[Imc-uk-process] [Fwd: Re: Oxford IMC meeting (Monday evening)] Decentralise UK Indymedia

[ekes]

I am in favour of working on more decentralisation, at a technological 
and people level. I am, however, deeply concerned by this one...

MrDemeanour wrote:
> * The practice of running a UK collective should cease. This would free
>   up UK contributors to return to work at their local collective.

This makes the assumption that UK contributors have a local collective.

 > The UK
>   site (new) would become an aggregation of features from local
>   collectives. Aggregation would be automated, using RDF/RSS; local
>   collectives would be relied on to do their own editing. There would be
>   no UK newswire anymore.

This would remove the collective work done on the newswire thus 
multiplying number of people required to do the job many times over. I 
think the number of techs (including java skilled ones) would also need 
to be increased dramatically.

One of the advantages that we have with the kollectives as sub-level of 
IMC is that they don't have to be a fully functioning bells and whistles 
IMC to be able to run a site and a page and feed into the global 
process. I actually think this is the case for the majority of regional 
kollectives, maybe not Oxford.

> This would mean the various regional
>   collectives going through the new-imc process; we don't think this is
>   likely to be a terribly painful or time-consuming exercise, as most of
>   us are already running effective, functioning collectives.

I am pretty sure Leeds Bradford IMC couldn't go through the new imc 
process. Sheffield have been heading that way, but it seems to take a 
fairly big amount of work for people who are doing other things. I'm not 
sure if they even still haven't made it through!

If kollectives are strong enough I think they should be encouraged to go 
through the new imc process. If people have the tech skills to set up a 
separate site and the people to maintain it and want to, they should do 
this also. We should make ways of collecting content from sites. We 
shouldn't, however, dismantle what we have managed to get which is a 
bloody successful site that helps pool skills and resources.

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