[New-imc] new-imc member Petros unsubscribed from the IMC-Palestine mailing list?

[boud]

hi new-imc,

On Mon, 17 Jul 2006, Anarcho Babe wrote:

> I got unsubscribed from my lists when my email bounced a lot, cause we
> experienced some server problems. Or the email account reached its limit.
> Happens a lot with my emails on the yahoo list, too. Not sure if that
> could be the problem?

Both petros and i were removed from the list, and it seems (this is
what bilal 'kidar' thinks) that the admin password was apparently
changed without giving the new password to bilal:

http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-palestine/2006-July/0717-km.html

In any case, raad - who is one of the list admins - is now facilitating
the discussion and asking the others what happened:

http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-palestine/2006-July/0717-8n.html

Ten hours after i was removed and seven(?) hours after petros was
removed, ghassan proposed this on the list (yes, yes, there's a
causality problem there!):
ghassan bannoura ghassan_hb wrote on Sun Jul 16 23:13:16 PDT 2006:
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-palestine/2006-July/0717-kt.html


The rest of this email is a point-by-point response to petros, going
mostly into speculative and general issues. For most new-imc people,
you can safely skip to your next email. :)

-----




> On Mon, 17 Jul 2006 01:17:15 +0100, Petros Evdokas <petros at ...
> wrote:
>
>> - When we helped to re-establish the imc-palestine recently, we made
>> sure that the new administrators would be Palestinian. It was around
  ...

>> If there was an administrative decision by one or more of our future
>> colleagues of the new Palestinian formation, this will generate even

IMHO this is the most reasonable hypothesis.

i just found a proposal on the archive - *after* i had already been
removed from the list - by ghassan:

ghassan bannoura ghassan_hb wrote on Sun Jul 16 23:13:16 PDT 2006:
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-palestine/2006-July/0717-kt.html
| To all IMC Palestine is there anyone who is against
| blocking Boud from the list.

ghassan is from the IMEMC:
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/ImcPalestineWho
| ghassan bannoura -- beit sahour - audio wizard, produces IMEMC weekly
| audio report and publishes newsbriefs


i got my unsubscription email at: Sun, 16 Jul 2006 12:48:07 -0700
  => 19:48 GMT Sunday
ghassan's email was Sun Jul 16 23:13:16 PDT 2006:
  => 06:13 GMT Monday

So his proposal came 10 hours after the action.

My guess is that a secret decision was made offlist, and then someone
decided that it would be better to make some attempt to say something
on the mailing list, so one of the IMEMC people did so.

Also, raad has asked for an explanation:
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-palestine/2006-July/0717-8n.html

So there's at least one IMEMC palestinian who chose to remove me (he
didn't mention removing you - petros).

>> more questions, such as:
>> 1. What was the intended effect of this action on the relationship
>> between the new-imc work group and the candidate imc-palestine group?
>> 2. Was it a decision by the entire collective?

The archives clearly show that it was not a decision by the whole
collective, and that the proposal was made about ten hours after the
action.

Even two of the mailing list admins (kidar and raad) were excluded
from the decision-making process.  From what i understand of the
collective at the moment, neither kidar nor raad are active "members
of IMEMC" - which is presumably why they were excluded from the
decision.

>> 3. Was it a decision by the entire collective to just do this and to not
>> even take responsibility?
>> 2. How is this escalation going to be interpreted in the current context
>> and climate?
>>
>> The climate and context I refer to is this: right now on that email
>> list, there is a hell of angry letters and accusations being thrown
>> around (none from me). The relationship between the new-imc work group
>> with the new Palestine imc group that's been emerging in the hope of
>> refreshing imc-Palestine, has been poisoned by a conscious campaign of
>> rumours, whispers, a twisting of meanings and misinterpretations.


petros: please, let's not assume that people *deliberately* make
campaigns like this. Assuming bad intentions makes things much more
difficult.

>> This campaign took place in previous weeks, in private, without anyone
>> of us knowing or being informed, resulting in a storm of confused and
>> angry letters being published on that list in the last few days (none by
>> me).

It's quite possible that a lot of discussion took place during the
previous weeks in private, and that misunderstandings accumulated.

E.g.:

George N. Rishmawi abunimir at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 14 09:30:22 PDT 2006
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-palestine/2006-July/0714-8s.html

| and all others who were arguing through the ISM list and other lists
| did not show up so that we answer their concerns.


So presumably a lot of discussion happened on the ISM list - which may
or may not have public archives - and the IMEMC people did not realise
that in effect, they were excluding part of the collective and failing 
to communicate with the network.

This sort of error happens. People don't realise who is where, who is
talking where, who are people they can trust, what the communication
methods are, etc. But let's not assume bad intentions...


>> Please have a look at those letters. And please look at previous letters
>> from June and May. You will see that nothing else explains the torrent
>> of anger except conscious manipulations of our (understandably)
>> vulnerable colleagues in Palestine, through the use of clever, age-old
>> techniques of personal power.

i totally disagree. Please see an email i wrote:
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-research/2006-July/0709-gl.html

It is a fundamentally difficult problem to reconcile (put together):

(1) local grassroots publishing and decision-making about organising media
     by ordinary activists

+ (2) global non-hierarchical structuring/communication/decision-making/
solidarity

+ (3) local autonomy and non-hierarchy as a network


IMHO, jenka's quite inaccurate comment here:
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-palestine/2006-July/0716-xw.html

>  in my six years working with dozens of indymedias, and global, and
> US, i've watched it turn from an effective media and organizing tool
> to an institution where a few people on process lists get to dictate
> 'indymedia policy', while at the same time continuing to claim that
> local indymedias are 'autonomous'.

is an expression of frustration with the difficult conflict between
trying to do all of (1), (2) and (3) in our indymedia network.

i think that the regular difficulties we encounter as new-imc
volunteers are partly due to the natural conflict between (2) and (3),
(possibly combined with some aspects of hierarchical behaviour which
are hard to grow out of): people who want to be autonomous are very
sensitive to any connotation that "the network" or individuals from
the network are giving them "instructions".

i don't see why we should *blame* people for this: it's natural.

(1) and (2) are also contradictory if a local imc is successful in 
getting participation by ordinary, "oppressed" people. Of course, this
is oversimplifying, but "oppressed" people are not necessarily those
who have lots of experience in writing essays, structuring arguments,
software skills, and knowledge of foreign languages. They're also less
likely to own their own computer.

So the more that goal (1) is fulfilled, the more we should expect
there to be problems with (2), at least in the "short term" - as time
goes on, new participants will learn global communication skills, but
it takes time.

Getting back to the specific case of imc-palestine, i am confident
that jenka is doing the best she can to find a balance between (1),
(2) and (3) based on her own experience. i think the details of her
paragraph are clearly inaccurate - we don't have "a few people on
process lists [who] get to dictate 'indymedia policy'", in fact, IMHO
we rather lack facilitation, bottom-up proposals being made, people
doing global work, my feeling is that the problem is rather that when
conflicts happen, people tend to prefer to put time into (1) over (2).
And then "cognitive dissonance reduction" takes place:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
- some of the people spending more time in (1) see that difficulties
in global communication happen and there's a cognitive conflict
between the fact that they are sincerely heavily engaged locally (1)
and the uncomfortable questions asked by people involved in (2).

The cognitive dissonance hypothesis would then suggest that someone
engaged locally (1) like jenka solves the cognitive conflict by
assuming that glocal people (doing both (1)+(2)) are being
unreasonable.

Anyway, imc-research would be a better place to discuss possible
ways to test if my model is something close to reality or not.
Writing long emails and crossposting them to a zillion lists is not
going to convince people that any model of indymedia is an accurate
model of what we are, what our problems are, and what possible solutions
are.

On the other hand, accusing someone of conscious manipulation is IMHO
clearly dangerous.


>> It's the same thing that happened to the imc-othello Collective, if you
>> remember, a while back. I'll send a reminder of the details in a
>> separate letter.
>>
>> The letter from the list administrators is below.
>>
>> Again, I'm not going to do of say anything else for a while about this
>> until we (new-imc) have a chance to either give me some critique, or a
>> vote of confidence, or directions on how to proceed, or at least until
>> we have a chance to discuss collectively the direction we are taking in
>> our relationship with our colleagues from Palestine.

Let's give a chance to the forming collective to see if maybe now that
public conversation has started, maybe with raad and kidar's
involvement the present conflict might lead to the creation of a real
indymedia collective - of which imemc is just one (dominating, but not
totally) part.


solidarity
boud