Notes from UK Network Meeting 4 and 5 Nov 2006
These are the draft of the notes LA kept, as he was typing them. It seems that there are a lot of errors in grammar and syntax, and things missing cause LA couldn't concentrate all the time. Worst case, things might be transcribed wrong! Genny has edited and completed these notes, ionnek added links. Please continue to give feedback and not consider accurate until reviewed by others.
Summaries, decisions and proposals
Table of contents :
Saturday 4/11
11.20 Information about the political situation in Mexico
Ximera described in brief the political situation in Mexico and she is going to write a detailed article of the historical and political background of what has been happening recently in Oaxaca.
Read some notes on the presentation
11.40 Global issues
IMC Global lists
1. The main issue regarding international things is that the UK is not well represented within the global network and there is not a clear communication structure. There are some liaison people in IMC-Legal but there is nobody involved in IMC Finance (25000$). The processes are very slow (Paris wouldn't [couldn't?] get a response, radio APPO needs some money). There needs to be a representative on imc finance so that [s]he passes to the members of the uk network what is being discussed and relays their opinions back to finance.
There are some kind of emergency things, where the liaison process would take (too) long.[?] There are proposals. Years ago, indymedia received a large donation, and in order to bank the money a formal structure had to be adopted. UCIMC set up to be something like a registered charity in the US, an organisation that can accept donations so that donors can get tax credit for donations. For this "service", UCIMC charges a 5% commission, which is the usual rate for such organisations. UCIMC has some paid staff, which has created a lot of discussions on a global level.
(two people volunteered for participating in imc-finance (one of them Wietse)
2. There has been some dispute in Darwin, Oceania. UK was about to support some sort of solution.
Indymedia book
Indybook: proposal by NYC. to produce a book about Indymedia. They have got a
website and a
page on docs.indymedia.org. They are negotiating with disinfo, a lefty publisher, about rights issues. It is a slow process and trying to evolve. There should be submissions till the end of the year.
We sent them the Sam and Annie
draft article on the G8 to look at, and offered to write more.
Legal representation
One guy from Brasil has registered the indymedia.org domain name. He receives all letters concerning that domain, and he has to submit enquiries to people right across the global network. The situation might need to change, based on a legal entity (but it is still being discussed in Brasil and worldwide).
There is some thing with the Italian Public Prosecutor having some legal action against IMC and they would need support.
>
> Proposal: to choose a specific list which would hold information and discussions on such issues.
Decisions: imc-uk-process at lists.indymedia.org – Information: UK-communication list. Argument: Process communication involves the working about the website of UK and some IMCs work on separate website.[?]
Decisions to be taken in the UK process list, where every group would have a liaison. Basic information to be sent to UK information.
Delegates should put things to be decided in the process list. Then, after there is a proposal on some decision and nobody has a negative response (within some fair amount of time), [s]he could go back and report it as a decision.
>> Structure of feeding up the legal issues. Whether the closed lists should be available to the liaisons and who is actually the liaison. Person offered to act as a liaison, expanding some work that already has been done since IMC server seizure.
12.15 New IMC UK server
There has not yet been action on a proposal about a new server. There has been some discussion among the techies. The network meeting decided to get a new server which would hold the existing data, then fix Traven and afterwards sort everything into the two machines. Once it's all sorted, the UK site needs to be kept on a server outside UK.
Background
Dan, Mish, Yossarian and Zak
proposed to buy a server to be located in the UK has been posted in June. Since the proposal affects all imcs that are currently hosted on Traven, it was forwarded to
traven-process. The money is available and set aside for servers, and there are a lot of IMCs which need some newer and faster servers. Several people responded to the proposal (
1 |
2 | |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7).
The proposal was
blocked. This was discussed and resolved during the network meeting.
Discussion
During this session, there was a very sincere discussion which led to resolution. The proposal came beginning of June while the server was slow. After two weeks of work there was a technical fix, so the block suggested that it wasn't a UK issue but providing a server for other IMCs. The person who blocked the proposal felt there should be some input from the other groups so they could have a say over what they want from the new server. He said the block was about process. A person who worked on the initial proposal contested this. He felt strongly that the block had held up the vital process of getting a new server and other imcs are suffering as a result.
- We have always had temporary servers and the idea was to get another hopefully permanent server. The idea was that the new server would be permanent and good enough for a lot of IMCs. Small indymedias eagerly waiting for us to have a server
- The UK server already hosts approximately 6 sites. I can't see what input we need to fix our problems which would give us the capacity to do favours for others (and return favours we have received!)
(here comes discussion on the block)
- We are getting a new strong server to support extract things developed, able to host other IMCs.[?] What will happen to the UK site was discussed in separate workshhop.
14.00 Server issues
In this workshop, we discussed technical, practical and political details on getting a new server - in which cities could it be hosted so that techs have physical access to the box, do we know possible ISPs, what would all this cost, and how could we finance it. A timeline was set to decide on ISP and hardware until mid-december
summary. Next Steps are on
UkServerPlans
14.00 Network issues
(workshop)
New CMS project
(plenary) Report by Zapata, developer of the MIR content management system (CMS). At the moment there are 5-6 projects for indymedia content management, but each of them is basically run by one person or a very small number, leading to a situation which is not really sustainable. It actually means that if something happens to any of them, the entire development and all the IMCs based on them will be in trouble.
In July there was a meeting of IMC Tech in Brazil. There,
Zapata proposed that IMC developers should start working on a new CMS. The proposal introduced the idea that there shouldn't be an Indymedia IMC developed from scratch, but an existing open-community based CMS, adapted according to our needs. This would enhance the CMS with the benefits of a continuous building process involving a lot of developers. Furthermore, more IMC developers can be involved in implementing, since the the development process is well-documented and organised.
There is an ongoing technical process, which at the moment is focusing on evaluating the known CMSs and seeing how suitable each one of them would be. The entire procedure will take several months and will result to a basic platform, which will be subject of testing. The job is being organised by imc-cms list and a wiki which will move to docs.indymedia soon . Regular IRC meetings are held in #cms .
Newswire
UK startpage & Promoted Newswire
(plenary) Discussion on the proposal of having the promoted Newswire as the default one.
- Main argument for this was that this would improve the quality of the newswire, although there were some concerns expressed over indymedia promoting articles in the first place.
- At the moment article promoting is not sufficient, there should be better effort if the change will be implemented.
- There were several arguments for and against the initial proposal. Also, it was suggested that the change should be followed by a wider change in the startpage, which would better reflect the work being done in the regions.
The proposals mentioned: -
- two newswire columns (instead of one) for both the promoted and the plain newswire.
- Reducing the plain newswire to the 5 first articles, then a link to the entire newswire, and then the promoted newswire. This would let the users not being disappointed of the fact that they might not be able to locate their post, after the submission.
- Having the promoted newswire over the plain newswire
Finally, since there was a diverse on the preferences of the people, it was suggested that some templates could be developed and made available for comments.
Personal Details
Posting personal details into the newswire. Personal details which are not in the public domain should not normally be posted, for reasons including legal threats. Should there be an editorial guideline about this? Discussion about whether offending posts should be hidden or deleted?
(note: When people sign their own thing, usually there is some confirmation, since otherwise it might be a fraud.)
Wording for amendment to editorial guidelines was agreed on Sunday.
Sunday
History project
see
ImcUkHistoryProject
Network Discussion
(plenary)
- What happens with regions not represented by collectives.
- Proposal to switch off West Country imc. (Liverpool collective seems to be affiliated but not connected. They last took part in a meeting in Sheffield last year).
- We should try to develop ways to maintain communications with IMCs that are not communicating well with the network,
- The idea of non-geographical thematic IMCs.
- Reports back from collectives.
- Things done as a collective effort.
- Develop projects.
Since there were not people in West Country for ages, there is the proposal to remove links from the regions list. Keep the link so that people can assign the category, but get it of the region. The proposal first came at 2005, but somebody pop-ud as interested in running the site again, which never happened. There should be a distinction between a region as section and a region and a region as maintained by a collective. Deadline: end of December.
Idea for enabling South Coast IMCs, but they must be given the chance.
If the tick box is not directly associated with region site, shouldn't there been tick for more regions?
>
> Proposal to remove the West Country tick box. A closer look on how the topic works the newswire, and there is nobody administrating this region. The domain name recently says that West Country IMC is closed. Bristol IMC kind of takes part of West Country.
>
> Proposal to add a link that will indicate the archive of the region.
>
> Idea: Any promoted article to be displayed in the central column, that would work for the areas that do not have a collective
>
> Scotland would like the Scotland link being displayed without having the two pages appearing active.
- Some pages are not having traffic, but this might be because of their not being updated. But there are regions that are really active. There are already websites running MIR who have a more magazine-style that has been proposed. Till the next meeting might [?]
- Some local IMCs have a broad base of community groups, and are perhaps more connected to people living locally than the UK site, which is mainly activist-based. Having some support with implementing-testing new ideas eg. people from Nottingham have voiced to change the startpage but no-techies have been available to help.
- The idea of changing the frontpage which would also display a both local and regional main features and newswire.
- The idea of putting multiple newswires and possibly part of the main newswire it is an idea that several regional website have proposed and has been considered as a part of the ideas.
- The regions are not represented enough. A local site should target to locality and get most hits from the local features. If this information is based in topics, it would be useful to see issues of the same topic from various regions. UK site shouldn't work as a local but could be based on topics. Regional sites could also display items from the uk newswire and global newswire.
- We could also build collectives around single issues/topics. This would introduce a different structure than the one we have. People from Nottigham chose working as a local collective because of the locality and there would not necessarily be the same support for topic-based collectives which might have far less face-to-face contact.
- We have lots of different IMC models around the world and the one referred before was based on the idea of Seattle, eg with the activist things. In the IMC UK things might work somehow different, since there are somehow different identities developed. [?] In Germany the regionalization has been done in the same page. But regional collectives may not be happy to lose their own space and identity. There is not a UK collective that is independent from the regions. There are theamatic groups and this is something to think about. We should think of how to sort out things in the pages in a dynamic way.
- Possibly to allow the user to define how they want their own pages.
- Pushing the idea of other websites syndicating their particular topics.
- A lot of things about development to be discussed in the next meetings, therefore they should be set as issues, so that ideas can be thrown in in the meantime.
- People from more places would like to be around. A meeting to be set soon and focus on those issues.
Calendar
Certain issues about some spamming being done in the existing calendar. The calendar has now been cleaned up to March 2007.
>
> Deadline probably till March 2007 to resolve the issue, yossarian is implementing
- New calendar should be dealing with some integration, which would encourage people post to the calendar instead of the Newswire
- The fact the existing calendar will be unusable after March, means it should be replaced earlier if possible, but it may be possible to automatically clean it after March.
- The uk pages and the calendar are two different sites technically, but it would be possible to have them communicate. Possible to associate MIR post to certain calendar entries.
- The Calendar should allow more information on the event published
- The link for “Publishing” should be the same for both the Newswire and the Calendar and then lead the user to the right publishing form.
- Discussion on how to link events in the past with newswire listings of that specific dates. That might introduce some easier navigation to the existing infinite archive.
- www.upcoming.org
- Post event descriptions.
- Discussion on whether IMC is an organizing or a reporting thing.
- Regionalization
RSS and blog feeds
(plenary)
A start to brush up our RSS feeds was set up by Mick Fuzz (
email) and can be found here:
ImcUkRss
Proposal
- Proposal to have a static page listing rss (produced from indymedia regional pages and topics as well as imc uk startpage) and documentation how users could include imc rss feed to other websites. PASSED
- Proposal: Editorial guidelines on party and political promotion. Since blogging is a related thing, there should be some similar guidelines for blogging.
- The publish page - guide people via publish page to the appropriate parts of imc-uk (announcements on calendar, blog-entries on blogwire or similar, copy and paste from other media to an "other media" topic...)
- Alternative Indymedia: Next generation websites. RSS feeds, markups. Might be useful to have a look to these proposals and see how they might be incorporated into future changes in the website.
- A ticker that would display the local issues[?]
- Bringing in feeds are not anonymous, so they are much easier to moderate. If it is a bad feed will be easy to stop > Every post to that blog must be according to uk editorial guidelines.
- Proposal: To add a new alt media topic and copy the contents of the old Indymedia topic into it.
Pulling rss feeds into imc.uk
- How would we come to a consensus on what kind of blogs and rss feeds would be included in an imc uk feed list?
- The blog issue is something not clear about, mainly political issue. But some bloggers who also post in indymedia are using connections to other resources, which is interesting.
- If a blogger just posts a link, it is hidden. The entire article should be posted so that it get judged, along with the link, it is fine this way. We couldn't handle an automatic transfer of blog post into the newsire.
- The idea of a blogwire would make sense in a new non-linear site, but at this moment, the way the UK site is done, it would be very difficult to define the criteria and the way the blogs would be displaying. There might be done sth with user rating...
- the criteria of a blogwire shouldn't be different than the ones we already apply. In terms of of defining which feeds are important to import, there should be some way to do it, without encouraging everyone to submit all blogs that seem important to them [? - maybe i've misunderstood this]. As for the exporting, it would be nice if we would be able to enable the search functionality, because it something relevant. In terms of the metadata, indeed it would be useful to analyze what we are producing and start to move forwards improving that quality.
- Meta data is an important factor that would sort out things and enable us to display them thematically. Meta tags don't work really effectively. - Idea about the user congregating articles in a printable PDF format.
Pushing rss feeds out of imc.uk
- It is an interesting issue, along with the RSS thing. There was a recent proposal about a topic on housing. There is already a technically easy way to use this RSS technology to spread some issues around. To get people to include an IMC newswire into their own websites/blogs. But having an RSS techincally is not enough, we will need to promote and communicate with other collectives.
- Pushing info to other pages: maybe to create a “BLOG THIS” button that would allow users to syndicate the content to their website. It is already being done (via RSS feeds), but it could be made easier.
Offering indyblogs
- indyblogs.Protest.net displays blogs from indymedia people. They include RSS feeds which just shows the links in the front page. In the CMS discussions, one of the most useful things would be for the users after registering, to be offered blog space. Which is a political question. We are an alternative to Gmail etc and we have to provide an alternative for users not giving out their rights to the main corporate websites.
--
GennyVg - 07 Nov 2006: Have gone through this and made a few alterations. Where I wasn't clear what was being said, I've added [?]. Maybe someone else can have a look and clarify. I haven't added any sections or topics which are missing, just edited what's there. Hope it's helpful. --
IonNec - 09 Nov 2006, 13 Nov 2006 added some links
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