Tootfinder

Here's their press release from this morning:
Alt text here instead of in images due to length:
NEWS RELEASE Embargoed until April 24, 7:00am PST
Divest From Death USA
Media Contact: Media Liaisons, USC Divest From Death Coalition USCSolidarityOccupation@protonmail.com
USC Divest From Death Coalition to Begin Gaza Solidarity Occupation in University of
Southern California Campus
LOS ANGELES. (April 24, 2023) — USC Divest From Death Coalition today announced theit occupation of USC's Alumni Park, where the increasingly controversial 2024 Commencement is currently set to take place. The students taking part in the Gaza Solidarity Occupation are planning to occupy USC until their demands are met. The coalition joins other students groups across the country in the National Students for Justice in Palestine's "Popular University for Gaza," a coordinated mass movement of students, faculty and staff that disrupts universities, creating climates that push universities to answer community and international calls for full divestment from the Zionist entity, and all of the industries that sustain it.
1. End War Profiteering and Investment in Genocide. USC must fully disclose and divest its finances and endowment from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine, including the US Military and weapons manufacturing. USC must comumit to accountability through full transparency of their financial investments.
2. Complete Academic Boycott of Israel. USC must end its study abroad programs at Hebrew University's Rothenberg International School and Reichman University and sever all academic ties and research cooperation with Israeli universities.
3. Protect free speech on campus and provide full amnesty to all students, staff, and faculty disciplined, penalized, or fired for their pro-Palestine ackivism. USC must abide by their self- proclaimed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion values and implement material policies protecting the safety of its marginalized students.
4. Stop the Displacement, from South Central to Palestine. No land grabs, whether in South Central, Tongva territory, or Palestine. Cease expansion, provide reparations, and support housing for low-income South Central residents. No development by USC without genuine community control.
5. No Policing on Campus. End the targeted repression and harassment of Black, Brown, and Palestinian students and their allies on and off campus, including through university disciplinary processes. Defund the Department of Public Safety and disclose and sever all ties with the LAPD.
6. End the Silence on the Genocide in Palestine. Release a public statement calling for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza, denouncing the ongoing genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people, and call on government officials o do so too.
"I'm participating in the Gaza Solidarity Occupation at USC to highlight and amplify the anti- zionist Jewish voice at USC and be in solidarity with the Palestinian fight for liberation," says a student organizer from USC's chapter of Jewish Voices for Palestine (JVP). "JVP USC feels our voice is especially important right now as many people at USC and across the country are equating zionism and Judaism, but we are here to say they are not the same! We stand by our belief of free speech, resistance to oppressive systems and solidarity with our valedictorian Asna and all other college campuses where pro-Palestine voices have been silenced."
The USC Divest From Death Coalition establishes the occupation mo st fundamentally in solidarity with the people of Palestine as they resist genocide and continue in their struggle for liberation. The occupation is also in resistance to attempts by USC and other universities to suppress the student movement for Palestine on its campuses, in resistance to the silencing of students that criticize the state of Israel, in resistance to the university administrators and boards of trustees who profit off the genocide of Palestinians; The students taking part are firm in their commitment to speaking out against the university's complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
"USC's funding of the ongoing genocide perpetuated by the zionist entity is reflective of maintaining imperialist interests abroad, as well as solidifying the shared ideology of amerikan and zionist institutions in preserving racialized oppression," says a student organizer of the Gaza Solidarity Occupation. "To not stand in opposition to the expressly racist violence here and abroad is to ignore the calls for solidarity demanded by the majority of the world. USC acts in accordance with these oppressions, and to call against this is to recognize both the inhumanity of these systems and our own humanity in opposing them."
We have chosen to use the word "occupation” instead of "encampment" to draw attention to USC as an occupying force on unceded Gabrieleno/Tongva land, an occupying force in South Central through its expansion into, gentrification of, and destruction of the existing community, and as a complicit power in Israeli occupation of Palestine.
About USC Divest From Death
In joining the national "Cut Ties with Genocide: Divest from Death" campaign, USC Divest From Death pushes our institutions to divest from companies complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, in all its iterations, alongside thousands of campuses. The coalition's push for the advancement of the key demand points on campus is the first steps towards the liberation of all people by ending the complicity of the University of Southern California in the violence enacted on our communities. Through the intentional act of coalition building, the students of USC realize that we are part of an interconnected fight for freedom taking place on campus, in our communities and homelands. We envision campuses free from militarism, occupation, and war through the implementation of divestment at USC
About Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)
The student movement for the liberation of Palestine first began in the 1950s through the formation of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS). From the U.S. to Palestine, GUPS chapters galvanized thousands of students towards a liberated Palestine. The 90s” wave of corrupt politicians and faulty deals changed the liberation movement as we knew it and many institutions, including the student movement, collapsed. In the absence of a Palestinian student movement, organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine emerged across occupied Turtle Island (U.S. and Canada) as a way to educate, advocate, and mobilize in support for Palestinian liberation. Nearly two decades after the formation of the first Students for Justice in Palestine, the movement for Palestine has taken colleges and universities across North America by storm. With over 200 campus Palestine solidarity organizations across the continent, students have been leaders in uplifting demands for freedom, Justice, and equality for the Palestinian people.

The Active Communities Plan isn't dead but is now the Biking and Rolling plan and has been delayed "to be responsive to community needs." It will seek to find ways "goals can be reworked to focus on vibrancy, economic vitality and thriving communities." #BikeSF

I've worked on community groups for a long long time, and the only good thing I can say about most codes of conduct is that their existence proves the group fought past the army of dudes who think they get in the way of important things like letting them dominate the group.
But seriously, most codes of conduct are worth about one bit of information: "has cared at all (y/n)”
There's a single code of conduct document that was extremely influential by being designed to be copy-and-pastable: the document was given a specific name, work was done to propagate the idea that all you had to do was adopt it as-is. Drop in and ready to go!
The only problem there is that doesn't work. A long, legalistic set of rules about what's Not Allowed with no actual policy for enforcement invites a bunch of problems: a long list can be treated as exhaustive, so people will do things not on the list then cry foul when you tell them to stop. A lack of enforcement policy invites a binary approach: is a person good (did nothing on the list) or bad (did something on the list)? If they're bad, kick them out, if they're good, keep them.
This is bad.
The actual rules that will be enforced will be much more subtle, will favor people in positions of power, and will not yield results consistent with the stated values of various factions of the group. Arguments will ensue about whether or not something "really counts" as an item on the list, because often the actual decision being made but not explicitly stated is “do we kick out some important person to the group for some broken way they relate to others in the group?”
The other way they get used is "here's a person doing something some part of the group doesn't like, which rule can we use to kick them out?”
These are both broken approaches that don't actually reflect the relations of the group, and they lead to punitive and destructive methods of enforcement, rather than healing and reparative methods. This leads to conflict within the group being turned into a code of conduct violation while at the same time allowing outsiders to weaponize the code of conduct by provoking those conflicts.

The Downtown Nasty Women Social Group is a grassroots community of activists working together to make positive change in people’s every day lives.
We believe that the strongest America is one that values the freedom, equality, and safety of each individual regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, ethnicity, or immigration status.
https://

"The speculative imaginary of Matriarchal Design Futures counters the values and priorities created by white supremacy and capitalism. It values collectivism over individualism, cooperation over competition, inclusivity over elitism, and human rights over profit."
Co-created by Ayako Takase and Heather Snyder Quinn (with community members)
Download the workbook:

Matriarchal Design Futures
Matriarchal Design Futures is a non-capitalistic, non-hierarchical pedagogical framework centering the practices and values of caregiving and nurturing, which holds for all identities: for caregivers, mothers, those who are not mothers, women, men, and nonbinary alike.

Multi-Generative Agent Collective Decision-Making in Urban Planning: A Case Study for Kendall Square Renovation
Jin Gao, Hanyong Xu, Luc Dao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11314

Multi-Generative Agent Collective Decision-Making in Urban Planning: A Case Study for Kendall Square Renovation
In this study, we develop a multiple-generative agent system to simulate community decision-making for the redevelopment of Kendall Square's Volpe building. Drawing on interviews with local stakeholders, our simulations incorporated varying degrees of communication, demographic data, and life values in the agent prompts. The results revealed that communication among agents improved collective reasoning, while the inclusion of demographic and life values led to more distinct opinions. These find…

Columbia University President announces decision to arrest student protestors.
#ColumbiaUniversity #FreePalestine #NYC #NewYorkCity
Fwd: Addressing Unfolding Events on Campus
Thu, Apr 18 at 1:28PM
- Forwarded message - From: Minouche Shafik <officeofthepresident@columbia.edu> Date: Thu, Apr 18, 2024 at 13:22
Subject: Addressing Unfolding Events on Campus
To: <PRESIDENT@lists.columbia.ed>
To the Columbia University community:
This morning. I had to make a decision that I hoped would never be necessary. I have always said that the safety of our community was my top priority and that we needed to preserve an environment where everyone could learn in a supportive context. Out of an abundance of concern for the safety of Columbia's campus, I authorized the New York Police Department to begin clearing the encampment from the South Lawn of Morningside campus that had been set up by students in the early hours of Wednesday morming.
I took this extraordinary step because these are extraordinary circumstances. The individuals who established the encampment violated a long list of rules and policies. Through direct conversations and in writing, the university provided multiple notices of these violations. including a written warning at 7:15 p.m. on Wednesday notifying students who remained in the encampment as of 9:00 p.m. that they would face suspension pending investigation. We also tried through a number of channels to engage with their concerns and offered to continue discussions if they agreed to disperse
I regret that all of these attempts to resolve the situation were rejected by the students involved. As a result, NYPD officers are now on campus and the process of clearing the encampment is underway.
Protests have a storied history at Columbia and are an essential component of free speech in America and on our campus. We work hard to balance the rights of students to express political views with the need to protect other students from rhetoric that amouits to harassment and discrimination. We updated our protest policy to allow demonstrations on very short notice and in prime locations in the middle of campus while still allowing students to get to class, and fabs and libraries to operate. The current encampment violates all of the new policies, severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students
Columbia is committed to academic freedom and to the opportunity for students and faculty to engage in political expression—within established rules and with respect for the safety of all. The policies we have in place around demonstrations are in place to support both the right to expression and the safety and functioning of our university.
Prior to taking this action. I complied with the requirements of Section 444 of the University Statutes.
This is a challenging moment and these are steps that I deeply regret having to take. I encourage us all to show compassion and remember the values of empathy and respect that draw us together as a Columbia comnminity.
Sincerely,
Minouche Shafik
President, Columbia University in the City of New York