[AktiviX] aktivix fights racism

[m.reinsborough at Queens-Belfast.AC.UK]

The ongoing racist situation in Northern Ireland has resulted in grassroots
organising of many people coming together to address the growing problems.
The Antiracist Network came together initially meeting at the Belfast
multicultural centre. Quite quickly the number of people involved and the
other meetings set up in different parts of town began to create
bottlenecks in communication and organisation. The original organisers were
keeping a central email list and trying to orchestrate what they could
through that. There were also some concerns about how to better democratise
the way we were organising.

I talked with others in the network and then emailed people I met through
the Activix conference last summer in Lancaster and they agreed to host a
mailman list (see http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html
 ) Open
source software and more effective communication meaning that if an alert
needs to be circulated about a racist attack or people who are organising
their own events then they can do so directly themselves, rather than
waiting for the central email to resend it to their list.

I'm trying not to make this sound like a cheesy testimonial (and maybe it's
too late :/ ) but the point is to send some appreciation to the
burngreave.net people specifically and others at the activix conference
generally (including the host town). The activix conference has been useful
across the irish sea where I live, accomplishing here a little bit of what
it set out to do. Opensource software doesn't solve all the problems of a
rapidly growing network of people but it is helping a little bit so far and
the other people in the antiracist network are really pleased.

Michael w/ redhair
Belfast, Northern Ireland