Yesterday morning Mas Kimball of Oak Bluffs packed his bags for a three-day trip to New York. Specifically, Zucotti Park. It’s his fourth trip since October.

“You get the criticism, oh you’re just being idealistic,” he said one day earlier. “We love the way children are free-spirited and idealistic but then it’s beaten out of us as we get older. Luckily I’m 62 years old and it still hasn’t been beaten out of me.”

Wearing a crisp collared shirt and slacks, Mr. Kimball, a celebrated Island tennis pro and retired technology consultant, looks anything but the part of the downtrodden 99 per center. But an early education in nonviolent resistance as a Washington D.C. organizer for the 5th avenue Viet Nam Peace Parade Committee and an unflagging optimism in the power of technology to enact social change has brought Mr. Kimball to Wall Street.

“The impact has already been huge,” he said. “This movement in three months is where with the antiwar movement it took us a year and a half to get to. Part of that is the Internet. Information can be disseminated much faster. Everyone’s talking about it. When I go to the dentist or I’m on the ferry, it will always come up, and if it doesn’t I make sure it does.”

When Mr. Kimball first arrived in New York city in October, he was introduced to the unique culture of the Occupy movement. Every day in New York there are what are known as general assemblies, free-flowing yet orderly discussions open to anyone and moderated by consensus through a burgeoning vocabulary of hand gestures familiar to occupiers worldwide. Hands up to signal approval, hands out in front to signal a lukewarm reception and hands down for the off-topic or offensive speaker. A cross-armed “block” signal is reserved for the most insufferable speakers.

“Everything is done by consensus,” he said. “People always say I don’t see how it’s going to work and I felt the same way when I first got involved, I was very skeptical. I thought we’re never going to get everything done. This is ridiculous, we can’t even agree 51 per cent in Congress, but it was amazing how well it worked.”

A survey of Wednesday’s listings of meetings on the New York general assemblies Web site reads like the curriculum of a progressive night school: Nonviolent Communication Workshop, Hearing on Clason Point Post Office Closing, Kundalini Yogic Meditation Teach-In, Stand Up for Public Schools, People of Color Working Group: Organizing through a Racial Justice Framework, arts and culture music working group meeting, etc. But only a handful of the general assemblies and other Occupy meetings take place at the now-legendary Zucotti park. Mr. Kimball’s visits to New York, where his computer and organizational skills quickly earned him a spot on several Occupy working groups and spokescouncils (where official Occupy policy is coordinated), have at times seemed more white collar than Woodstock.

“The unions and a couple of law firms have been very cooperative in letting us have office space down there,” he said. “It’s amazing how well it’s organized. Don’t believe everything you read in the paper.”

Now Mr. Kimball’s focus is on uniting the nationwide movement.

“One of the things I’m going down to New York for is to try to coordinate the communication between the various Occupys,” he said. “There is a new group that’s come out called InterOccupy and what’s happening now is we’re vetting the people who are in that organization . . . They have a Web site, they have the facilities to do conference calls with thousands of people all at once. The whole idea is to be able to communicate without being physically present and reach out to people who can’t be there. Our sense is that for every person that’s at an Occupy there are hundreds if not thousands of people who are behind the movement but they have jobs, they have kids or they just can’t get down there.”

He doesn’t know what a successful movement would look like and readily admits that the diverse movement doesn’t readily lend itself to the facile analyses and sound bites of what he calls “corporate media.”

“Besides the fact that people are upset about what’s going on and they feel like they’ve gotten the shaft, essentially the message is people have to raise their consciousness,” he said. “It’s not about attacking a problem, it’s not attacking global climate change, or the banking system, or foreclosures, or corporate money in politics. It’s all those things, but if you look for a solution for one thing it usually doesn’t work because the whole system is just so screwed up.”

In his forays to New York he has met cagey undercover right-wing documentarians, steely-eyed twenty-somethings vowing to Occupy for a decade, and even the former Philadelphia chief of police Ray Lewis, who has made headlines for joining, and even being arrested, in solidarity with the ostensibly anti-establishment movement.

“I asked him, ‘You were a policeman for 35 years, how can you be here across the line from the New York city police? How did you come to this point in your life?’ He said, ‘Well for many of those years I was in a very rough neighborhood and I saw how people suffered and it was just not right. When this started I said, I’ve got to be there.”

Last weekend Mr. Kimball spoke about his experience in New York with the Occupy movement, and its culture of consensus, at a meeting of the Martha’s Vineyard Democrats.

“At the meeting someone said, ‘Well these problems are at the national scale, Congress can’t come to a decision about anything, they’re all butting heads.’ I said, ‘Give me a break. We have a blinker here that they want to make a roundabout and this has been going on for years. We’re just a little tiny place, don’t give me crap about how it’s at the national level. We do it right here because we’ve forgotten how to really speak to each other.”