Minutes of the ESF IMC Network Meeting

Saturday February 28th 2004, 12-5pm London.

8 people attended, of which two were completely new to IMC (they were friends, and left early). Of the other six, 1 was from London, 3 from Oxford and 2 from Cambridge.

At the start an overview of the ESF process from pre-Paris to the present was given. Reports were then heard back from Oxford (many months ago decided to get involved and try to provide media centre), Cambridge (a debate about official/unofficial involvement resulted in unofficial being chosen) and London (some people sick of it but many keen to get involved to some extent). Then the agenda was decided and discussed as below.

Website

There is an unoffical website at esf2004.net. We could try to force the official site to be open. A letter was sent from the French web providers to democratise_esf list. If opening up fails we could: use imc as news source, syndicate a news column on esf2004.net, could use fse-esf.org if they change domain name. [At the organising committee meeting on Sunday it was made clear that they would use Poptel to do all web work]

Media Centre

We could: draft a groovy proposal, discuss it at the IMC European summer camp in Greece (?), start collecting second hand hardware for later donation to grassroots groups (problems: collection and storage), do radio interviews/broadcasts.

World Summit on Information Society (WSIS)

We could: organise a parallel conference/or try to get it inside the official program. But it must impact outside the communications groups, and have broad participation in organising it. We would like to hear more from people participating.

Democratise the ESF proposal

Urge the process list to consult with IMCs and hopefully sign it. (put in a link to it!)

Babels (UK)

Babels is a translation network connected to the Paris website group. It would be good to come up with a holistic communications proposal that dealt with the process from seminars->translations->web streaming (for example) as part of a Communication Forum. People should try to meet with Babels at the European Assembly next weekend.

Involvement and/or Entryism

Discussion of methods of getting inside, getting information out (this seems to be happening now but will it continue?), then having a fringe event (inside the ESF process but organised as autonomously as possible). This led to the main idea of a:

Communication Forum

Organise a complete proposal with many groups to present to the program group. Firstly try to get IMC UK agreement to this (quite a discussion took place if this was necessary/at all possible). Get other groups involved (e.g. Commedia, WHO ELSE WAS MENTIONED?), make a precise detailed proposal, make it a self organising forum. Include the translation streaming, media centre, WSIS forums from above. Continue the network after the ESF by getting people to sign up to email lists or otherwise.

Consume the ESF

Since individuals cannot participate in the process and they want us to behave as mere consumers, then consume it. Treat the ESF as a means to an end (e.g. network meetings, maximise networking).

-- BrettHennig - 02 Mar 2004
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