September

The past month has been so crowded with events that this weblog has been abandoned. But no more. Let's lay down some little review of what has happened, and move forward.

I became member of the campaign committee, under the direction of Jasper Fastl, a fast and very welcomed “newcomer” to Utrecht. This is the club that is planning the coming local election, in march. A very interesting club, in which we have seen the process of start with some vague ideas to go on structuring a fully-fledged electoral campaign. So far I have been busy with trying to identify tendencies in the electorate of Utrecht. Fascinating work, indeed. One thing is to live in a city, and a very different thing is to see how that bunch of people has voted in the last twenty years. The big trends come back in the picture. The diminishing power of the big parties, the PvdA and the CDA, the short flash of the D66, the growth of the SP and the VVD, and the steady growth of Groenlinks. Until the Fortuin revolution, that is. Utrecht seems to be a predictor of national trends. Want to take a detailed look at my findings? http://www.scicha.org/GL/doc/GLtrends.ppt

Before the holidays, the Kleurrijk Platform (http://www.kleurrijkplatform.nl/) changed her stuurgroep. I became the chairman, or rather contact person. Since then we have meet couple of times, and decided to go on with our conceptual discussions of integration, a set of meetings that have so far produced some much needed insight in this actual issue. And we organized several workshops in the Linkse Lente, where we could discuss diversity as unifying practice, diversity inside our party, the relation of integration and education and more. What we certainly want for the future is to discuss all these results with the local politicians, active in the cities of the netherlands. There Utrecht plays a role, surely, with the multicultureel manifesto that we wrote in the multiculti werkgroep.

Back to my local roots, then. The program committee (http://programma.groenlinksutrecht.nl), the club in charge of giving us a program for the elections of coming march, decided not to include a multiculti chapter. We in the multicultiwerkgroep Utrecht disagree and are in campaign for its inclusion. The alv from 9 november will be the place for this “battle” to happen. Will we manage? Will we gather the support of the afdeling? exciting question.

And then, De Werkvloer. Back in the Linkse Lente I moderate a public dialogue in between entrepreneurs and politicians. A bit chaotic, but it was still interesting to check that indeed there are plenty of groenlinks politicians working at the interface of green politics and ondernemers. That interaction, that crossing of the borders is what we want to improve in the Werkvloer. (Read the presentation to the dialogue in http://www.scicha.org/GL/doc/WVNijmegen.doc: print it and fold it first...) After all, we started this national workgroup to develop the thinking on the MKB sector inside Groenlinks. One of the issues alive is innovation policy. I have gathered some literature, which you can check up here: http://www.scicha.org/GL/doc/In.doc.

And talking about border crossing I finally got the time to update the site of the Heerlen group (http://www.greenyourope.net). Take a look at it. Some of us will get soon to Antwerp, to discuss our developing agenda of cross border collaboration.

And more about Europe. This coming saturday 8, I'll be discussing about bestuurstijl in a debate for candidates to the gemeenteraad. After, the Europa workgroup organizes a discussion on contrasting visions of Europe. The reader is here to be seen (http://www.scicha.org/GL/doc/EUGL.pdf). High time for this discussion to occur!

So as you see, Groenlinks in september is a very alive party. Lets hope that this weblog can keep up. Stay tuned (or come online again) and you will see.