Baghdad Al-Zawra has a who's who of armed iraqi resistance organizations. (via juan cole) It's good to get a real sense of what's happening beyond the random attacks and more attacks. It also explains some of the ideology of the groups, the funding, and links.
Ever wonder what other anarchist bloggers were thinking? Tired of getting relegated outside a two sided debate between warbloggers and bleeding heart liberals? Blogging is personal DYI media, and that's the bread and butter of anarchist media making.
To encourage blogging, raise awareness, and and promote cross linking among anarchist bloggers i've created a anarchoblogs.protest.net. It's a followup to indybogs which brought together indymedia bloggers. I'm sure i'm missing most of the anarchist bloggers out there, but there is 36, which is enough to start out. Anybody who wants to be included should just email me, rabble at protest.net.
Maybe if we get enough traffic we can divide the sites out by language. But for now, there it is....
Last time i talked to mako about blogging he declared that it was just for egoists and all a bunch of a useless self-congratulatory masturbation. Now, low and behold he's started blogging. (via gaba) And not just a little bit, he's blogging a lot, combining personal posts about people he met on the subway with weighty footnoted posts about intellectual property.
I'm happy mako's not putting all of his stuff just in to mailinglists which don't have rss feeds and i have a hard time following.
So Bush, Cheney, and the gang lied to go to war, it was illegal, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. More than 12,700 Iraqi's and 1,165 occupation soldiers have been killed.
I thought Clinton was bad, but this is way worse than blowing up asprin factories to distract the public away from a sex scandel.
Today i was thinking of how we internationalize (i18n) and localization (l10n) of wiki's. With docs.indymedia.org a twiki based system we've only had hap-hazard success. We've got the FAQ in many languages, and a few other random pages. The introduction page for docs.indy is in english, spanish, and catalan. The overview of how indymedia functions and documents specifically related to IMC's joining the indymedia network also have been translated in to many languages.
What hasn't happened is any kind of coherent navigation scheme for the site beyond what is in english. Lots of little sections are in different languages, but because there is neither practice nor tech to support the continued translation and updating of parallel versions of page in different languages the translations don't happen. We also don't have any structure to encourage more translations of pages throughout the site.
There are two kinds of i18n and l10n which need to happen. The first is easy conceptually. Adding support for utf-8 to the wiki and wiki words. We had to upgrade twiki for support of arabic, chinese, and korean. We could add the navigation in those languages, and should. That is just a matter of following traditional i18n / l10n techniques for software.
The real trick is when we try to look at how the wiki content and pages will be maintained across the languages. A single web page should be able to exist in multiple languages. The user should get the language they know (as defined in their browser) when they look at a page. They should also easily be able to switch to view the page in other languages. The debian website does all this nicely. They do it with a fairly big translation team and a static non-wiki like publishing system. Wiki's are supposed to be quick, easy, and simple. Most i18n projects end up being cumbersome and clunky.
So what we want, is the ability to connect different versions of a page. When you look at a page, there is a list of links to see this page in other languages. When the user clicks on a wiki link, it takes them to a version of that page while maintaining the language. One good way of doing this would be to pre-pend or append something like WikiWord.Langauge. This is the direction that pmwiki is going with it's i18n work. It's a good idea, and it's definitely the best internationalized wiki i've seen. The problem is that it doesn't maintain the cross linking beyond the home page. I'd imagine that's fixable without too much work.
The other problem is that the IntroductionPage is PaginaDeIntroduccion in spanish. This means we couldn't use IntroductionPage.spanish and IntroductionPage.english without the site having a dominate language and everybody else being forced to conform. The learn enough english to conform is politically acceptable in free software circles, but it's something we'd like to reject on principle in indymedia. We're just a long ways from shedding our english-centric-ness.
I'm not sure what the solution is.
Perhaps using something similar to back links, we could have horizontal links, to other pages in parallel languages. So you could show on a given wiki page, which other languages the page is available in and ask the to translate them. Then a wiki page would have to have another field beyond edit, it would need a place to enter in the sibling page.
Then we have the problem of versions, we'd need to indicate that new information was added to the sibling version of a page in another language.
I think a few examples we could pull on are the way www.indymedia.org (using mir) has been letting people open publish their own translations for articles. Another way we've been requesting translations of documents, both news and internal communication, is the translations.indymedia.org which works pretty well but has a terrible interface and design. It doesn't follow the wiki philosophy at all either.
Anybody else find good, or any, examples of people maintaining wiki's cross languages?
I've been having this problem. You see, i forgot that aside from my loyal readers (all 10 of you) who are radical tech activist types, there are folks who read anarchogeek via indyblogs, then the googlebot which reads it for the rest of the world. I was hoping to offer my gmail invites to friends. When folks who read indyblogs asked for one, i didn't mind. But then the requests for invites kept coming, and coming, and coming.
The thing is, it's google's fault. It's their damned email service, and they keep sending people to me to get an account. When anybody searches for "Want a gmail account" or "I want a gmail account". Just today i had 22 people find anarchogeek searching for things including the phrase "gmail".
I think the only thing i can do is change the blog entry to stop the flood of comments.
On another note, i was bemoaning my google juice as being too radical, and low and behold iit had changed. I now look much more like a respectable techie in the Planetwork crowd and not like a dastardly anarchist.
On an interesting note, apparently Seb wants to interview me, when he gets around to asking it should be an interesting interview.
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?
Chuck0 has been bemoaning his underemployed state for a while. Perhaps it is because when he applies for a job, folks google his name. Sometimes I have the fear that the same thing would happen to me, that i perhaps can't get a 'straight' job if i wanted one. Lately i've been working for activist groups, non-profits, and the like. A lot of what i see out there in terms of jobs are like the one currently being advertised from The Rainforest Action Network who are looking for a swiss army knife type be all webmaster. Gaba is applying to work for Planned Parenthood doing tech support. It doesn't use her programming skills, but they are a good organization and it's not a life-eating-full-time job.
Chuck just asked what tech skills are needed to get a job today for activist techies. In someways i feel this is not quite the right question. The work gaba and I did on Asterisk for the RNC infoline used a set of technologies we'd never heard of before starting the project. We were fluent with scripting languages, linux, and how to learn about free software platforms. But i had never even heard of Asterisk until the day we arrived. The ability to learn, and innovate, and adapt i think are the most important things. The problem is those things don't show up in a resume or interview.
When i was in India hiring people to work at partecs i saw a lot of resumes and spent many days interviewing people. The thing that struck me most was two fold. One that people's formal education showed mostly their ability to get a formal education. Some of them came out of it in such a way that they investigated and explored things, other came out of it knowing how to do cookie cutter projects. Others clearly knew how to learn and teach themselves.
The most striking thing was the two people we hired who i thought showed the most initiative and ability to get stuff done, didn't work out. They clashed with a corporate culture which had different values. The best techies didn't make the best employees. That's probably true of myself too. My work is much better when i'm inspired by a project and self-driven to make it happen. Getting orders and doing something i'm told to do never seems to work for me.
It would be easier if i could do what i was told, but then life would be less interesting. I count myself as extremely lucky that i'm able to do the work i do, get paid for it sometimes, and have the freedom to follow my heart. I know most techies didn't hear about the tech bomb and respond by saying, "well i guess i'll just spend a while hanging out with south american anarchists instead of coming back and looking for work." If i had a mortgage payment, or kids, then i couldn't have done that.
Having a 9 to 5 job is like living life on fast forward. The world just rushes by.
On the other hand, that could be just me. Gaba feels that to not have a job she is sitting in waiting, not getting anything done. There is no one right answer. In Uruguay everybody talks a lot about jobs. Who has one, who is looking for one, who is about to loose one, and everybody not quite getting paid enough to live on. The economic crisis transformed jobs and money in to a central topic of people's lives.
In the US it doesn't seem like that same kind of real economic crisis has transformed the lives of the techies. But maybe i've just been an expat too long to really know.
The Austin indymedia folks are organizing an Indymedia Convergence for Feb 18th to 20th 2005. It seems to me that a cheaper (travel costs) place to organize it would be in New York as flights are cheaper, but these things happen where people organize them.
There's a proposal from a bunch of big name media activists and left leaning journalists to start, Independent World Television, international progressive television news network. They aim to raise a fair amount of money, 100 million dollars, and have a professional staff of journalists while drawing on some AP and/or Reuters footage.
It seems like it's a cross between a progressive english language version of Al-Jazeera and a TV version of IPS.
The general drive seems to get alternative content out there to an audience, not change the relationships around which media production and consumption are built. This is quite different from the 'media revolution to make revolution possible' and 'become the media' missions of indymedia. I bet the two will co-exist similarly to the sometimes tense, sometimes cooperative relationship between democracy now and indymedia.
What i do wonder, is this. Is this the best strategy at the moment? Aren't we about to see a revolution in the way TV is transmitted similar to what is happening with VOIP in the telephony world? Will the 24 hour news channel go the way of the evening news? What are the implications to ubiquitous bandwidth, narrowcasting, very low cost barriers to entry for production, and the end of broadcast television?
Today i could spend a few weeks hacking VLC in to a television transmitter and make a TV station which pulled all of it's content off of the internet (bit torrent, p2p, sites) in to an automated television station. The whole thing, would probably cost about $2000. It'd be illegal, even though there is no shortage of tv channel spectrum. The point is, things are in the process of fundamentally changing.
We need to be looking at places like South Korea where video activists are making weekly news programs which are broadcast via the net to factory lunch rooms.
What happens when people start being able to build applications on top of software defined radio?
Things could start to get really interesting.
Today i came across an blog post / article about the swift boat vets, blogs, and journalism establishment. The argument is that professional journalists don't like switfboat vet folks because they are liars and aren't following proper channels to promote their agenda. What they are doing is going on cable news, and getting a lot of play from right wing bloggers. Jay Rosen who maintains the very interesting PressThink blog agues that this is another reflection of how participatory media are reshaping the media environment as laid out in Dan Gillmor's We The Media. I still haven't read We The Media, but i find the arguments interesting.
We on the far left, and yes we are the far left, do similar things. We've been doing it for years. Keeping stories alive, or making them through our own media networks. This is what indymedia is about, organizing leftists to coherently make their own media to advance political campaigns. It's also to a degree what MoveOn does when they invite thousands of budding media activists to make advertising for them.
It's interesting the effect small indyblogs has had. It has taken a group of us, who are all very small time bloggers, and given us a common platform. Sure, none of the blogs individually, or through indyblogs, gets much traffic. But they do act as a base of organizing something. There are people who read indyblogs who would never read any of the individual blogs. But, by providing listings of the pages, and back linking, we have a way of building up mutual traffic and google juice. We are creating a space which could become an echo chamber. We already have that effect within indymedia around the world, covering events in much more depth than anybody else. Adding blogs to that mix will help increase the quality of the content, our coordination, and our visibility to the outside world.
All this makes me want to put some more effort in to reviving the Anarchoblogs concept. My two doubts are this, do we call it anarchoblogs, or perhaps following the naming convention of using the 'planet-planet' software "Planet Anarchy". Another issue is, should it be 'anarchist' or the broader 'radical' blogs. The software is easy to setup, maybe i'll do both.
The number of US military killed in Iraq since the start of the 'war' has passed 1000. The rate of deaths seems to be going up. The 1000 number is significant as it relates to the US election, but for me more amazing is that over 11,000 Iraqi's have been killed.
Perhaps the 1000 number will trigger a new series of TV shows about those killed and have some effect on the election. Not that Kerry is even anti-war himself. The Republicans loosing the white house might somehow put breaks on the slow slide towards fascism (via micah).
'Jonny Buck' came and visited us in the mountains. We weren't able to convince him of the virtues of papercrete, but it was fun to have him around. Anybody else who wants to hang out in the woods, get online from around the camp fire, and learning about alternative construction.
From: NYC Indymedia
>To Indymedia centers around the world
Written 08/31/04 in NYC as police surround peaceful protesters in front of Fox News.
-ZDLREyes Upon The Eyes
You're the eyes upon the eyes
and upon the battons
that pound voices and bones
that erase memories of homeYou're the eyes upon the eyes
in the days before the fall
you're the eyes upon the eyes
that are watching us allTo witness the barricades and
the wire they place around our hearts
your document is proof that
there is a fire in the darkYou're the eyes upon the eyes
in the days before the fall
and it's your eyes that stop
their lies from burying us allZack de La Rocha
This week showed the social movements in the US adopting another level of technological sophistication. I've been really impressed with the organization that various groups put in to the New York RNC protests. Many groups put out special magazines, guide's to the protests with high quality maps and calendars, sophisticated websites, SMS (text messaging systems), web radios, dispatch desks, and the automated infoline. There was a plethora of good information and communications systems for the protests.
There has been an escalating struggle between protesters and police over communications and coordination during protests involving mass direct action. Our task is to help facilitate horizontal communication and information distribution to all the activists in the streets. The police want to keep the protests under control and stay a step ahead of the protesters.
So, all of this communications infrastructure helps on a tactical level. For example, when the thousand coffin march needs 60 more people, it's easy to get the message out and find those people. When there is a blockade or arrests, activists know where, to either go there or avoid arrest. All of this helps make the protest more effective.
But the other, and perhaps bigger part of what we are doing is we are constructing a spectacle. Something people can follow. A protest which isn't a march followed by ten boring speeches. The radio, breaking news, sms, and phone line updates all create a larger event which imparts the energy of the protest around the world. Maybe the whole world isn't actually watching, but somebody everywhere is. From Quito to Capetown, Seoul to SoHo, we've created a way for people to follow and identify with the protests. This is an essential aspect to the globalization of social movements and the 'anti-globalization movement.'
The project i was personally involved in this time was an automated information line. People could call 212-400-7458 to hear breaking news from indymedia, the day's events from counterconvention.org, get important contact numbers, and listen to radio from the anoise indymedia radio collective, and pacifica's wbai. It was a last minute project project which showed how using free software and about $10, we could create quality phone based information systems. The system is based on a software package called Asterisk which uses VOIP (Voice Over IP) internet telephony to read information from websites, convert the text to speech, and provide it to people over a phone line.
With little pre-publicity we've received over 2000 phone calls over the last 4 days. From a cell phone or a pay phone, it's an easy way for protesters to get an update. Before the indymedia radio and breaking news were mostly useful people at home. Now this kind of information is available for the protesters.
The project grew out of a VOIP sprint organized by Aspiration Tech in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. We were looking in to applications for non-profit's and activist organizations to use VOIP and internet telephony in relation to their work and the upcoming presidential elections. After getting the system setup, a casual conversation lead to the topic of "wouldn't it be cool to do something like this for the RNC protests next week."
Gaba and I spent the week coding away on the system along with Micah from riseup.net and Blaine from RadicalDesigns.org. We got DemocracyInAction.org to donate the use of a server and we were off. There were some bumpy points at the start where the server kept crashing, and we've had more dropped calls than we would like, but it's come together amazingly well.
Future applications of this technology will include looking at cheap and easy call blasts, low cost distributed call centers, conference calling, a phone based activist meeting reminder service, and easy to setup information lines like we one we setup for the RNC protests. Until now the telephone has been an organizing tool which was dominated by large well funded organizations and corporations. With the use of free software and VOIP, it will become a tool which grassroots groups can use like websites, email, and mailinglists.
I read recently a saying: "The Size of a Forest Fire Doesn't Depend on the Size of the Spark Which Created It." In someways that reflects indymedia. The spark which got things started was the WTO protests, and it was a big spark, but what make it spread were the conditions. Indymedia represented a model for how many people could participate directly in media making for social change.
The indymedia network has added a new local imc every 11 days. That's a sustained level of growth which has only been possible because of the flexible and decentralized network form of organization which the indymedia network has adopted. The network is grounded in a set of principles of unity which lets each group adapt their organization and activities to the local political environment while providing some standards and integrity across the network.
Indymedia started out as more an organization which facilitated media making by already established activist journalists. Over time it evolved in to more of a mass organization of amateur media makers. The indymedia slogans, 'become the media', 'be the media', and 'everybody's a journalist' were adopted as the network grew, and came from the UK, Belgium, and Argentina respectively, not from the North American IMC's. They reflect a growing sense of indymedia as being embedded within social movements.
In someways this was a move away from the more liberal conception of the role of media in social change. IMC's in the english speaking world tend to be much more 'liberal' and tend toward a chomskian conception of an equal playing field and depoliticized free speech as the ideal for building a communal discursive space for social change. That same communal space is also a vital component in IMC's outside the english speaking world, but the perspective is more partisan, the space that is being opened is just for leftists.
This conception of opening space is important to understanding indymedia. It gets to why indymedia is so wedded to Open Publishing. What indymedia is trying to do is reconstruct how media for social change is organized. One of the accomplishments of the Leninists was to create a model for media and communication which advanced social change. The 'What is to be done' model lays out a conception of society as a Fordist factory, with the news and ideology flowing from the cadre, or capitalist press, to the masses. Much of the left around the world still operates what is basically a Leninist model of media for social change. An intellectual elite create quality news and content which goes out to the masses who consume it.
With the media movements in the 70's there started to be a trend of community media, which is more participatory, but often less politicized. Indymedia draws on this more multidirectional tradition of media. We also draw on the concept of the Zapatistas of leading by following, of a dialog lead revolution to make revolution possible. This anti-vanguardist tradition says that we don't know the path to the revolution. Social change is something that grows up out of the crowd and through action not theory.
Indymedia is a media system built upon the premise that only by radical participation in a communal discursive space can a new conception of politics be created. It is this open publishing, participatory media making network which invites a broad spectrum of social movements to participate that makes indymedia special.
Sure we've got websites, servers, videos, andstreaming web video radio stations with sms gateways, and automated breaking news phone lines, but what we really have is a new model for 'what is to be done.' Indymedia is the 21st century version of the leninist party newspaper. It's something who's time has come, the mix has grown and been shaped by the movements around it. It's a way of constructing a broad popular front without coercion or hierarchy. Where the proletarian, or student / proletarian, or counter culture blocks of radical actors have been replaced by a contradictory multitude.
When i have talked to groups in dozens of different countries explaining indymedia i get the same reaction. People take to the idea, like they've been hoping for a set of models which they can use. It's never been a process of convincing anybody to start a new indymedia center. All we need to do is explain and show how it works, and people adopt what is useful to them and take it forward.
Hum, i guess ranted off there a bit. I'm sorry about that.
Back to the evolution of indymedia. We've made some interesting decisions as we've evolved.
We decided to embody a radical form of participatory democracy and consensus.
We decided to not have a central office or staff.
We decided not to have presidents, directors, staff, or elections.
We never talk in the name of indymedia, and never make endorsements alongside other leftist groups, except in some cases directly related to media activism.
We've discovered that we have a lot to learn from the free software movement, and copied many of their tools and techniques.
We've appropriated technology as an essential tool for radical social change.
We decided that each imc should be allowed tremendous autonomy.
We've decided we do have values and kicked out groups which weren't open, weren't leftist, or were controlled by a leftist political party (mostly greens, maoists, and trots.)
We've decided that we don't care too much what other people think of us.