[Imc-alternatives] curious about this project

[Zachary Ogren]

I work on the code for Indybay.org (we have our own code base thats php 
based but pretty much written from scratch).
I was thinking of adding some sort of user registration with user or 
group home pages (plus  friends lists and personal blog entries) and 
someone pointed me to this list as a place where others may be working 
on something similar.

Is there any good document to look at that describes what the 
imc-alternatives project is about?

The key things I could see Indybay having that would be a great addition 
to the network (but may be something other projects are already working 
on) would be activist group hosting via registered user home pages, 
regional site groupings where multiple editorial collectives could share 
some tasks but still have their own sites,  and some sort of user 
ratings that would allow discussions and spam to self moderate so sites 
can almost run themselves even without an editorial collective (perhaps 
even having the center column become newswire driven based of highly 
rated posts if editors dont add blurbs in a timely fashion). Part of my 
motivation would be to make Indymedias seem more interactive to users 
who may find the current format stale, but a larger motivation would be 
that collectives are disappearing and sites are going offline and part 
of this is because of the amount of work that is required of local 
editorial collectives.

Having user pages could make Indymedias a bit like MySpace or Facebook 
but I think a better motivation would be if they could get local 
activist groups more involved with the site because short lived activist 
groups could get a user account and home page and use that for 
organizing in a way that MySpace allows but aside from that is difficult 
for groups without tech resources. Once groups use a page on their local 
Indymedia as their home page, getting them to posts coverage and events 
would probably be easier and with staggered levels of editorial 
permissions even groups that one may not want as full editors could at 
least help highlight and edit their own events.

-Z