[imc-scotland-discussion] Spam and server problems, site improvements

[Tom]

maskedavenger at riseup.net wrote:
> I would much prefer having our server somewhere out of reach (well, m out
> of reach) by the law but less reliable, than somewhere the cops in the UK
> can easily seize the servers.

Yes. The noflag.org.uk hosting is in the US, which is not the absolute
friendliest place. However, we take backups every night and a seizure
would not be a huge setback. In fact, an unreliable site will drive away
users day after day after day, whereas a server seizure is publicity.

> I think that making decisions over email works ok. However, firstly theres
> the problem of whos on list. How do people get on this list? How many
> contributors know how to get on it, or even know it exists?

The list is publicised somewhere in the info pages, but it isn't that
prominent.

There are ~45 users on the site who have written an article in the last
year (which has not been hidden). I consider them our active membership.

> Secondly, what to do when theres major disagreement? Could we use IRC to
> hold a meeting? If that fails then we have a face to face meeting.
>
> I know someone who wrote a chat room designed for meetings. It allows you
> to have an agenda, minutes and a facilitator and was semi-secure. We could
> look into that?

I think that right now we have virtually no disagreement when making
decisions. However, organisation has collapsed and stuff is done
entirely on the individual initiative of techies. This has worked OK for
that last year while the new site was put together.

In the future Indymedia Scotland has to grow to reach 100, 1000, 10000
times its current readership. This might seem an over-the-top way of
putting things, but supplanting the corporate media means replacing
news.bbc.co.uk as the site people look at in the morning. We have to grow.

This is how I imagine Indymedia working if we ever grow to seriously
threaten corporate media:

There will be a collective of techies, editors and admins (as there are
now), who will make decisions amongst themselves as to the day-to-day
running of the site, direction of development, editorial policy and all
that stuff (as we do now).

Any major decisions made by this collective (such as changes to
editorial policy, integration of news feeds from particular outside
community news sites, etc) can be put to a referendum of general
Indymedia Scotland contributors. That would be the ~45 users I mentioned
before.

Techies, editors and admin positions can all be put to the vote
periodically. Currently there is no system for this and it is actually
an insiders' club although probably harmlessly so at this stage. In my
opinion election of editors and all that can wait until the site is busier.

I know people get the heebie-jeebies when the word 'voting' comes up,
but the reality is that once we become part of a mass movement we need
structures that are responsive to the opinions of very large numbers of
people.

Finally, we can create 'groups' within indymedia for political campaign
groups, trade unions, local journalist collectives, etc. Articles posted
by one user within a group can be edited by other users within that
group. In this way we hand editorial power down to people at the local
level.

The software side of all this is ready to go. We should put this poll to
our contributors: do you want final say on the decisions of admins, or
do you want the status quo.

-- 
Tom