Occupy Philadelphia - Day 13 - Update

As of Saturday at 4pm, Julia and I counted 225 tents at Occupy Philadelphia (195 personal tents and 30 work tents/canopies). The media team put out a press release saying 300. We were relatively strict, but we did include two child play tents. A more generous count method would have given 240 tents, but I don't see how they could have reached 250, unless they didn't actually count the tents. Hopefully they aren't intentionally exaggerating.

The Saturday march had around 500 people (loose estimate, but not 1000 as claimed by the press release). About the same as last Saturday's march.

In general Occupy Philadelphia is going fairly well. The Saturday General Assembly had around 230 people (up from 150 on Friday and 100 on Thursday). My guess is the weekend attracts more people. This interestingly may lead to different voting results - probably a more moderate and older crowd on the weekends.

The library tent was destroyed by the wind, however we have got a canopy and the library committee is working to strengthen that.

I'm concerned that the outreach isn't as active as it could be. We haven't spent much time discussing outreach at the General Assembly and outreach is one of the most important things we can do (tents and food are perhaps the others). I've seen the outreach table a couple times, but haven't seen anyone at it and haven't seen a SINGLE outreach flyer which is very perplexing. We should be passing out thousands of flyers.

There are people working on labor outreach and a recently formed inter-faith committee. And those are key elements to outreach.