North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress 2015; Summary and Notes

"Between the 26th of February and the 1st of March, 2015, and only with the help of my supporters on Patreon, I attended the 2015 North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress in New York City (hashtag #NABIG15). There I witnessed all 42 speakers across all 15 sessions, including both public meetings before and after the conference sessions.

It will be difficult to fully convey what I witnessed, as it is virtually impossible to transfer through mere words, the levels of emotion and passion that were originally attached to those words. This is in itself a key point to understand. This was not just some academic conference of raw numbers and dry analysis and discussion. This was a group of people coming together from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, all projecting a level of passion far beyond economics and academia, and all present to discuss the idea of simply giving people money to meet their basic needs.

What happened was essentially a drawing of a line in our societal sand.

This far and no further.

Having read James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention, I couldn’t help but feel to some degree a little of what he must have felt then, a sense that what I was attempting to faithfully record was somehow potentially historic in precedent. Speaking to others, this feeling of something outside the normal experience did seem mostly unanimous among those who have been to any of the previous thirteen NABIG Congresses. There was something in the air in this one that was different than all before. This one involved fires that had been lit within people.

With that said, the following is a summary in a more readily shareable form, so as to better enable the sharing with others of what felt like the more powerful sentiments made and discussions explored over the course of the Congress."

Source and Entire Article
https://medium.com/basic-income/notes-of-discussions-in-the-north-american-basic-income-guarantee-congress-of-2015-56607ceb9362