[New-imc] New Victoria (BC, Canada) collective: editorial policy

[boud]

hi ekes, all,  [cc: to imc-research since it's a potential research theme]

On Mon, 24 Nov 2008, ekes wrote:

> Bartolomeo wrote:
>> I thought that it is essential to open posting, that the posted content is
>> shown instantly on the website without prior moderation as defined in the
>> wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_publishing):
>>
>> "Open publishing is a process of creating news or other content that is
>> transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly
>> appear in the pool of stories publicly available."
>
> Maybe this isn't the forum to trace the discussion, where is? But,
> Indymedia is possibly better described by Open Editing than by what has
> become the definition of Open Publishing now. The speed at which  posts
> become available isn't the important factor. What is important is the
> ability to see what has been posted, what has been 'hidden' and why,
> what has been shown and why, what has been promoted prominently on the
> site and why. This is what makes Indymedia different, the open
> procedure, and importantly the ability to, even the encouragement to,
> take part in the procedure.

If we want to be anywhere near the reality of most existing indymedia
collectives/websites, then AFAIK, we are nowhere near Open Editing.
Open Editing is surely what wikis in general and the wikipedia
in particular are probably the best example of.

IMHO what indymedia is near is somewhere between:

Open Publishing + Open-Editing-In-Principle-And-With-Some-Effort

and

Open Publishing + Locally-Open-Editing

IMHO a huge amount of local conflicts have occurred in indymedia
because of the fact that the software packages initially in use and
still in use in most indymedia websites makes Open Publishing easy to
do and difficult to avoid, but Open Editing difficult to do (requires
a huge number of emails to mailing lists to be done and/or constant
subjective judgements regarding when an edit is "important" or "not
important" enough to be proposed/discussed/consensed on etc.) and easy
to avoid.

The local meetings/local activist community aspect is what makes
"Locally-Open-Editing" - if there have been controversial editorial
interventions, then people can sort it out face-to-face and override
weaknesses in the software.

If we want new indymedia software to encourage Open Editing, then IMHO
it should make open editing as difficult to avoid as open publishing
is difficult to avoid. That means that every editorial intervention
should be publicly logged, like on mediawiki and on samizdat, so that
people don't waste energy on speculating who edited what and when and
either getting suspicious of each other or (unintentionally in most cases)
denying their own editorial activity because they forgot or got
confused.


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boud