Conference Call

Organising events tends to require a lot of effort and more often than not is decidedly stressful. When things go well that tends to make up for everything, though. That's probably a fairly good summation of my experience with the Peace Conference which I helped organise and which took place on Sunday.

By all accounts everybody involved including speakers and audience members seemed to find it enjoyable and interesting. The first session on the linkages between oil, war and environmental damage was slightly marred by Life of Brian-style exchanges, but nonetheless there was much of interest on peak oil, Iraqi unions and the connections between these issues and the state of the public transport system. While the No Sweat session didn't happen due to "limited" interest (a probably consequence of the aforementioned exchanges), but the workshops on life as an asylum seeker and peak oil, both of which I dipped into, were well attended and seemed to be stimulating healthy debate.The day's big event was Craig Murray, former British mabassador to Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, Craig was running a little late, which was a little worrying for myself and fellow organisers, but he more than made up for it when he got here with a compelling and amusing talk. To be fair, it was largely the same speech he gave when I saw him in Manchester, with many of the same jokes, but few of the other people in the audience had been there and, in any case, I still found myself laughing. This was certainly a personal highlight for me and afterwards I was able to get my copy of his Murder in Samarkand signed.

Whether because of the incredible organisation or by sheer luck, we finished in time for the awesome fireworks display put on, down by the lake just of campus, for Chinese New Year. Which was nice.

Notts Indymedia has more on the Conference and KnowledgeLab, an event which ran across the weekend and alongside on the Sunday, including various photos by the legendary Tash, from which the picture above has been purloined.