Regional mailing lists and TWiki pages

Please add to, update, correct the lists here.

Some of these lists are more active; some are less active. Contribute and activate the one in your region. Or make a smaller or bigger geographical region if you think that would be better.

• EuropeImc - ImcCEEurope - imc-europe or imc-east-mediterranean or imc-india
• imc-oceania or
• imc-africa
• or imc-canada or
• imc-us or imc-us-process imc-midwest-regional or imc-nena or
• imc-latina or
• Imc Asia-Pacific list

...

Why regionalise? Is this creating hierarchy?

Long discussion: ImcRegionalisation

Brief discussion

By end 2002, we had about 100 local IMCs. If things keep going like they are, then by end 2005, we're likely to have something like 1000, and by end 2008, there'll be 10000 local IMCs. That's a lot. We'll be mainstream ;). Just like the 15/16 Feb 2003 antiwar demonstrations of 10 million or so people around the world showed that informed, popular opinion is mainstream.

So can we coordinate and communicate globally without regionalising? Is a geographical hierarchy OK as long as the boundaries are fuzzy and the regional coordination groups are built bottom-up rather than top-down?

Possibly the most radical session at WSF2003 was the Life After Capitalism session. Steven Shalom points out that 25-50 people is the maximum number in a group for people to get to know, understand and trust each other, just as anthropologists noticed that tribes typically had/have this number of people. His model of nested councils of 25-50 people - http://www.zmag.org/shalompol.htm - is for a general national and global political structure. Is it relevant for Indymedia?

If we could evolve to something like 30 regional groups, each with one liaison from each of 30 or so local IMCs in its region, and a liaison from each regional group to the global imc-communication group, then we should be OK up until the end of 2005.

As of early 2003, it seems that regional coordination is working best in Latin America, Canada, Oceania and Europe, but is not functioning well in USA, maybe because of different cultural traditions of collective organising versus individualism, though maybe this is maybe just a biased point of view of non-USA people...

By mid-2003, a USA-region coordination list became functional :)) : http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-us-process

added asia pacific list -- WoWi - 21 Feb 2005