[Imc-communication] An important discussion about new country vs. new city sites?

[Tony]

Hello Pete

Yes this brings up some issues - but i don't see it as a problem...

Looking through the list - i came across 39 countries listed - mainly 
in Europe and Americas - out of 160 odd - so about a quarter.  It 
seems this is different according to local needs and circumstances, 
mainly because of scale - where it is not practical to have more than 
one IMC in a small country, and some where the countries are so big 
they do need wide representation.

Some are decentralised within the nation state - like UK and Italy, 
where we do understand all the issues that come up when using 
national boundaries. With the UK - when we started we had discussions 
within the alt-media community (schnews, undercurrents, squall etc) 
when we started and after long discussions we decided that it would 
be good to have a site that covered more than just  a city, as many 
were already covered by different group, but it would be interesting 
to have a common site. And with time we managed to co-ordinate with 
many collective inthe UK to a truely decentralised site. Of course 
there are many sensitive points around our imperialist history 
especially in realtion to Wales, Scotland and Ireland, which we have 
to  work round.

Personally i think our situation the best solution - strong local 
collectives that pool resources and energy to a creating a common 
portal, and some of those collectives are now moving towards going 
through new-imc to then be listed (if and when they want to) as an 
individual city as well as under the 'UK', as local sites can often 
have different priorities than nation wide ones (Bristol is a good 
example of this) maybe we will all end up doing that?

Sometimes issues are nation wide - and it is interesting to see the 
many different campaigns brought together under one feature, which 
they wouldn't do if we were all separate sites. Sometimes a local 
group will go through an energy crisis - and the others around can 
help out and get them through, where as an individual site might just 
have stagnated... just trying to think of more positive reasons 
here...

Anyway you get my drift - and don't really see the need for a default 
position - i would think it is worth raising the issue as groups 
apply for national names - but there is no reason that a city is any 
more represented than a country by a group of indymedia vollunteers, 
it is more how many people you can get to use the sites as they are 
supposed to work - by posting!

cheers tony
one of imc-london/uk



At 19:55 -0700 15/6/05, Pete Stidman wrote:
>I hope I'm posting to the right list...
>
>In the past a number of sites have gone up as whole
>countries as opposed to the longer indymedia tradition
>of city sites.  
>
>It seems to be causing some problems in Belgium now
>and could potentially cause many more problems in
>other future Indymedia countries that are even more
>politically polarized. 
>
>What if we structured the new IMC process so that *as
>a default* city sites come first, country sites come
>when city sites combine efforts?  We can always make
>exceptions to this case by case, but maybe it might
>help avoid future turmoil? 
>
>Currently I don't think we have a default-
>
>A good piece of info for this would be: What was the
>first country site, and why was it a country and not a
>city? -( if someone knows..)
>
>In another sense, city borders are more natural than
>the boundaries between countries, and some nations,
>like the kurds for instance, are in several countires
>without their own sovereign nation.   ( so it would
>make sense to have city sites, and then if they
>decided to they could make IMC kurdistan together- but
>then that's kinda odd to mix nationalism with IMC-
>which brings us back to the beginning- why borders? )
>
>-pete
>
>
>
>
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