This is a quick reportback from last nights organising committee meeting for the UK esf, the committee will now meet every Thursday at 5.30pm at City Hall till Sunday 29th of Feb when there will be a general UK assembly to let people know the state of play and raise any amendments to decisions taken by the committee before the European assembly on the 6th and 7th which is our deadline for presenting a costed proposal for the London ESF to go ahead.

The meeting was called from Saturdays general assembly where it was agreed subject to amendments the proposal presented by Alex Gordon of a basic organising structure, which is based on discussions with the organisers of WSF mumbai, and the ESF in Paris and the international secretariat of the WSF who have seen it and are happy with it. The organising committee is now in a position to get to work and set up all the working groups needed for the event - which are a lot! The groups that already exist will, apart from the practicalities group remain unaffected, apart from being supplemented with more people and will report back work already done to the meeting next week and hopefully as the calls are now going out to the social movements in the UK we will have more and more people joining us over time!

The meeting was very broad, participating off the top of my head were, Unison, GLA, Amicus, Natfhe, RMT, WDM, Friends of the Earth, Red Pepper, the Muslim Association of Britain, London disability network, Globalise Resistance, Stop the War Coalition, Campaign against Climate Change, CPGB, Just Peace, Unite aganist Fascism, National assembly against Rascism, NUS, Kurdish community reps, Turkish community reps, faith based groups, people from the eastern european national mobilising groups and quite a few more, all groups are in the process of signing up and again this committee will grow rapidly now and sub-divide into a number working groups.

The meeting went through a number of the practical realities that we face, I'll give an outline of a few as best as I can remember:

Money: estimated cost is around £1.6 million around half of that can come from registrations unlike Paris we have no State support apart from GLA, in Paris they had 3.5 million euros to start with from the state!!! Our event will be more like Mumbai in that it will have to be funded by the movement itself, the largest funds will come from the GLA and the unions and maybe a couple of the bigger NGO's - it's important to realise that just becuase these people put in the funds they do not determine the content of the event, which is of course decided by the groups and organisations putting in seminars and workshops and the European process determining the plenaries.

Venue: Alexander Palace is one possible site, although other venues are being looked at as Ally Pally has problems with it too, it has been provisionally booked for around the second week in October (any earlier the europeans claimed would conflict with their holidays!!!) although of course this provisinal booking, just like when you book a party venue has a time limit on it and we will lose first preference if we don't get the money or get a different venue - obviously with an event this size (estimates are done on the basis of 40,000 to 50,000 participants) most large venues in London are already booked! A group of people voluteered to look into this

Accomodation: Again unlike Paris we are not able to use municipal halls or gyms becuase there are no public ones in London to use!!!! Many people from the faith based groups present said they would look into staying in Mosques, church halls etc....a group of people voluteered to look into this

Website, communication, transparency etc...: It is urgently required to set up the website, a division of computer people from Amicus is looking into this - this is important for a number of reasons. Firstly money, in Mumbai they had over 80,000 pre-registered paid up particpants in Paris they had no where near that number because their website didn't work to take the payments - as we will depend on registration money for a huge chunk of our event, a secure website is of some urgency. It was also stated that this will obviously allow us to have a truly open process where there is ONE website with minutes of meetings, contact details, an email list and not as now a number of lists and emails that have only vague connections with each other, causing untold problems of getting information to people. Similarly when the seminar process begins to happen there will be hundreds of applications that need sorting etc...so the site needs to work. Different teams will be able to edit different sections of the site.

The committee will appoint (presuming the money is there) a team of Staff to help organise the event in Paris, a team worked full-time for 6 months to get the event ready, and the organsing committee met every week for half a day...it was emphasised that it is important to understand the vast amount of work this is going to be.

Finally the committee will discuss the proposed amendments next week, once the groups who agree with the principal founding document have had time to look at them, this week around 10,000 London based groups will be contacted to be asked to participate and we will soon have a letter of invitation, bank account details for donations and various appeals to send out to all our networks, anyone groups and organisations can join the committee subject to a current minimum affliation of £50 going up to several thousands for larger organisations, again this is based on Paris and Mumbai, in the end Paris had around 300 affliated groups and organisations, we obviously hope to have many more.

So in summary a mammouth task ahead! Time to get to work!

hope this is useful,

noel x