Occupy Wall Street's 'Think Tank' Soldiers on, Nonconfrontationally Winter has not been easy for Occupy Wall Street. Violent confrontations between protesters and police in Oakland, New York and elsewhere have threatened to dominate news coverage of the movement. On Jan. 12, the New York City General Assembly posted on its Web site that its offices would be temporarily shuttered due to an anonymous complaint to the Department of Buildings that people were camping out there. A couple of days later, with new donations drying up, the governing body decided to freeze its budget in order to regroup and think how best to rebound in the spring. "We were arguing about money every day instead of thinking about action," said Haywood Carey, one of the group's accountants. We don't want that. But there is at least one facet of the New York contingent that is still going strong: the People's Think Tank, a sort of intellectual nucleus around which people have gathered since the beginning of the movement to discuss such topics as health care, food, energy, banking and the influence of corporate money in politics. In the early days of Occupy Wall Street, on the northeast corner of Zuccotti Park, people joined the Think Tank each day from noon to 6 p.m. to talk about the direction of the movement. Every conversation was diligently recorded. Those daily forums continue today. After the police forcibly cleared Zuccotti Park on Nov. 15, a small group of facilitators continued to hold discussions in the barricaded park and elsewhere in New York. On Jan. 17, during an event called Occupy Congress that drew hundreds of participants from around the country to Washington, D.C. (many of whom are still there), about 70 people gathered for a Think Tank discussion on the West Lawn of the Capitol. In November, New York University began archiving the Think Tank's recordings in its Taminent Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive. Michael Nash, director of the library, said he expected the archived recordings to begin appearing online by January 2013. "I think OWS is the most exciting thing that's happened in radical politics since maybe the 1960s," Mr. Nash said. It's changed political discourse in ways you couldn't have imagined six months ago. Back in November, The New York Times profiled Tim Weldon, 35, a founder and frequent facilitator of the People's Think Tank. On Jan. 17, The Times caught up with Mr. Weldon in Washington, during Occupy Congress. In this follow-up video, Weldon explains how he's tried to go mobile with the Think Tank and expand it into New York's outer boroughs. "I support Oakland and people taking to the streets, but I'd take an intellectual gathering any day," he said. I'm not here to shout at police.