Network Brainstorm

Transposed from an older blog

Way back when, well Febuary 2004 I started volunteering in the Active Supporters Unit at Greenpeace. One of the first things I pulled together was a meeting between key people in London to try and organise a big event where all the local groups took to the streets at the same time.

The meeting was a bit wet, and we all got depressed by the fact there only seemed to be 30 people in all of London willing to volunteer to do stuff with Greenpeace.

Then we went to the pub. Oh the pub, beer is the root of all inspiration.

So, hic, 30 people, hic say we get 32, that could be 16 teams of 2, hic yes I'll have another Guinness, if each team did two events one in the morning and one in the afternoon, hic, thats 32 events, or one in every London Borough, that's be cool.

So we did it, and it worked. OK we recruited lots of new people to come help, but we hosted 30+ campaigning events all round London, collecting loads of nasty GM Milk, swapping it for lovely organic milk FoC. The nasty GM milk got delivered back to Sainsbury's HQ in a big direct action, but that's a different story.

So we had some more Network meetings, which got bigger until last October it turned into an unproductive waste of time.

So this time we had uber facist facilitaion by Richard. We'd identified different reasons to get together, but this meeting was to come up with ideas for how London networks could work together.

You weren't even suppossed to come unless you had a kick arse idea, but then everybody was invited.

So one of the most productive meeting to date, lots of cool ideas, putting the Climate Summit back, but unleashing the idea of Urban 4x4 polls, which turned into a great success