Meeting at the Allied Media Conference

Possible Agenda Items:

• Intros
• Web Innovations/wishlist
• Online File Sharing
• Tech Support for Local IMCs
• Advertising/Finances
• Self-reflection
• Outreach

Notes:

• Web Innovations/wishlist

NYC is doing major site overhaul. Including local, global, and blog wires.
Portland has a tabbed newswire.
Torrents are a good way of archiving/sharing files. Indybay, Michigan, and Portland are all employing torrent technology. To find out more about torrents, go to indytorrents.org, or seach bit torrents on the web.
Madison has added a zine wire in order to bring in more interest to the site. They haven't had too much feedback yet, but hopefully it will catch the attention of different communities.
Online collaborative media making, for audio/video/etc, is something that people are working on.

• Tech Support

Q: How do IMCs with no tech team get access to up-to-date tech help? A: Jump into irc.indymedia.org #tech, #mir, #dada, or active. Or join the imc-tech (at) lists.indymedia.org. BostonIMC also has sf-active tech people.[note from Pete at Boston IMC- no sf-active folks that I know of. we are working on a new Drupal site but we have nothing to give new IMC's yet] The easiest way to receive immediate tech help seems to be through irc.
Q: Have all dada sites recovered from the recent hack? A: More or less, several sites are still down, others are having problems. The sites that went down are slowly coming back and should be fine. It is recommended that at least one member from each local collective join the imc-tech (at) lists.indymedia.org in order to stay informed on current tech updates/patches.

• Advertising/Finances

The discussion about UC-IMCs financial responsibilities was picked up. How do people feel about the flow of money in the network? Does anyone care about the way that money actually moves between IMCs? There should be more transparency in general when it comes to finances. IMC financial records should be immediately accessable online. UK-IMC has an itemized spreadsheet of all their finances on their wiki page. At this point, UCIMC is in the process of documenting all financial records.

• Outreach

Q: How can a local IMC reach out to communities that are not immediately drawn to IndyMedia?
UCIMC went to the African American community in the area and presented themselves as simply being a tool for people to tell their own stories. NYCIMC wants to reimbrace the "hub" model, meaning they provide RSS feeds to local video collectives, or they offer to repost articles from local indy papers.