Report 1) by MJR / slef

The Norwich forum on Sat 4 Sep was a success, seeing a reasonable number of people from diverse groups from around the region overcoming the terrible transport to meet for discussions.

A small pre-forum discussion on education, capitalism and alternatives interested some, based around the paper you can find on this site's online forum and with expert opinion from its author. At the end, the booklet "down wiv skool" was distributed.

After lunch, the main forum started with a brief introduction to the forum, schedule and history, then workshops were held on topics including: police powers and prisoner support; identity cards; Indymedia Cambridge and possibly East Anglia; and Hutchison-Wampoa's roles in East Anglian ports and Burma. In the second plenary, planning continued for future forums in Ipswich and Cambridge. Finally, the forum concluded with reports of recent past and near future activities.

Personally, I found the forum in general interesting and useful, but the workshop immensely frustrating and annoying. That was probably my own poor choice of workshop to attend, however. I think others were better, from the reports. The scheduling seemed to work pretty well, but maybe moving the reports earlier in the day may give more of the background needed to help people choose between offered workshops. Then the forum could close by planning future forums, which seems a neater conclusion.