NO2ID Worcester

Yes for any of you who are wondering where we went in the last few months, it can basically be summed up by two things.

First off I ended up in a road traffic collision on the motorway which put me out of action for the last few months. Needless to say, this made co-ordinating payments interesting and consequentially. Our website got clobbered.

That aside and all problems sorted out we are ready to hit the road again.

I suspected this might happen, when some of the NO2ID lot decided to pay peaceful protest to the a public meeting which had about as much public in it as chalk has cheese. Mostly people with a vested commercial interest in it. Naturally it came as a rather nasty surprise when some NO2ID folks turned up inside and outside the venue.

Instead of just being decent and either allowing questions asked from a member whom had managed to make it inside the conference room, they did the silly thing and decided to have the lot of them arrested.

Now from watching documentaries like Taking Liberties, its pretty clear that when you arrest peaceful protesters that have done next to sod all wrong, you tend to look like the bad guy. The example that comes to mind most notably was when a Vegan Chef from the Hastings area was arrested for reading out the names of the dead as a result of the Iraq war.

She became a minor celebrity.

I must commend the government on this one. They realised how the arrest of the NO2ID Nine already looked. With the David Davis byelection being quite big in the news I reckon it must have been clear (as they hate actually debating anything to do with civil liberties) that this would being ID cards to the forefront of the media was the last thing they wanted and funnily enough all charges were dropped.

Some news of whats been going on:

Obviously we have previously published Stourbridge News press release which was an excellent little nugget of publicity for Worcester NO2ID

A Local Starter Injection!

Yup after a little encouragement on ID Groups I finally received the Local Group Starter Pack I have been promised for so long :).  Thanks to Matty and Guy and those oh so dedicated people in the London HQ offices. In this little (but very heavy mind you :P) box of joy we had lots of…

• Trifold Leaflets
• Badges
• Stickers
• Pledge Certificates
• Mini pledge business cards
• Posters!

Plenty of supplies for our upcoming stall….watch this space!

“Holy domain names and hosting batman!”

I have sorted out this websites domain name, so no more hosting on weird and funky dynamic domain names. Very soon the Worcester site is going to be moving to its new hosting over at streamline. Keep our place on your drives warm guys :). I will have the fun of convincing Wordpress to not cry when we separate it from where it grew up on my home server :P.

This may well have happened by the time you read this and hopefully no-one should notice a thing if my geek-foo is strong ;).

Worcester NO2ID once again gathered for its second meeting! But with a difference, we had the awesome company of Shrewsbury NO2ID leader Rob Findlay

Head count was again in the 5/6 range.

Main topics discussed were:

Our need to gain some core supporters (the do-ers), as compared to other groups the different stuff that needs to be done is delegated a lot more. I tend to do many things myself at the moment, but things shall get better in that respect.

How it should be that nearby local groups should help each other. So using resources of both Shrewsbury and Birmingham should be kept in mind at all times when things are tight

How Rob has recently gotten his local council to pass a motion against ID cards and he will pass on the template to me for Worcester group’s use.

The website nearing completion and the need for hosting to be organised properly.

The need to plan the stall. Personally I feel the signage/placcards need to be easier to read.

Once we are in a decent position from the site standpoint then the Student Unions shall be approached and the local media notified of the Worcester Group’s re-arrival!