The Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair is this weekend, March 14–15 in San Francisco at Golden Gate Park. And A.L.L. is going to be there. Here’s a partial schedule:

Schedule for speakers in the auditorium

Auditorium, SATURDAY 3/14

11:30 – 11:50 Bruce Anderson
12:00 – 12:20 James Tracy – Anti-Authoritarian Approaches to Housing
12:30 – 1:20 Diane Di Prima
1:30 – 1:50 Summer Brenner – I-5
2:00 – 2:50 Judith Levine – Kids, Sex & the State
3:00 – 3:20 Diana Block – Arm the Spirit
3:30 – 4:20 Native American Perspectives On the State
4:30 – 4:50 Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz

Auditorium, SUNDAY 3/15

12:00 – 12:50 Sex Workers Panel
1:00 – 1:20 Barry Pateman
1:30 – 1:50 Chris Carlsson
2:00 – 2:20 Cheb –i- Sabbha
2:30 – 2:50 Andrej Grubacic – Wobblies & Zapatistas
3:00 – 3:20 Victoria Law – Resistance Behind Bars
3:30 – 4:30 Osha Neumann – Up A**inst the W*ll Motherfucker

Schedule of speakers/events in the cafe area:

Cafe SATURDAY:

10:00 – 10:50 Resist War Taxes
11:00 – 11:20 Matt Callahan
11:30 – 12:20 Surviving The Economic Meltdown Panel (Robert Ovetz & others)
12:30 – 12:50 Yiddish Anarchism – Audrey Goodfriend & Joel Schechter
1:00 – 1:20 RNC8 Defense Committee
1:30 – 1:50 Doug – Modesto Anarcho – Importance of Intentions in Anarchist Actions
2:00 – 2:50 Eastern European Anarchism panel w/ Andrej Grubajic and Marta Kolarova
3:00 – 3:50 Women In Prison Panel w/Bo Brown & Vikki Law
4:00 – 4:50 Becoming the Media Panel – Jen Angel, Pranjal Tiwari, Joe Biel
5:00 – 5:50 Intro to Lefty/Anarchist Sci-Fi with Sara Brodzinsky

Cafe SUNDAY:

11:00 – 11:50 Resist War Taxes
12:00 – 12:50 Shutdown filmscreening and discussion
1:00 – 1:50 Venezuela: Revolution From Inside Out screening & disc with filmmaker Clif Ross
2:00 – 2:50 Provo Panel/Discussion, Stevphen Shukaitis & Richard Kempton
3:00 – 3:50 Art & Activism Panel/Discussion with Josh Macphee and Fly
4:00 – 4:50 Retort Panel: Iain Boal, David Kubrin and more

And, the main event — this is a bookfair, remember? — will be the space in the main hall, where about 60 vendors will have tables to show off their anarchist books and materials from 10:00am–6:00pm on Saturday and 11:00am–5:00pm on Sunday. Among them will be us — members of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left from around the Western U.S. I’ll be there (especially in the morning); and, if no-one encounters any unforeseen disasters, we should have Southern Nevada ALL, Northwest ALL, and ALLies from California and Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ll have books, journals, and buttons for sale, and a lot of information about ALL and what we do back in our hometowns. If you’re in the area, come on by, say hi, and see what we’re doing.

Hope to see you there!

Guess who wins a government award, from the Ministry of Cultural Exchange in this secessionist republic of one, for the most attractive ALL local outreach logo?

The answer is Shawn Wilbur, of the Northwest Alliance of the Libertarian Left, with his call for ALLiance in Occupied Cascadia:

Sure beats my photoshop defacements of tourist traps and paint company logos, anyway. Congrats, Shawn!

Now, then. Do you know any individualist anarchists, agorists, mutualists, left-Rothbardians or others on the libertarian left in or nearby any of the following metropolitan areas, who might be interested in getting involved, or getting more involved, in local activism and organizing? (If that description matches you yourself, that's good enough, too.)

• New York City
• Baltimore
• Omaha, Nebraska
• Tulsa, Oklahoma
• County Wexford, Ireland

If so, please drop me a line with their contact information. I have some requests from prospective local organizers who are looking for people to start locals for the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. I would love to be able to put them in touch with anyone locally who might be interested.

On the subject of the Organizing Committee website, I’ve been getting some very good suggestions from other ALLies about materials to make available up there, and sketching out a few ideas of my own on paper. Most of these I hope to be adding over the next several days.

The main one that is now available, more or less live, is a feature to provide contact pages specific to each location where the Organizing Committee has gotten inquiries (click through on the links to each city above — for example, Baltimore — to see what it looks like). The main point is to have a landing-pad for each place we get an inquiry from, and to give prospective ALLies more information about how many people are interested in getting organized. Right now, this consists of a landing page, a map with one or more pins representing inquiring ALLies, and a quick count of the number who have inquired. My hope is to make this somewhat more sophisticated over time (right now, it’s mainly just some pretty wrapper over an e-mail form; I hope to add some features to find, e.g., how many people are interested in a particular state, possibly some sort of public Wall feature, etc.). But this will do for a start.

What I’d like to work on for the next few days is adding advice on getting started, on organizing, on ideas for activism, and so on. I’ll be incorporating some of the suggestions I’ve gotten already, and I’d like to put together some pages specifically on:

1. A step-by-step guide to starting a new ALL local (along the lines of guides like Seven Steps To Starting A Food Not Bombs Group);

2. Some advice focusing on organizing locals on college campuses, in particular;

3. A sampler platter of actions and projects that existing ALLs have worked on, with an eye to giving people ideas for what they can do to kick off their ALL local, and what they might do as they get themselves established.

Which leads me to ask you all, gentle readers:

1. If you have any suggestions, either for particular ideas or pieces of advice to add, or for focused sections that you think would be particularly useful, let me know. Let’s discuss in comments. And…

2. If you were to pick out a sampler of four or five actions or projects that your own ALL local has worked on, or that some ALLies you know about have worked on, which you would like to add as suggestions for ALL organizers trying to make plans for a new ALL local, what would you pick? Let’s discuss in comments.

Onward.

See also:

• GT 2008-09-15: ALL you need to know about organizing is what you can learn on the web