Post by Idea behind this board on Jan 23, 2010 17:39:54 GMT
The Midland branch of the People's Movement, a small group of No activists based around Mullingar who campaigned for a No vote during the Lisbon referendum campaign, decided to set up a small website/discussion forum for their own use in the months following that campaign. This is the resulting website. But it was also decided to throw it open to other ex-No campaign groups in order to widen the discussion about where we should go from here and to facilitate co-operation among these disparate but sincere and patriotic activists around Ireland.
The idea is that any No campaign group that would like to join the forum could get their logo added to the top and could get a special board on the site for their group as well as the right to get one of their group appointed moderator of their board on the site. Then they can post their press releases and discussion documents etc on their forum, or the main site ones, and would get a wider audience than if they just worked with their own individual websites.
The obvious objection to this is why bother, because there are already a number of sites on the web where Irish political groups can post things like this, like boards, politics and indymedia.ie? True enough but there are a number of problems with those sites for No campaign groups. Some No groups would be unwelcome on individual sites, like religious or nationalistic groups on indymedia - sometimes messages from quite harmless groups are deleted as part of a 'no platform for fascists' argument - , republicans are angry that they are regularly dropped from politics.ie, who at present don't allow new members anyway, and anybody who questions the government line on 9/11 - like the people behind the Sovereign Independent newspaper that was distributed during the campaign - or global warming or whatever is classified as a conspiracy theorist and banished immediately from the main politics part of boards.ie. It is hoped then that if this forum makes a genuine effort to bring people together, even where we would disagree on the individual issues, then it would be a unique spot for these various groups to coalesce a bit. Also it includes a kind of chat forum where people can gossip and even play chess on the net, which would be no harm in building trust between groups and is also not available elsewhere as far as I know.
Well that's it and hopefully it will serve some purpose in any case! All are welcome anyway to throw in their tuppenceworth on this board...
Btw the picture on the main page is of Galway Bay and was taken by Mira Pavlakovic from Croatia, posted at www.sxc.hu .
The idea is that any No campaign group that would like to join the forum could get their logo added to the top and could get a special board on the site for their group as well as the right to get one of their group appointed moderator of their board on the site. Then they can post their press releases and discussion documents etc on their forum, or the main site ones, and would get a wider audience than if they just worked with their own individual websites.
The obvious objection to this is why bother, because there are already a number of sites on the web where Irish political groups can post things like this, like boards, politics and indymedia.ie? True enough but there are a number of problems with those sites for No campaign groups. Some No groups would be unwelcome on individual sites, like religious or nationalistic groups on indymedia - sometimes messages from quite harmless groups are deleted as part of a 'no platform for fascists' argument - , republicans are angry that they are regularly dropped from politics.ie, who at present don't allow new members anyway, and anybody who questions the government line on 9/11 - like the people behind the Sovereign Independent newspaper that was distributed during the campaign - or global warming or whatever is classified as a conspiracy theorist and banished immediately from the main politics part of boards.ie. It is hoped then that if this forum makes a genuine effort to bring people together, even where we would disagree on the individual issues, then it would be a unique spot for these various groups to coalesce a bit. Also it includes a kind of chat forum where people can gossip and even play chess on the net, which would be no harm in building trust between groups and is also not available elsewhere as far as I know.
Well that's it and hopefully it will serve some purpose in any case! All are welcome anyway to throw in their tuppenceworth on this board...
Btw the picture on the main page is of Galway Bay and was taken by Mira Pavlakovic from Croatia, posted at www.sxc.hu .
