Minutes from the meeting of the European network of Local Social Forum held in Athens on Friday 25th February

At the meeting there were people from:

 Manchester Social Forum
 Cardiff Social Forum
 One of the Hungarian Social Forums (split in 3 now)
 Thessaloniki Social Forum
 Greek Social Forum
 Patras Social Forum
 3 Social Forum from different areas in Athens (Ilion, Nea Smyrni, centre)
 thematic forum group: City and Environment from Athens (They proposed a kind of link with the local Forums)

What’s the EULSF?

 We are a group of participants to local social forums all over Europe, who are starting networking between local social forums in Europe.
 The purpose of the network is to get to know each other, learn from each other, build up memories, exchange experiences on operating practices and processes, and on activities taking place in local social forums.

Points agreed in the meeting

1. The web-site has to start as soon as possible with the minimun steps we decided in the meeting in Paris (links with the LSF who decide to be linked, documentation of the work till now – minutes from the ESF in London and from the network meetings -, the result of the questionaire of the LSF, ...) but also thematic links as such as Environment, Education, Civil Liberties, Community struggles, ... where LSF can inform what they are doing on these matters if they are doing something. Some people already took reponsability about the website in the previous meetings and we would like to be informed about what has be done.
2. Memory group : Kiriaki and Owen went to the meeting of the memory group after ours and there are good possibilities about linking with the work of this group in the future;
3. Mailing list eulsf@lists.riseup.net: the proposal is to use this list to inform the others about the main activities of LSFs till the website is ready (at least a newsletter from LSF every 2 months – possibly in English);
4. Everybody stressed the importance of working on the issue of giving visibility to the LSF in order to be seen not a one more group in the left but a common space for common actions (the idea of having a banner in Brussels and participate with proposal in the process of building for the next ESF comes from this idea as well as having a space in the EUSF website);
5. If the WSF and the ESF are not just events, LSF are the spaces where the struggle for a different world links with local concrete issues and we can translate the global slogan of the movements in concrete actions taken by individuals and groups/organizations who meet in the space including people whose life is directly effected by the global policy (examples came into the discussion as : new generation mobile phones and the consequences of installing new anthens, water as a right and not a good to payed, defend the environment against exploitation, defend hospital and schools against privatization, informing people for the consequences of the so-called european constitution in local level e.t.c);
6. There is a proposal from people from the manchester Social Forum to have a camp for people from LSF during the antiG8 week in Britain. At the moment we know there will be a demo in Edimburgh the 2nd of July, the contrasummit in Edimburgh the 3rd of July, day of actions the 6th of July and a meeting the 9/10 of April in Scotland to coordinate the events;
7. There is the proposal to meet in Brussels Sat 19th March in the morning before the demo as EULSF network already sent to the list;
8. Proposal of a banner for the 19 March demo : People from Local Social Forum;
9. Proposal of keep meeting at the EPA. Next will be in Prague the 20/21/22 of May and probably the network will meet on the Friday. There was a discussion about our meeting not clashing with the others in order to let people participate also to thematic meetings. Maybe we could find the way of meeting late in the evening of the first day;
10. People from the local forums in Greece will network in order to try to create a greek network of local forums and a site which will link with our european one. They proposed that the esf-fse website to put links for all european networks to be visible there also.

It will be nice if you discuss these ideas in your local SF and you send back what you think about them.