access to who contributes money to these groups or how much they contribute because we, as a collective, are not involved in the direct funding of local regional Occupy Movement tent sites in any way. Any questions regarding requests for contributions to local Occupy Movement sites should be directed towards the individuals who produced and promoted the request. Again, we have no access to any of their financial records because we have not been involved in their fundraising team .

Occupy Love Street has never solicited any donations or monetary contributions beyond the need to create and maintain our media outreach abilities and computers. The Occupy Together website states the following:

“Shortly after the launch of our site, we began experiencing massive amounts of traffic during the daytime hours which caused the servers to crash regularly due to inadequate bandwidth.  We had a private individual contribute towards our first $1000 of hosting in order to maintain a functional site to provide the information on the growing movement. We moved to MayFirst on a virtual dedicated server and pay a membership fee of $300 a month to belong to the co-operative hosting organization. Beyond this, our time and other expenses have been completely funded out of our own pockets.”

Here at Occupy Love Street, we started our website less than a month and a 1/2 (45 days) after the September 17th start of the Occupy Movement in New York City, but will not be able to pay $300 per month so we have our website hosted on a ning server which gives us a large amount of bandwidth to prevent crashing at only $239 per year. In order to pay for hosting on this server, we had a private individual contribute towards our first $200 of hosting in order to maintain a functional site to provide the information on the growing movement. We placed much of the remainder of the site (the blog) on a Wordpress site hosted at LoveSetFreeProject.org on a shared server and pay a membership fee of $100 a month to belong to the not-for-profit webdesign and socialmedia outreach collective with much needed telephone support 12 hours per day, 5 days per week. Beyond this, our time and other expenses have been completely funded out of our own pockets.

While we believe in the importance of transparency, we also believe in an individual’s right to privacy and respect this individual’s request to stay anonymous. However, for the sake of transparency, here is a record of the transaction with the deletion of personal information.

Item Title:
$200 to Help Contribute to the Occupy Love Street Website Annual Cost for Working Group Access
Date:
Nov 1, 2011
Time:
17:55:56 PDT

Payment Type:
eCheck

In addition, another expense that we have is our podcasting account, which enables us to empower people to conduct podcast interviews having no tech training and using only a telephone.  Our first two podcast broadcasts were on October 31st, 2011, the first day of the 7 day free trial.  The payment record is below:

PODCAST INVOICE STATEMENT:

Your podcast payment was processed successfully.  A payment of $4.95 was applied to your account.

Payment Information:

   Date: 2011-11-07 07:41:02
   Payment Amount: $4.95
   Payment Type: Card
   Card Number: *************

Invoice Summary:

   Previous Balance: $0.00
   Current Charges: -$4.95
   Payments Received: $4.95
   Ending Balance: $0.00

From the beginning, as a team of volunteers, we decided that the work that we were doing through this site (and off of this site while traveling the country for Occupy Movement interviews) was more important than any one of us. Therefore, the anonymity of the team was not just to protect our privacy but to prevent any single individual from overshadowing the movement or to appear to be in any kind of “leadership” role. Because of this, we decided to go only by our rightfully chosen names (see the nymwars article on wikipedia or the Taking Back Your Rights article on our website for more background) and rely on our actions to speak for our intentions.

Transparency is important in this movement. We also understand the importance of individual freedoms and rights as well as consensus among the group’s members. As it stands, the Occupy Love Street team has agreed to continue to go by our rightfully chosen names only. If at some point in time new information comes to light or the feelings of the members change, we will reconsider this position.

Inevitably, there are going to be those who are quick to react and accuse those they suspect of having “ill intentions,” even if those suspected are working in the greater good of the cause. A certain level of skepticism is healthy and needed to protect the movement from being co-opted. However, it reaches a dangerous level when accusations are not based in reason or factual information. There is nothing to protect anyone from such accusations or insinuations and in many circumstances, no amount of evidence would prove contrary to someone else’s beliefs or baseless distrust. We would rather put our efforts towards working for the movement than spend our time defending ourselves. Instead, our plan is to continue to show our intentions through our actions and to maintain this level of transparency as we move forward.

We hope that our decision to publish a Statement of Transparency will encourage other Social networking sites to do the same and join us in our effort to create a better, safer, and more accountable social web for Internet users from around the world.

You can also find a permanent link to this article on our first collective blog post found here.

Thank you for being involved in the Occupy Movement.

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"The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

"Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

-Arundhati Roy, from her speech, Confronting Empire