Indymedia.org – analysis from within.
0. Introduction
0.0 History
Road protest was at its hight in the late nineties in Britain. A loose network of activists, under the banner “Earth First!”, was one of the catalysts. There were groups using such banner all over Britain, although the one in London chose to use “Reclaim the Streets” instead.
“Reclaim the streets” had a contact telephone number that around announced actions often became saturated. The media attention, though, was focused mainly in their hairstyles and extravagances, and not on the issues these activists were defending.
Virtually every person ever involved in Indymedia will tell a different story of how it began. For the media activists in London, it began on the 18th of June 1999, of course. Thousands of activists and other normal people converged in the biggest financial centre in Europe at the time, the City, and had a party – well, according to the media, a riot. Elsewhere in London, the group that had decided to become autonomous from the main organising group, was streaming on the web the video taken from the streets.
The activists that set up the first Indymedia, in Seattle, took this idea of video streaming from the London events, and many other ideas from many other events around the world, which were probably shared by people travelling to Seattle for the protests and blockades against the World Trade Organisation meeting on the 30th of November 1999. They took all these ideas a step further: they would allow anyone and everyone to publish their videos, audio, text and pictures directly on the web, from any computer connected to internet. It is the Open Publishing element that nowadays is required from any new site that wants to join the Indymedia network.
As the documentary video made with occasion of the happenings in Argentina in December , says, then something happened: “someone forgot to switch off the machines. And people continued to publish after the tear gas had dispersed”
0.0 Expansion
First was Seattle, Nov 1999. Second was Washington, April 2000. Third was London, MayDay 2000. With every transnational summit, with every major mobilisation, a new Indymedia was born. Groups with no more resources than their enthusiasm and a few cameras would set up a website on the server in Seattle that they called “Stallman”, honouring the creator of the Free Software movement. The element of trust was guaranteed because all these groups always had some one who had worked with some one else from other groups, and already trusted each other.
But expansion continued. New local groups wanted to create an Indymedia website, and the technical people, not knowing all these new groups personally, felt they were taking a political decision of admitting new groups into the network, decision that should be made by the whole network and not by the “techies”. Documentation of such political processes, began, which included Principles of Unity, Membership Criteria, and a process on how a new indymedia would be allowed into the network before giving it an indymedia subdomain and space in Stallman and other servers that became available.
The first step for an indymedia was then to fill an application form to be considered by the “new-imc working group”. Then a sponsor from that group would take the application and work with the aspiring imc in documentation on how they satisfied the membership criteria and how they approved the principles of unity.
At one point in 2002, the rate of new application forms was two a week. Many of these applications were never processed due to lack of people offering themselves to be sponsors.
0.2 Evolution
When some one in seattle forgot to switch off the machines, people continued publishing their stories, which were not only related to what had happened on the streets during the WTO summit. The same happened to other individual sites.
In the same line, when new imcs were created, there was the tendency that these new sites were no longer aimed at the coverage of one single event, but local and every day issues affecting not just a few thousand protesters, but every one.
1. Organisation
1.0. Mission Estatement, Principles of Unity.
Starting with principles of unity, which have recently been subject of a proposal to re-name them as Principles of Diversity. All local collectives, as long as adhering to some basics, are completely authonomous. There is some tension here. For instance with the issue of paying the work of volunteers. Only two collectives in the network do this, and they have been subject of strong criticism.
The fact that money is not involved at any stage of the production process of the websites is a political instance in itself.
Indymedia aims to change society, starting with the way news are produced, following with the ways humans interact in the production of the goods they use and consume. The different way to produce news has been described. The radical difference from commercial outlets is the denial of monetary value for the news. Not because news are not considered to have any value, but because it is understood that this need to exchange news for an amount of money is what makes the maintainstream what it is. For instance
1.x. Meetings in different media.
Face to face. This is the primary form of meetings, although it is the less noticed in documentation of the activities, since minuting them takes extra effort.
Email lists. Most of them on the list server, more than 1050 at the moment. Most of them are publicly archived and open for subscription. The fact that they are publicly archived provides documentation on the go: every email sent to the list becomes a web page, with its unique relay location, url, and can be referred to at later time. The fact that are open for subscription means that volunteers can get involved even if they have never met face to face with the people already working, but it also provokes a situation where about only 10% of the subscribers post or indeed do the tasks at hand. This sometimes provokes frustration and proposals to close down lists.
Email lists was the first new way of communication introduced in the way indymedia worked, after face to face meetings. Making decisions on email lists has proved sometimes difficult, but some admire the ability of this collective to make decisions via email. The shift from making decisions in meetings to making them on email was traumatic for some collectives, but proved to be absolutely necessary on a global level. Some smaller collectives continue to make decisions in their regular meetings.
Wiki. Emails are sent and stay as they are sent. With wiki, a whole collective can work on a document. The web pages are editable by any one with a login identity which is easily obtainable without the need of any one else’s approval. It is surprising that, being so open, defacing of documents in the indymedia wiki is unheard of. Again, shift from normal email communication of documents to wiki documentation process was not smooth and still today there are people who do not handle it well. Special expertise is needed for effective wiki building, like html and other wiki-specific coding.
Irc. One server hosts all channels, again any one can open a channel or join an existing one. Irc has been the latest innovation on imc communication. In the beginning it was only used for technical questions, but more and more, people were using it for quick decisions and even to have online meetings. Now, some face to face meetings are complemented with irc for those who can not attend but are happy to connect via irc.
1.1. Syndication.
Nowadays, the global site, www.indymedia.org, gets its content from the many local sites. All sites are Open Published, except that one. Here is how it works:
People, any one, can publish on a local site. To do this one only needs to click on the “publish” button, present in all sites. No login, no password, as some of the literature promotes. Then the article gets published, on the right hand side column. Each local site has an editorial collective, which is the same collective that technically maintains the site. If a piece of news is considered of significant importance, it is highlighted with an article in the middle column, with a link to the original article/s. It can also have links to other websites, for background information on the issue that the piece is about.
Automatically, this middle column article, or feature, appears on the right hand side column of the global page, www.indymedia.org. There is another editorial team there that highlights the articles coming to the newswire by putting them on a bigger article on the middle column, although of course they are free to simply reproduce the article that was on the middle column of the global site.
The political motivation for it to be the way it is.
