Sussex Not For Sale

Hi.

today was supposed to be the first of the education not for sale talks. it was mandated to be an introduction to restructuring, and though people had prepared speaches, due to poor attendence we ended up just having an open ended discussion, which was actually quite fruitful.

For one thing, i think there has perhaps been some confusion about what the nature of the talks was supposed to be, and how exactly they were supposed to fit into the rest of the structure of the campaign.

In my origional conception how it would work would be like this:

1. The reading group would meet and read a certain book, or a few texts, and discuss it amongst themselves.

2. Some people in the reading group meetings would delegate 2 or three people to meet up at another time to organise a talk on the subject of the texts they had read for the following week, and book a room as well as perhaps some other speakers who were not part of the reading group to talk on a similar theme. the meeting to organise this would be the monday "talk organising meeting"

3. this talk would be advertised by the comms group, having been informed of the necessary info by the talk organising group

4. ideally lots of people would come to the talk, listen to it learn a lot of stuff they didnt know before and which would inspire them to dedicate themselves even more to the campaign. then have an amazingly stimulating open discussion about the theme, at the end of which a vauge feeling of "we all pretty much agree on the basics of this, isnt it great that we're all coming together in such an amazing way"

5. the campaigns effectiveness would be increased, and knowledge would no longer solely be in the hands of those who had gone to the reading group, but also be in the hands of the many, many people who would gladly come to a big open talk, but be put off by the thought of reading a lot of stuff, especially given that they have so much other stuff to be reading, ie for all these courses that we non-sabb students are doing

 so please can people who are going to the reading group tommorrow come to the talk organising meeting on monday, which i guess is when it will be, though really it would be better if both it, and the comms meeting could be on friday to give more time to actually do all the publicity neccessary. also i think the talks should not be on wednesday any more, i dont know how that got decided, but loads of people have half days on wednesday so its probably the worse possible time. what was wrong with tuesdays?

i'm saying all this because i have to go to london tomorrow and so wont be able to come to the main campaign meeting at 5 myself, though if i can i will try and come to the reading group.