Indymedia session

facilitated by jong

how to build a indymedia center in your own city?

principal in IMC: a decentralized network of autonomous collectives whose shared resources allow for the creation of a social and digital infrastructure that is independent of state and market forces.

the process and procedure which people should observe are introduced inside the session, and is cleared outline in the web page provided by global IMC.

questions

what's the relationship between any local IMC and the independent media in their respective city?

sasha mentioned that there are different views regarding this issue. some deemed that it is fine local independent media are affiliated without taking on the name of IMC, while other holds that why not joining a network of hundreds of media activists?

indeed, it is up to the editorial collective to decide on the repost policy, basing on the principle that editorial collective is open for anyone who comes and works together. in manila context, annotated repost is welcome even from corporate media. and in korean context, news from jinbo.net and MCA will be summarized and translated into english.

for the activities within the IMC communities, people discuss the spam problem (human instead of automatic). sanjay said that in a controversy about a genocide, some people just come to the bombay imc to spread stupid racist and hate speech. jong emphasized that if there is a clear editorial policy, editor can just adhere to it. and in malaysia as well in singapore, the government even sends paid people to spam forum. in global IMC, there are some many people and company abusing the open publish system, that the newswire function practically becomes useless, the way global IMC dealt with it is to withdrew the newswire from the front page and replaced it with featured articles.

how to avoid raid in repressive regime?

set up a mirror site in place where is more politically stable, or call help from the IMC geeks who can quickly set up a new server somewhere else. people also joked that it could be a good opportunity for promotion, accusing the government of media censorship and political repression.

finally an article about txap is written up collectively and to be posted on IMC. Jakarta IMC Manila IMC