Anarchogeek

indybay, getting back involved

I've been slowly drifting away from indymedia for the last year. I'm not sure why exactly. When i was in Rome it was difficult because of the language barriers, but also the lack of regular meetings or face to face organizing. Then gaba and I were up at the cabin. We did some stuff tech wise for the RNC stuff, but that was it. Since we moved to San Francisco in October, was it that long ago? we haven't gotten involved. In part because we know folks on both sides of the indybay / sf indymedia split. Mostly because we hadn't intended to stick around. But working with Odeo has meant we've been able to pay off our debts and start saving up money, so we decided to stick around for a while.

Today i went over to Oakland for the meeting setup for people interested in getting involved in the web working group of indybay. There were a few people new to indymedia, but they didn't out number existing collective members. They went through the history of the indybay site, and the coverage. It was interesting, it was very much a this is what we covered history, rather than this how we worked and changed theoretically / organizationally, which is they way i normally present things.

Then there were some more technical presentations on how to publish, how to do admin of the site, how indybay editorial decisions are made, and the like. Indybay has had working groups split off to do a monthly newspaper the fault lines which is roughly modeled after the Indypendent, Enemy Combatant Radio a web / pirate radio station, and Street Level TV a video activism tv show. The development of those three projects has left the web site team lacking, hence the outreach.

Interestingly enough, there are plenty more global focus features posted on to the indybay site than the www.indymedia.org site, so perhaps part of what i bring is that connection. Odd being a connector between the global indymedia stuff and the local collectives. It's something indymedia has little off, we need is to survive, yet at most a collective only has a few members to participate in the larger network. If those people fail in their task as liaison to communicate back and forth, or leave the local imc, then that imc falls out of active communication.

That's something we should really work on more. Making sure the communications paths get opened further. That's why I'm happy to see the feature about the austin indymedia conference making the rounds because it includes direct links in to the indymedia wiki.