All New Anarchynz: now with Enzyme!

The original Aotearoa @-list has a new home at http://lists.enzyme.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/anarchynz_lists.enzyme.org.nz

I set up the Anarchynz email list was set up on the free Egroups service in Feb, 1999 by consensus of a small 'national anarchist meeting' held in Wellington. At that stage email lists were a new and fairly experimental tool in activism and no fixed goal, purpose or structure was imposed on the Anarcynz list. Posting was totally open and unmoderated although the membership list was limited to other members.

Yahoo bought Egroups and merged it with their existing Clubs service a year or so later. I quickly came to dislike the intrusive advertising that appeared in list emails and on the archive site with the transition to YahooGripes. ALso I felt the requirement for list subscribers to sign up for a Yahoo ID to change their membership details, access archives and other online functions was a symptom of the corporate control I had become involved in anarchist organising to resist.

The Anarchynz management was system was broken in the process, never to be repaired. It became impossible to nominate new list maintainers which resulted in some musical passwords when Belle Lovesnight - who had by that time taken over maintainance duties from me - dropped out of active involvement in activist politics for personal reasons. The new maintainer closed off the membership list and most of the other list features including the links page although the member list and chat have now been restored.

Due to a combination of all this and a lack of support for Anarchynz as a networking tool by promiment people in the movement, interest in the list has waxed and waned ever since. It was probably at its most active in recent times during the propsal and creation of the Anarchy Aotearoa portal (http://anarchism.org.nz) and posting dropped of significantly after most people made the transition to the new forum. At this stage I considered abandoning Anarchynz altogether, however I continued to see a place for an Aotearoa anarchist discussion forum for those like me who are comfortable with email and list use and find it simple and efficient while finding the forums exciting but confusing.

Anarchynz was always intended to be an open networking tool rather than an organisational platform. Knowing that attempts to find consensus on moving the list to another service had petered out a number of times since the Yahoo takeover, I decided to take the initiative and request a new list on the non-profit, activist-run Enzyme list service. This list is now up and running and
it's refined mission statement is "continue the discussions on strategy and tactics that begin at each large gathering or conference of anarchists and create discussion documents summarizing what's been said as a discussion starter for the next one."

Anyone can join in the discussion by entering their email address and a password here:
http://lists.enzyme.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/anarchynz_lists.enzyme.org.nz

This information is a hot potato, please pass it along.

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http://enzyme.org.nz/