July 28th - Annual General Meeting

by Igor Srdoc B.Sc.Com

The first meeting that N.E.T. has organised has been held in the Swedish city of Umea from 28th to 30th of July 2006. N.E.T. plans to organise such meetings on a yearly basis in order to discuss various topics that the Board and functional sequences consider to be most important for the organisation and beyond. This year's conference's focus is on the establishment of the organisation in its physical and virtual environment.

Agenda

Friday

Arrival and Orientation

Saturday

10:00 Meet-up for a paper exercise on what a technate might be and how it might work
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Informal discussion about N.E.T.
16:00 Dinner
17:00 Presentations

Presentations

Introduction
Website
Energy survey
Key ideas
NET
Vote on the new symbol for N.E.T.

Sunday

10:00 Bike ride / Departures
12:00 lunch
13:00 – 16:00 either more bike riding or more informal discussion / Departure.

Report

The Umeå meeting was planned to be held for the weekend 28th to 30th of July in Umeå and be the first of a set of planned annual meetings. The schedual below was worked out. But due to the lack of travel planning, the meeting failed to assemble enough of participants to be classified as a conference, and thus the agenda was completely rewritten.

The schedual was never put into effect, due to the above-mentioned facts.

Minutes

1. A paper exercise was conducted on how a technate could be run and organised.

2. A discussion was held regarding the Umeå group and a Peak Oil event with Steve Hinton

Enrique will sort out the bank account for NET and aims to have the forms within a week.
Sten will contact SNF with a view to establishing funding for the event.
Andrew will provide Sten with more info on Steve Hinton
Andrew will design some leaflets for the peak oil event that could also be used for recruitment.
Andrew will arrange to check out the peak oil video
Andrew will book a room for the event and look into advertising for the event.
A form will need to be set up and task placed on SeqAdm to do that to be undertaken by Andrew.
Andrew will look at workshop, which follows the peak oil event, cost.
Enrique will talk to Henrik regarding administration of NET.

3. A discussion was held regarding the future direction of NET

Membership was discussed and the need for a formal membership application
The possibility of arranging talks was discussed and Sten was to look into arranging debates with SNF
Enrique was to investigate the Social Forum at Umeå and how NET could be part of that.
It was decided that the Umeå group would have meeting once a month during term time about the 15th of each month with the first meeting on 27 September.
Andrew was to look at alternative designs for the NET symbol based on the current fulcrum design.
Enrique was to work with Henrik to get the domain address link to the site as soon as possible.
A recruitment kit was proposed consisting of documents already written and leaflets and posters to be designed with the intention that other members could use them to establish study groups similar to the Umeå group.
Andrew was to investigate the possibility of getting students to do some of the work of the energy survey as part of their projects at University.

4. A possible way to establish a technate via a proto-technate constructed of eco-units and other such communities was also discussed.