Five years ago I attended a smallish demonstration called N30 for November 30. It was timed to coincide with the WTO meeting in Seattle, and I figured it would be a little bigger than the J18 global day of action we’d had in June, but wasn’t expecting much.
Instead, Seattle was huge. And out of Seattle came Indymedia. A guy called Maffew (Matthew Arnison) from Sydney’s c@talyst collective created open publishing technology for the Web that has changed the way we view journalism. I was on the c@tkore list at the time (I joined in ’98, I think) but I wasn’t at all involved with setting up Indy. I now feel like I really missed an opportunity there…
I was able to celebrate Maffew’s achievement publicly when I persuaded him to be part of our 30 under 30 rising stars in e)mag. I got involved with Melbourne Indy when I moved down here (and some of you know how that story ended).
Tonight, I joined with a bunch of other anarchist media makers to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Indymedia. We watched the Oceania Indymedia Newsreal 2, with a bunch of excellent mini-docos and stood around and drank wine and beer and reminisced. Apart from a mild annoyance with bloody smokers who seem to ignore the consensus decision that the upstairs at Irene Warehouse is a non-smoking space, I had a lovely time.
I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. I’m scared by the amount of work we have yet to do.
Some pointers for you to be going on with: the folks behind WikiPedia, the collaborative open source encyclopedia, have now established WikiNews. Go, get involved. I certainly intend to.
And secondly, for those of you in the city, there’s direct action against Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old company, the one that is still profiting billions out of slaughtering children in Iraq, on Friday. Meet at 12pm at Federation Square. Info at http://disobedience.nomasters.org/.