[Imc-birmingham] Brummie notes for the network meeting

[Shiar]

Last Thursday (31 Jan 2008) IMC Birmingham had a meeting to discuss/agree
on common grounds to take them to the Indymedia network meeting next
weekend. Below is a summary of the main points.

1. We fully support the move towards a new Content Management System (CMS)
that is easier to develop and play around with and meets the 'new' needs
of the regions and the various projects alike. While IMC Birmingham does
not have at the moment the ability to go this way on its own, we do hope
that this discussion within the uk network would result in practical steps
ASAP.

2. It is perhaps natural that different people (and even collectives)
within the network have different positions on certain political issues.
This has occasionally resulted in 'political clashes' when moderating the
UK newswire or writing uk features. While we do recognise that 'diversity
is strength', as the cliché goes, we would like to see a wide and deep
political discussion within the network; a re-writing of the UK Editorial
Policy and Mission Statement; as well as UK-specific Principles Of Unity.

3. Another critique of Indymedia UK was the lack of 'real activists'
within IMC UK. Indymedia seems to have created a group of 'media
activists' who often distance themselves from the campaigns/issues they
are reporting on. This is against the ethos of Indymedia (from the Mission
Statement: "Through this system of 'direct media', Indymedia erodes the
dividing line between reporters and reported, between active producers and
passive audience"). We want Indymedia to truly be "the journal _of_ the
movement" not "a journal _on_ the movement". There should more emphasis on
the collaborative/collective production of media (not only the written),
and we should try to get more activists involved in producing and
maintaining the site.

4. It was felt, yet again, that regions are under-represented on the UK
site. More prominence should be given to regional sites. One way of doing
that (which would be our proposal) is that clicking a post on the uk page
would take you to a page on the regional site ticked on that post rather
than a uk page. A problem arises when a post has more than one region
ticked. So we propose restricting region-ticking to one region only; and
where the post has a wider relevance, only national or international would
be ticked. Thus, regional newswires would have only local news, the uk
newswire would have only national news, and the same with international.
As for the uk startpage, we propose splitting the newswire into 3
newswires: Local, UK and International. Further, we propose creating
regional subsites for all uk geographical regions, even where there is no
imc there. The banner of these could be something like “There is no
functioning imc in this region yet. If you're interested, get together and
set one up!”.

5. Comments: Until a new, radical solution is found, we propose removing
the number of comments on posts from the newswire. This would hopefully
discourage comment trolls and encourage people to read the original
articles more. This has been proposed before and we would like to endorse
it and see it implemented ASAP.


Shiar (on behalf of imc birmingham)