[IMC-US] u.s. indymedia caucus, AMC:

[faith swords]

hey everyone,

here are the notes from the indymedia caucus at the AMC in bowling green.
it was great to see everyone there. i have signed up all the new people,
so new people, spread the word to your friends ok?

--faith swords,
urbana-champaign IMC

***

US Indymedia Caucus,
Allied Media Conference, Bowling Green, OH
June 19, 2004. 10-11:20 a.m.

Present: Sascha (UCIMC), Ellen (UCIMC), Faith (UCIMC), Ryan (Tenn. IMC),
Jay (UCIMC), Paul (UCIMC), Josh (NYC), Alicia (Madison), Matt, Mike (NYC),
Chris (NYC), Meenu (Austin), Andy (Cleveland), Max (Michigan), Ben
(Michigan), Kathy, Dawn (Rochester), Alexis (Charlottesville), Tyler, Mike
(Michigan IMC), bht (Portland), Laurie (Houston), rob (Houston), Donna
(Cincinnati), Lott (Chicago), Ryan (Chicago), Puck (Philly), Esther (NYC)
Ally (Oxford OH) Lauren (Miami),  Chris (Chicago), Nish (?)

Assigning roles: Sascha is facilitating, Faith taking notes. Paul is the
timekeeper, cutter-offer if necessary. Josh wants to add conflict
resolution to the agenda. Resolution of conflicts in Indymedia, we don.t
have to make any decisions, just talk about it. Dawn wants to talk about
the Indymedia Newsreal. Chris says: it would be helpful for conflict
resolution to avoid specific IMC conflicts as much as possible, and focus
on general management strategies. Keep it abstract.

Overview: Ryan: ideas came from this caucus last year. Everyone was
feeling like it was good to have more levels of IMC syndication than we
had then/have now. US domination of global site has been a problem.
Another outlet for US IMCs would help alleviate that. Hard to get a good
national overview. Idea was to syndicate important stories from local IMCs
that have national relevance (sic). Chris NYC: knows there are tech things
that are holding things up, wants to know what they are. BHT: wants to
know the roadblocks that have been hit. Ryan: first roadblock was what to
call the site. A lot of people felt that we should not even refer to the
United States. A lot of debate about that, never really came up with any
solution. Calling it US-IMC for practical reasons, makes it clear that we
are dealing with a particular state entity. Another thing: how much should
be syndication, how much should be original content written specifically
for US-IMC. We wanted to follow the global model. Structure of US-IMC:
outreach, tech, editorial committees. Ben: bilingual? Ryan: that was one
of the roadblocks. Some of the code isn.t very compatible with
translations. Sascha: we.re looking for someone who wants to implement
that.

Updates: Josh . person who has indymedia.us wanted to know if he could get
paid back for the domain name. Josh said renew it and we.ll take care of
it. Ben: site is still hosted on Michigan server, Ben does most of that
work. He.s been working on moving other sites onto Michigan server for
emergencies. Volunteer from Rochester (another Ben!) who can do
syndication, which will hopefully push things forward.

Chris NYC: what is timeframe on going live, and what.s delaying that? Ben:
right now it.s just a basic dada site. There are bugs Ben hasn.t had time
to figure out. Editors can.t even log in. Syndication is holding up the
hole process, but we.re still going to do that . Sascha. Bht suggests hat
maybe we just use mir. Global site runs on mir, and it does multi-lingual
and syndication. Andy wants to know how stories get syndicated in the
first place. Sascha says local stories will end up on the newswire and the
editors will make features. Ryan: has the syndication EVER been working?
Ben: no. Paul: mir . what code base? Bht: it.s in java. Chris NYC: maybe
the techies can do lunch and get things moving? Josh: maybe we should try
mir. We decided to go with dada because the techies
present would be more comfortable and it would be faster. Maybe we can do
both and use whichever one works first. Ben: definitely supports that.
There hasn.t been all that much tech help, but there are a lot more mir
admins who have free time.

PROPOSAL: open IMC-US to tech groups who want to work with another code
base, and whatever works first, we.ll use. PROPOSAL PASSED.

Ben: the site will have to be on another server, because he doesn.t do
java. Bht: Portland can host.

Editorial collective is open to all local IMCs. What about people not in
local IMCs? They.re ok too, but we promote local involvement. No one.s
going to get turned away.

Local updates:
Site abuse: at Austin IMC, a lot of postings by National Alliance (hate
sites). Editor deleted the link to the hate site, but left the story.
Changing of announcements. Hate-oriented content. What they decided to do,
their policy is not to have hateful content like that.

Ryan: TN has had problems with national alliance and KKK, best solution
they.ve come up with is to set a rating threshold really low (so that a
couple of negative ratings hide the story). Makes it a more collective
decision, rather than an editorial collective decision. Not ideal, because
the rating system can be abused too, but it.s worked so far.

Chris NYC: NYC came up with a comprehensive policy about site abuse. NYC
had a lot of trolling. (Everything from hate spam to lots of pictures of
pandas, which sounds
funny but was annoying.)

Paul: Urbana has an .acceptable use. policy. Focus on behaviors rather
than content. Trolling, excessive comments and posting. Urbana is
re-writing policy to deal with increase in web abuse. What.s not allowed:
threats, hate language, etc. Monthly public editorial meeting. Allows
people who feel that they.ve been wronged to discuss it.

Bht: Portland has a tight activist community. People actually talk about
what.s been going on in their various organizations. If there.s a
questionable post, they just ask that group. Community based.

Mike: Michigan hides a lot of stuff. He says when in doubt, hide it.
Censorship is bad, but the racist shit is worse. Hidden articles are
available through search engines. They only should be visible through the
hidden article file. They.re having problems with a lot of irrelevant
stuff. They.re thinking about putting a clause stating that the website is
a news service to progressives, not a site that has a lot of irrelevant
stories.

Nish: any kind of policy closes off dialogue about it. Maybe could start a
dialogue about it, rather than hiding it.

Bht: that.s called feeding the trolls. It.s not constructive and gives
them more to feed on.

Andy: needs to be a delete code.

Other people: there is. It depends on the code base.

Josh: site abuse registry would be good, so we can compare notes. Abusive
IP addresses. A list-serv for editors about what.s going on with site
abuse.

Ben: that.s a really good idea. Political tactic used by national alliance
to up their Google rating.

Meenu: they thought discourse was important, community could learn a lot.
Worked with local ARA to address racist postings and start dialogue that
way.

Sascha suggests using IMC-US-process list as a tool to organize. Paul: one
category is called .flooding. which is constant posting. If the person
leaves an email address, contact them saying .thanks for using our
newswire, but limit it to once a day..

Google: ongoing battle for over a year between a couple IMCs and Google
news. Google news is syndication service. You can search and the Google
spiders will find stories relevant to your issue. SF IMC started it .
Tried to get google news to syndicate SF. Briefly syndicated. Right wing
extremists got together this petition to remove SF from syndication on the
grounds that some things that were posted to SF-IMC newswire were
anti-Semitic. Google dropped SF. TN tried to get google to syndicate just
the features section. At first, google said they were working with SF to
set up guidelines. 10 mos. later, google said .no open publishing..
Explained to them that the feature syndication isn.t open, but since
editorial group is open to the public, no dice. Spanish language IMCs can
get syndicated. Different divisions of google news. Ryan wants to start a
group to get into google news because it.s REALLY important. UCIMC has
been talking with google. Since UC is federally recognized non-profit, it
might be different. Chris can find contact info for google news folks.

Local updates:
Portland update: they.ve been talking about it, have a lot of issues with
US-IMC. Bht is here to convey that. They want: 1) no email verification,
2) focus on political prisoners and anti-racism issues.

Sascha: Portland should bring that up as a proposal on the list.

Meenu: Austin IMC is organizing a conference in February for IMC. Contact
them through their website.

Josh: wants to cover issues beyond those listed by Portland. Has concerns
about site being hosted on Portland.s server if they have so many
concerns. He would want some assurance that there is a larger group
working on the project and that Portland doesn.t have greater control just
because it.s on their server.

Andy: diversity issues again. A lot of white people in this room. A lot of
men.
Rob: local groups doing diversity work.

Conflict resolution: TN, Urbana, Houston, the Indypendent in NYC have
conflict resolution policies. Important to have these policies in
emergencies.

Next steps: tech caucus after this meeting? Ok! Server space: Portland,
zero just went down. Plans for server support during RNC . server crashes,
bandwidth? Sascha: Eggplant Collective is planning to do work on this
through the RNC to make sure the usage spike doesn.t kill the site.

Announcements: 50th issue of the Indypendent. 6 copies of 50th, 1 of 49th.
GO THEM! Bht: SF the Indybay collective just put out their new paper,
Faultlines. The FTAA video should be ready this week.  Sascha handed out a
card about the Community Wireless Summit in Urbana this August.
(www.communitywirelesssummit.org). Josh says that folks should talk to
Boston because they need help too!