Mayday Indymedia Organisational Status

1. Pre-organizing: the first step is to talk with people in your community and try to get the sense if there is interest in forming an IMC. Once you have formed a collective, or as you are forming it, ask yourselves these questions:
   • (1A) How does the makeup of your collective reflect the diversity of the local community (e.g. in realtion to gender-, sexual-, spiritual-, and/or cultural-identity)?
   • (1B) If your group currently does not represent the diversity of the local community, particularly in relation to groups who are underrepresented in mainstream society and denied access to vehicles of expression, what steps will be taken to address this on an ongoing basis?
   • (1C) What steps will be taken to involve individuals in workfields new to them? What measures will be taken to overcome a gendered work division?

     See ImcMaydayDiversity and the revised ImcMaydayNewImc
     

2. Look at the documents linked at this site (see below).

   All members of the Mayday collective have read and are familiar with these documents:- 1 | 2 | 3

3. When you think you're really ready to do some good organizing, fill out the form at the bottom of the http://newimc.indymedia.org page. The person filling out the form and the person written as contact will receive a password for updating the http://contact.indymedia.org database. Please keep this password carefully.

   See ImcMaydayNewImc and the email from 12th February 2011

4. Open a mailing list: http://newlist.indymedia.org If there are problems, you can try emailing listwork at sos.indymedia.org . If nothing happens after a few days, you can try asking on irc on #listwork if someone has answered your "ticket" (your request). Read ListworkWorkingGroup to understand how the group of listwork volunteers functions. Please read NewImcMailingListIssues about openness of the list.

   We have a mailing list which is named imc-mayday-collective

5. O - R - G - A - N - I - Z - E !!!!

   We have organised a number of face to face meetings, IRC meetings, and we have undertaken outreach work in the form of showing films ImcMaydayWeekendJan2011 and distributing leaflets to the community at mass mobilisations ImcMaydayOutreachLeaflet. Unlike most new imcs, we are in the position of already looking after a busy newswire which is used by diverse individuals and groups and we therefore already have the potential for recruiting new collective members. We propose to add an invitation for site users to get involved with mayday indymedia that will appear on our publish page as well as being accessible from the front page main menu. This will be put in place once the fork has been completed, reaching out to existing site users who may be interested in becoming more involved in the collective running of the site. We are not in a position to make any such changes until the new site is in place.

6. With your forming collective, write
   • (6a) an updated mission statement (see below) and

     See ImcMaydayMissionStatement

   • (6b) an editorial policy

     See ImcMaydayEditorialGuidelines

   • and maybe contact mailto:imc-tech@indymedia.org at this stage.

     We have agreed that the Mission Statement and Editorial Guidelines will stay essentially the same as the UK IMC ones, thus we are already working in line with the Membership Criteria and Principles of Unity.

7. Edit the wiki page https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local and put in some text like ImcWoopwoop if your IMC name will be IMC Woopwoop (first, any member of your collective should register a wiki account at https://docs.indymedia.org/System/UserRegistration ). Then click on ImcWoopwoop and add some text and save, and then carry on and use these wiki pages to manage your documentation (mission statement, editorial policy, answers to MembershipCriteria and PrinciplesOfUnity, etc.).

   We have a wiki page here:- ImcMayday
   This documents our email list and iRC channel, the inception of the Mayday collective, how to get involved [needs to explicitly stated], a list of meetings with associated minutes, and these wiki documents:-
   

   1. ImcMaydayMissionStatement
   2. ImcMaydayEditorialGuidelines
   3. ImcMaydayFoundingStatment
   4. ImcMaydaySocialMedia
   5. ImcMaydayNewImc
   6. ImcMaydayName
   7. ImcMaydayWeekendJan2011
   8. ImcMayday303Statment
   9. ImcMaydayDiversity
   10. ImcMaydayOrganisationalStatus
   11. ImcMaydayMembershipCriteriaResponse
   12. ImcMaydayPrinciplesOfUnityResponse
   13. ImcMaydayOutreachLeaflet

8. When you're really ready, and only when you're ready, reply to and send to new-imc at indymedia.org your collective's responses to these (you might disagree with some of them, please be honest, it's as much for your own group's self-organising than for the network):
   • (7a) MembershipCriteria

     See ImcMaydayMembershipCriteriaResponse

   • (7b) PrinciplesOfUnity

     See ImcMaydayPrinciplesOfUnityResponse

9. Your new-imc contact proposes your site
   • internally to new-imc, if no one blocks within 3 days, this is passed to
   • globally to http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-process/ and http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-communication and if no one blocks there within 7 days, then...
   • you become part of the network! This will be official when your imc sponsor sends a 'Welcome' email to imc-process, imc-communication, and new-imc.
     • If your website is not ready yet: the contact person in your group, who received a password for the contact database at step 3, should update your entries in http://contact.indymedia.org to show that your collective is accepted in the network
     • When your website is ready:
       • DNS: you should ask dns@sos.indymedia.org to get your domain name alias (somewhere.indymedia.org) - see SoS for more info on the sos system and to check the progress of your request, and
       • cities list: Your http://contact.indymedia.org/ entry should be updated to "live" (by the contact person in your group, or by your new-imc helper) so that your site goes onto the http://www.indymedia.org/cities.inc list; also update other information there for your collective
10. The fun begins. Get involved in the global lists and Indymedia discussions and decisions. Offer to work with other IMCs from your area or elsewhere around the world. Do good work.
11. Change the world, for the better of course. We wouldn't expect anything less.