[CIMC-working] Fw: [Imc-communication] IMC Finland answers

[Chris Kaihatsu]

----- Original Message -----
From: Tapio Laakso <talaakso@cc.hut.fi>
To: <Imc-communication@lists.indymedia.org>
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2002 2:44 AM
Subject: [Imc-communication] IMC Finland answers


> We wrote this quite fastly, I hope it clears things out a bit. Anyway
> there are several things about being an Indymedia, the nature of Indymedia
> and meaning of Open Publishing that I would like to discuss more. I think
> Indymedia Finland could contribute something to global process.
> Especially working and doing Indymedia in hostile internet space interests
> me.
>
> --
>
>
> Indymedia Finland answers to accusations
>
>
> Independent Media Center Finland (Vaikuttava tietotoimisto in Finnish) is
> an autonomous collective as every Indymedia. We understand that this means
> that collective has a right to choose its members, make its own decisions
> about editorial policy etc. It is clear that collective is not open for
> people who act against all our principles, who try to harm collective etc.
> Indymedia is not about 'anyone can publish anything' we are also the
> movement's media (of course it is very difficult to determine this
> movement). Person who made these claims against IMC Finland has over and
> over tried to tell us that there is no point in grassroots organizing,
> grassroots movements does not have any impacts to anything etc. This is
> what we call being against principles of Indymedia.
>
> Indymedia Finland has used same kind of editorial process as Germany.
> Since first spam attack (by 'aerial') all articles has went trough
> premoderation. In September our  newswire was closed about two weeks after
> other spam attack (by aerial).  We have published several articles of
> writer. Then there were articles that we wanted and he didn't like it.
>
> Since there was the first spam attack by Aerial we had to moderate our
> articles or the newswire would be full of articles written by aerial.
> This dude used to post the same article hundred, if not thousand
> times. It really made a mess of our newswire, so we _HAD_ to start
> moderating our articles. There was another spam attack by aerial, after
> which we had to go into "web magazine mode", which was also an attempt to
> get time to re-check our editorial and journalistic processes, and create
> a better technology for our Indymedia.
>
> Aerial is taking the role of Devils Advocate. Largely he is accusing us
> of things we had to do because of his activity. He spied on our
> e-mail-list, which was open at the time, and made surprisingly clever use
> of all information he could find. He snooped into everything we were
> doing and used this information quite smartly against us, which meant
> that there could be no open process in this Indymedia. I guess you have
> similar experiences, but this is surprisingly bad. This is not a case of
> trolling, this is basically something a lot worse, a person with nothing
> else to do having a perverse obsession with our indymedia. This person
> (Aerial) says, that all of this is a part of his social research, which
> seems to be a bit far-out. He doesn't seem to have any other mission in
> his life except for screwing our process. He can spend full days and
> nights with nothing to do but spying on us and making a mess of our
> project.
>
> He says that posters are leaving because of our censorship. He is speaking
> about himself or lying. Many writers have left us because of too soft
> moderating policy. Many people have said that in IMC Finland on time to
> time our political enemies have had more space especially in commentation.
> We have lots of comments 10-20 is normal but sometimes it has been up to
> several hundred. Some (potential) writers have been offended so badly
> about commentation that they have stopped writing.
>
> The problem here is that if most of our content is for example pro war
> articles we don't have lots of motivation to do this thing anymore.
>
> How much comments you have in other Indys?  How many criticizing articles?
> For example pro war articles. What you (we) do when we have too many of
> them? This is a real problem when you got attention in wider audience.
> Many people want to tell us that activists are stupid. Anonymously in web
> it is quite easy. At the same time we try to maintain stability between
> openness, quality of content and political project that is part of
> Indymedia.
>
> He accuses us that we are ideologically biased, against neoliberalism etc.
> Indymedia Uruguay says quite clearly that they are against neoliberalism
> in their mission statement. IMC Chiapas was started as an direct answer
> for zapatistas. Yes! We are politically biased. That is a point of
> Indymedia. IMC Finland has even written against the concept of
> objectivity. But it does not mean that we are 'the media of the Party'.
> Openness and diversity of voices is one point of our fuctioning but it is
> not everything. For example pro war voices have lots of visibility even
> without Indymedia. We have published two pro war articles in two weeks. No
> more was sent. Some in our group have already asked is this right.
>
> We are middle of process of building better organization, rewriting our
> mission statement, editorial policy, tech and it doesn't help that this
> aerial (he uses loads of names) does everything he can to break our
> collective and working. His antagonistic mission has involved at least two
> spam attacks, spamming of libelous comment again and again when we took it
> away and replacing our wiki-docs with his own stuff. We do not want this
> guy to our collectivel, in our meetings and mailinglists. We are angry of
> this paranoia (closed lists, invite only irc-channels) but maybe it helps
> us create better and stronger organization that can also be more open.
>
> We are reorganizing our email lists so that we can have an open forum and
> also place for discussion that we want keep inside of our collective. I
> believe this is standard method in other IMCs. We have to be able to trust
> people who we work with. We are trying to have more real life meetings,
> irc-meetings and lately new people have been coming to our mailing list.
> It is open if one participates to roll call.
>
> We believe Indymedia Finland have a strong support of Finnish 'movement'.
>
>
>
> --
> behalf of Indymedia Finland collective
> Tapio Laakso
>
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