Ok, time to let the cat out of the bag... I have avoided publicly admitting that I've left Australia because I didn't want the Wolf to find out where I am, but that makes blogging very difficult, and there's just too much interesting stuff happening here in Tucson to keep it quiet.

I attended an activist conference in Phoenix, where I learned about the Indigenous Community Police in Guerrero, Mexico. If a police force could ever be considered true to anarchist principles, these guys are it. The police are elected by the community, they are not paid for their work, but receive donations from community members. A committee oversees their actions and deals with more serious crimes like murder.

I have found the local Indymedia mob, and an anarchist warehouse all in the same place. I have joined the imc-arizona-edit listserv, but as yet have not been given the password, or a tutorial in how to moderate an sfactive site. Not sure if this is because of disorganisation or process. I have started a discussion about transparency in the collective, because I was shocked to learn that they write features offlist, don't post a reason when hiding stories, and don't take minutes at meetings which only began to happen in the last 2 months. This is despite their link to maffew's classic rant on open publishing which says:

Open publishing means that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find the stories they want. Readers can see editorial decisions being made by others. They can see how to get involved and help make editorial decisions.

This closed organising policy has caused much criticism and speculation on their newswire. I have since learned that sydney is one of the few collectives left with totally open and transparent organising, a fact of which I am very proud.