Election Daze

"Nobody wants an election right now."

I want us all to have a better General Election Campaign that we had for the last times we voted as a nation.  I think that means talking to each other face to face rather than on social media, so I'm running as many events as I can, all around the UK, that focus on ordinary people having the conversations about power and politics in our society that they want to have, rather than agendas set either by political parties or news organisations with an axe to grind.

I'll be using a process called Open Space for this, it's designed to let groups have lively, creative and productive meetings and to decide for themselves how they use the time available.  Some of you will have heard of "unconferences" - they are very similar sorts of events.

I'm giving myself a week to organise things and then want to get on the road at the beginning of May.

The main costs of this project are: my time; an assistant's time; travel; contributions to venues; stationery (lots of paper and pens!) and a little bit of web wizardry.  I don't have a private income or a full-time job, but I'm putting myself full-time into this for the seven weeks between the annuncement of the election and voting day.

I wrote a blog post introducing it and already have a small team of volunteers already working on organising everything.  I'm going to be looking for organisational sponsors and partners to help too, but I don't want to give too much influence to any one large group given that one of the reasons I'm doing it is a belief that too much in our society is directed by and for organisations rather than people.

I will publish regular accounts of what we're spending and if there is any surplus left over by 8th June 2017 I will run a democratic process for distributing it where it's really needed.

I'm really looking forward to getting out of London and talking to people (you!) about what they're interested in and giving them a space to meet each other and organise whatever's important to them.

Thanks for even reading this, even if you can't contribute please look out for an event near you soon, I'd love to see you there.

Lloyd