[Imc-alternatives] Re: a start with content

[qwerty]

Hello alternative indymedians :)

It's very exciting to see that the alternatives.tikimedia.org site is starting 
to get great content.

On Tuesday 24 January 2006 02:01, Jay wrote:
> >A couple of things:
> >1) the intro text at the top of the page that says "Indymedia Athens" -
> >has that been overlooked or is it not possible to change it yet for some
> >reason to do with hosting?
>

Of course it's possible to change it. Should I just change 'Athens' to 
'Alternatives' or should we come up with another intro text, tailored to the 
alternatives project?

> qwerty is one of the athens IMC techs ...

<off-topic-story>

That's not 100% accurate. I have been a member of IMC Athens for more than 3 
years, but I'm not any more. I left it some months ago, along with 7 more 
people who all had a 2 - 4 year regular involvement. Most of them were 
founding members of Athens Indymedia. We left because of different views on 
the medium itself, its perspectives and goals, but mostly because we couldn't 
stand any more the constant conflicts and fighting between the collective. It 
even got violent from time to time. A very sad story, that I believe could 
have been easily prevented if the collective was more determined to protect 
itself by marginalizing the 1 person that was constantly using agressive 
tactics in order to prevail and was involved in every single conflict 
(violent or not) that we ever had. 

Anyways, that's all history by now and you'll probably get different versions 
of it if you ask other people. But it lead us into a "funny" situation:

* What's left of IMC Athens is still using the TikiMedia codebase that has 
been developed by me and Clopy (another ex-IMC Athens techie) 
* We (the ex-IMC Athens people+some more activists), want to start a new 
Indymedia project in Greece, but we don't want it to be identical in 
functionality to athens.indymedia.org. 

</off-topic-story>

So, we've started the development of a new codebase (!) which is not based on 
TikiMedia nor TikiWiki. It's based on Plone/Zope/Python [plone.org] and 
includes some community building features, version management of all content, 
different levels of open editing and much more.

Some of the functionality has been inspired by the discussions in this list 
and I believe/hope that the new codebase will also be able to serve the goals 
of the imc-alternatives project, probably better than any other software  
that's currently available. But the final decision about it shouldn't be up 
to me of course. You'll be able see more of it and send comments, 
suggestions, bug reports, etc when the working prototype is ready, hopefully 
in a few weeks. I expect it to be ready for deployment in a few months.

If any of you happens to know any techies that have experience with Plone and 
could be willing to paticipate in such a project, please let me know. The 
current development team consists of 3 people.

I also discovered the http://www.engagemedia.org/ project that uses Plone. 
Some cat.org.au people are behind it and they're developing some very 
interesting plone extensions for video content :)

Sorry if the above is too vague, confusing and technical. I hope that most of 
it will clear out soon.

love and solidarity,
qwerty

P.S. Since you now know a part of the IMC Athens story I would like to ask for 
some feedback (in private messages since it's totally OT to the alternatives 
project) from anybody interested, on the following issues: 

Do you believe that we should inform the Indymedia Network about the fact that 
the IMC Athens collective has been split up? We proposed to the remaining 
Athens Indymedia members that we should send a collective email to the 
imc-communication list, stating that there were different views on the 
function of Athens Indymedia and we couldn't continue working together and as 
a result we split up, so an application for a new greek IMC should be 
expected. We didn't get any response. AFAIK that was because the remaining 
imc-athens people couldn't reach consensus about it. Should we go on and 
inform imc-communication on our own? If yes, should we analyse our different 
viewpoints? Should we be more specific about the conflicts that lead us to 
this mess? Or should we just shut up and make our point by creating the 
indymedia website and community that we dream of instead of whining and 
wasting the time of Indymedia activists around the world? Finally, was it a 
mistake on my part to mention the off topic imc-athens story on this list? (I 
wasn't planning to do so, but I'd rather not be referred anymore as an imc 
athens tech. However, I'm still a big fan of the Indymedia network as a 
whole)