I've come across a few articles about indymedia lately. The first is The New York Model by Jeremy Scahill of Democracy Now. He wrote about the use of technology and indymedia in the RNC protests. The article seems to have spread around to any number of the regular radical websites. My two big blog entries about the RNC protest and the history of indymedia started out life as answers to interview questions for the article. In general i think Jeremy did a good job capturing the spirit of where the indymedia movement is at as of the RNC protests. One of the things that came out of our work with Asterisk and the infoline is there will be a little 'summit' of folks talking about the campaign uses of SMS and VOIP and the upcoming elections. I'm looking forwarding to learning more about TxtMob worked and meeting some of the the usual suspects.
The second article which i've been meaning to blog about is by Biella about Indymedia and the Free Software Movement. It's pretty good. I wish she'd at least left in the techie's irc nick's so i could know who said what, rather than making us all anonymous. Biella has actually spent enough time hanging around both the free software and indymedia movements to really get it. It's funny to see our new imc processes analyzed in terms of it's anthropological effects on new groups in the network. It makes sense, but i just never thought of it that way.
Ah, one other thing, if i were less lazy i'd post both of those links on docs.indymedia.org, somebody wanna do it?
Posted by rabble at September 17, 2004 04:13 AM | TrackBackHey Rabble,
Hmm, yes, the IRC nicks. I never thought about doing that but that is a good idea, no great idea. It is a way to protect the identity of the activist but in a way that still allows folks in the network to know who it is.
Also I posted the article a while back on http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/ImcEssayCollection
which is a great idea. There is something similar for FLOSS but there is a lot missing:
http://opensource.mit.edu/online_papers.php
biella