[IMC Bombay] Re: [New-imc] Online form: Proposed new IMC! (hyderabad.indymedia.org)

[boud]

Dear vijay, jerry, kapil,
   Apse milkar bahut khushi hui. :) 

i think you're very excited about the Asian Social Forum, and i'm
glad you're interested in the indymedia experiment.

If you really want to create IMC Hyderabad, this would require time
to get to know one another, to do outreach to a variety of local
grassroots groups, but "outreach" in the Indymedia context means
making sure that grassroots groups can participate directly and
equally and freely. My guess is that right at the moment you're much
too busy organising the ASF, and there's simply no time to create
an Indymedia collective.

However, please have a quick look at:

http://newimc.indymedia.org

and you'll see more about where our experiment has got to so far,
and why simply setting up tech resources is not enough to make an
Indymedia collective.


*** Three quick solutions ***

(1)
My feeling from your message is that what you want is purely technical
support. Well, something better already exists, including human 
support as well (though IMC Mumbai had the benefit of going through
the full organising process):

http://india.indymedia.org
http://mumbai.indymedia.org   

(mumbai.indymedia.org has a multiple-site-on-one-IP-host problem right
now, i've just emailed <imc-mumbai at lists.indymedia.org> to suggest
they fix it)

(2)
However, if you really want to start a *non-hierarchical* Indymedia
collective, then you should apply for two mailing lists, 

imc-hyderabad 
imc-hyderabad-asf

at the page
http://newlist.indymedia.org

where imc-hyderabad is for generalising organising of a local IMC,
and   imc-hyderabad-asf  is for reports from the 90 venues.

Both will be mailing lists with public archives (by default).

To help guide people through the workshop reports, you can simply
prepare email messages with URLs and send them to imc-hyderabad-asf
and they will function as meta-links.  Your open-publishing site would
then be:

http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-hyderabad-asf


(3a)
But if you want to download one of the Indymedia engines and install
it on your server in Hyderabad, that would certainly be no problem,
and evan and other people at <imc-tech at lists.indymedia.org> may
be able to help with installation or finding the software.

(3b)
Even easier: simply install mailman - it should be a standard part of
most GNU/Linux distributions, certainly it's in Debian 3.0r0 - 
and then create a mailing list

asf@my.ip.num.ber

This should function without needing a domain name.

***


However, it seems to me that if we give the name
"hyderabad.indymedia.org" to your server right now it would just
confuse everyone. 

Maybe your answer would then be: an IP number is too hard for people
to remember.

My counteranswer would be: If you want to be anything at all like
Indymedia, you would have to accept working by consensus. And a
minimum effort in consensus would be to contact

<imc-mumbai at lists.indymedia.org>

and work together on a central column feature, in which you have
a URL pointing to your Pentium IV in Hyderabad.

You can then just advertise to people: "Please look up 
http://mumbai.indymedia.org and click on the link to the ASF".


On Sat, 28 Dec 2002 evan at protest.net wrote:

> Looks like your deadline is very very soon. Do you have a tech group
> already setup for your site?
> 
> What i'm thinking, is like with other groups who have critical timelines
> is we can setup the website and point hyderabad.indymedia.org at it. But
> we wouldn't add hyderabad to the cities list until it goes through the
> normal new imc process which can take several weeks. We've done this in
> the past with mixed sucess.
> 
> I'm sure there will be some questions about the relationship between the
> IMC and the WSF Hyderabad as part of the new imc process.
> 
> in solidarity,
> evan
> 
> On Sat, 28 Dec 2002 wsfhyd at hd2.dot.net.in wrote:
> 
> > Submitted by: vijay <wsfhyd at hd2.dot.net.in> on Saturday, December 28th, 2002  at  9:00:03 am (-0800)
> >
> > Client Variables
> > ----------------
> >
> > HTTP_USER_AGENT:
> > Mozilla/4.76 [en]C-CCK-MCD   (Win98; U)
> >
> > Online Form Fields
> > ------------------
> >
> > imc_name:
> > hyderabad.indymedia.org
> >
> > city:
> > hyderabad
> >
> > state:
> > andhra pradesh
> >
> > country:
> > india
> >
> > contact_name:
> > vijay
> >
> > contact_email:
> > wsfhyd at hd2.dot.net.in
> >
> > contact_phone:
> > 91-40-23392726, 91-40-23302115, 91-98490-05181
> >
> > tech_name:
> > Jerry
> >
> > tech_email:
> > wsfhyd at hd2.dot.net.in
> >
> > tech_phone:
> > same as above
> >
> > supporting_groups:
> > All groups in Hyderabad and Andhra Pradesh that are part of the WSF-India process

Great!

> > regional_focus:
> > yes
> >
> > critical_dates:
> > 30th January 2002
> >
> > resources:
> > 1) We have one 64 kbps line(DSL), 2 P4, 256RAM PCs and a printer.

Great!

> > 2) Students from the Univ of Hyderabad\'s Mass Communication
> >School are already involved in the process. We are pushing their
> >efforts forward to do the same, BUT IN TIME FOR THE ASIAN SOCIAL
> >FORUM which begins on 2nd January 2003.
> >
> > outreach:

> >  1) The proposed Hyderabad IMC contact person, Vijay, is also one of
> > the 2 Coordinators of the World Social Forum-India, Hyderabad
> > Secretariat. He therefore brings together with him a critical mass
> > of all the groups that are part of the WSF-India Process.

Indymedia functions without leaders. vijay, you're welcome to be a
contact person, but if you're a coordinator of WSF-India, as you say,
then it sounds like you'll simply be too busy to be a useful contact
for IMC Hyderabad. But it's your (collective) choice.

What's more important is to have an openly archived mailing list - as
long as it really gets used. Then you get *real* contact.

> >  2) Jerry and Kapil are students in the School of Mass Comm at the
> > University of Hyderabad. Jerry will be the man who will be the
> > tech resource for IMC and once his exams are over on Monday the
> > 30th, he will be available full time for the Forum, and thereafter
> > on a regular basis. Kapil has made a short 20 minute film, a
> > fictional satire (funded by the WSF-Hyderabad committee) on
> > intellectual property in the contaxt of globalisation and WTO.

jerry and kapil, you sound like you should have more time free!
Please see above - if you open the two mailing lists, and have 
local students and grassroots activists subscribe, then i'm sure
you could start learning about what's possible with the indymedia
model.

> > 3) Progressive publications and media in Hyderabad require
> >outreach and Hyderabad indymedia will be a resource for them.

Agreed, as long as the people from those progressive publications
and media, and even more so, the people who are the subjects of 
those publications, can genuinely and freely and equally participate.

We don't want to reinforce coordinatorism or hierarchies.

> > introductory_statement: 1)In the 2002 World Social Forum, there were 700
> > Workshops conducted and there was documentation for only 100 workshops!
> > The number of copies were limited so half the delegates had no way of
> > learning about those workshops.

i think the WSF is going to learn from the GNU/linux/wikipedia/indymedia
community about new methods of communication ;)


> > 2) The proposed hyderabad indymedia centre seeks to avoid a repetition
> > of this situation. Using our resources, we will be deploying stringers
> > to 90 venues to collect summaries of the Workshop/Seminar proceedings.
> > We have facilitators from the Workshop/Seminar organisers who will
> > supply summaries. These will be collected by the Media Cmte of which
> > this proposed centre is a part, edited, formatted and printed for
> > circulation at the Forum on a daily basis. But this process ensures that
> > only Hyderabad and environs will read the daily proceedings. We would
> > like the rest of the world to share a this documentation of the events
> > at the Asian Social Forum.

If there is a filtration by a "Media Committee", *before* publication,
this would be the opposite of what Indymedia is all about.

> > 3) We also need to do a couple of dummy runs before the Forum begins on
> > the 2nd. Therefore, to ask the impossible, is it possible to get the
> > hyderabad indymedia site up and running by the 29th or the 30th of
> > December 2002, that is in the next day or two? We recognise that the New
> > IMC process takes at least 10 days. But in the interest of allowing the
> > Forum to undertake this outreach effort, can it be made to function at a
> > faster pace?

See (1), (2), (3a), (3b) above.

> > 4)In the WSF Hyderabad\'s Coordination Committee meeting, it was
> > unanimously accepted that there should be an IMC in Hyderabad and that
> > resources would be provided for networking with groups, issue
> > identification, facilitating issue investigation and dissemination of
> > the same.

What you want here is for people to go through several levels of
synthesis and analysis and to decide what political issues are most
important/urgent/whatever, what practical proposals people have made,
what long term visions they have, etc. This is beyond the scope of
Indymedia, IMHO.

For this sort of stuff, a wiki might be better. Debian 3.0r0 includes
zope-zwiki, but TWiki is what was chosen for Indymedia stuff. i'm sure
you could install TWiki locally.

You can see how a wiki works at e.g.

http://docs.indymedia.org/
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Social_Forum

You might want to contribute to either or both of these, but i don't 
think their purpose is quite what you want for the ASF. IMHO it would
be best to have a wiki especially dedicate to the ASF - assuming that
the delegates really wish to network, coordinate, etc. and have internet
access.


So this is solution 

(3c) Install a wiki on your Pentium IV.


Anyway, i suggest you (the Hyderabad-wallahs) either open a mailing
list, or else continue the discusion on 
<imc-india at lists.indymedia.org>

solidarity
boud