[Imc-communication] taking a critical look at where we are.

[Claudio]

On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 13:18, pina at riseup.net wrote:

Hi pina,

> Hi Claudio
> Maybe my last email wanst so clear
> You said that belgium.indy collective is a national project. So is going
> to be the sindicated project.
> You also said that belgium.indy is a bilingual site. Well, so is going to
> be the sindicated projetc, considering that liege site is in french and
> the others in dutch.

The syndication project includes liege, ovl and antwerp (according to wvl, they are dormant). That's 3 out of 10 provinces.


> So the question i did earlier still remains. Why do you guys have the
> prefenrece to use the belgium url, and claim represent the entire
> country?????

In my opinion because it has been the url for the Belgian imc from day one. We don't pretend to represent no one, but we are a belgian-as-a-whole collective. This is one of our strong points.

> If we, the indymedia network, work on bases of equality, why should your
> collective have ownership of the url?

Because a working collective is using it. I'm from Antwerp, but I don't claim the antwerpen.indymedia.org. I don't want to destroy that collective. If I decided to create a local Antwerp (or even smaller: a neighbourhood) collective, I would choose an other name for my project.

> The local collectives also live the same reality as you do, so to me, they
> should have a voice on the decision make of this matter.

Yes. I totally agree. That why we propose mediation. And important decisions about a/the url can be the result of mediation. As you can read in Han mail's we don't exclude this.

> If all of you in belgium (both belgium.indy and the local collectives)
> dont have a consesus on how to use this url, I think that none of them
> should use it. That way sounds more fair to everyone. No one would be
> privelege

That not correct. We use it since 2000. The majority of the collective chose to widen our public (not preaching for the already converted) and syndication was not the selected option.
Now a new project is born and suddenly our url is a problem. Like said before, I *really* don't understand what's wrong with be.indymedia.org for their syndication projecty.

For being fair we could block all url's of Belgian collective. antwerpen.indymedia.org does not represent me. ovl.indymedia.org does not represent najat, etc etc. I hope you see why I think that disposing us from our url even before any mediation is not very attractive for people that work hard to make our site a success (according to visit-stats).



Thanks,

Claudio