[Imc-birmingham] [Imc-uk-process] Brummie notes for the network meeting

[Tony]

Hello Shir and birmingham

Thanks for these points - i think they raise 
important contradictions and problems we face, 
with possible solutions - i won't reply to each 
point as i am knackered - but look forward to 
talking them though with you all at the weekend

cheers tony
one of london...

At 12:57 -0800 4/2/08, Shiar wrote:
>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)
>
>
>
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