Summing up (Launch report)
Launch report, 27th March 2004:
programme | workshops | indymedia lab | film room | ideas | feedback | media | finance | summing up
Moving Forward
The day was never intended to reach any collective decisions among the whole group. Nevertheless, it is clear that some concrete things have come out of it. These include:
- The Sheffield Distributed Library Project. This project utilises internet connectivity in order to link people who want to borrow or lend items such as books, films and CDs who are in the same geographic area. The project resulted from a chance meeting at the SSF launch and is already up and running.
- The campaign around debt and advertising credit unions. Find out more here.
- Setting up an internet area for green networking here
Critical Appraisal
Before the launch there was alot of disagreements about the direction we were taking the reply was often "this is the beggining not the end", we must remember this when thinking about the launch. We should not go overboard with the energy of the event at all, it is true that the event was very well organised but to be fair the people who led the organisation are very together people anyway and have experience in these matters - although this does not take away from the huge amount of effort (of all types) that individuals invested in the event.
Not enough ethnic minority people were attracted to the launch, although quite a few were contacted. It will take time to build trust with communities in sheffield that have been ignored in the past. I am glad that some religious groups turned up, that shows we are breaking down old left boundries but we must cerment our links with them.
There was no childcare or crech available.
Moving forward after the launch it will be easy to say 'loads of things happened at the launch we are a success', we must avoid saying that for many reasons. We cannot and should not let the success of the launch paralyse us, we must always push ourselves further and constantly prove that we mean buissness. We should not just allow ourselves to slip into the 'sexy' issues, the bread and butter local issues are the easiest to ignore, therefore a special effort must be made to conquer the fear of local campaigning and get stuck in. Unfortuanatly there were far more ideas generated than people to carry them through.
We cannot rest on our laurels because currently we have none.