[IMC-US] Re: founding documents for IMC-US

[Sascha Meinrath]

Hi SuZQ,

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, SuZQ wrote:

> Hi.  This is SuZQ.  I subscribed a little while ago, but for some reason I
> haven't been receiving posts to the IMC/Us lists and my posts keep
> bouncing.  One more attempt at intro...

Yes, SBC (our phone monopoly) has been "upgrading" again, which has caused 
major DSL outages throughout the Champaign-Urbana area.  I believe things 
have stabalized on their end -- but it was a bit dicey for a bit.
 
> I'm SuZQ, IMC Philly.  I am involved with translation (french, english,
> spanish, german, and italian), information dispatch, radio and legal
> concerns.
> 
> I have a few questions; perhaps someone could help clarify them...
> 
> > The IMC-US affinity group is open to all people who wish to help with the
> > project.  Meetings are publicly "advertized" and invitations to join the
> > group were sent to all US-based IMCs.
> 
> Where are these meetings?  The US is so large that any face-to-face
> meetings would be geographically exclusive (and internet meetings are
> exclusive anyway.)

We've only had one face-to-face -- at this summer's Allied Media
Conference (AMC).  I'm also hoping that a bunch of folks will be going to
the Media Reform conference in November in Madison (see:  
http://www.mediareform.net/conference.php ) -- if so, maybe it's worth
having another face-to-face there.  Eventually we will probably need to
have IRC meetings to work out various logistical issues -- once this
happens, invitations will be sent to this list and the imc-us-process
list.  I agree that internet meetings are exclusive -- which is a good
reason to work on getting funding so that in the future we can hold
regional and national gatherings.

> Also, why is this list not on lists.indymedia.org?

There are a couple reasons for this -- the first is that Global's e-mail
servers are already maxing out, so anything that can be done to lessen the
load is a good idea.  Distributing the communications infrastructure is
also a good way to make sure that single points of failure don't affect
the entire Network (having been through a couple Global e-mail blackouts,
I can tell you, it's a real pain). That said, I think it's a good idea to
have a link on the global list site.  The second reason was that getting a
list on Global was more difficult than just setting one up on our local
server -- so following the AMC, we just went with what was most
parsimonious.

Let me know if you have other questions,

--Sascha