[imc-scotland-discussion] discussion

[chris]

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So my thoughts on current discussion.

*Drupal*
My understanding of Drupal is that it's used for a range of sites,
Digg.com to smaller CMSs. If anything my concern was its adaptability
would make it too hard to set up in the first place and this has proven
to be not the case.


*Publish Form*
Overall the new publish form is I think an improvement. It feels like it
would be familiar to people who have used a webmail interface for their
email and the icons are recognisable to bloggers.

I like the Creative Commons stuff and think it should be restored,
though probably in a half-hidden way. We could decide on a default
(NonCommercial-Attribution?) that we're happy with and say "unless you
want to change it, this is the case". Then contributors who care about
CC licenses can choose the right one; while people who don't, are
protected (at least nominally) against theft by $bastards. For my part,
I want my work to remain NC, and that means staying off of YouTube etc.
Our practice has to educate people of these issues, even if only implicitly.


*Number of contributions*
My perception was is that we've been static for the last 2 years and if
we're static, then we're going backwards, i.e. losing ground against
competitors.


*Number of viewers*
July 2005 was a blip and will always be a blip. The peak in hits had
much more to do with Tony Blair than us, sad to say. I also think that
Indymedias' fortunes are (too) closely tied to that of the globalisation
movement's. As that has declined, so has the use of IMCs, as far as i
can tell. We need to break out of that dependency and for me that is a
renewed focus on community issues. There's only so many times you can
look at a report of a one-off protest before it gets same-y.

Considering we have done very little promotion, I think we're lucky to
be where we are. The newsheet is a postive move here. For every person I
hand it to who says "I've seen it already", there are 2 who haven't
heard of the website.


*Broadness of Coverage*
This is always going to be arguable. My feeling is that there has been
no overall reduction in the types of issues featured (if anything, the
opposite), but there has been a shrinkage of contributors.
Reasons may be:
 - activist groups have shifted their focus back to getting mainstream
media attention
 - some groups are (openly or otherwise) hostile to the IMC brand, i.e.
we won't get STWC folk contributing
 - some groups are simply *unaware* of us. I was in a discussion last
year where someone suggested setting up a website for students to submit
news about things, looked blank when I said, "why not indymedia"?
 - "citizen journalism" has won to the extent that it has been
assimilated by corporate media, i.e. the BBC, Guardian, CNN are all
claiming to be participatory
 - lots more campaign groups have a website to put their news out, they
aren't seeing a need to stretch beyond their existing contents

I see the way to fight these trends is to aggressively promote
Indymedia, "here it is, use it, ask me how" and the new system plays an
important role in that. For one thing, we now all have more time where
we aren't deleting spam comments.


*Anyone read this far?*
Proper Independent Media is *really* *important*. After drifting for a
while, scotland.indymedia.org is moving again and I think that is vital
and encouraging. We still need more people to contribute though!

- --
chris h

What's this "signed message" stuff?
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