[Imc-summaries] IMC-Tech Summary For November 16th 2001
evan@protest.net
evan at protest.net
Fri, 16 Nov 2001 16:59:28 -0800 (PST)
TECH SUMMARY:
Indymedia Technology Options Site
IMC-Tech Meeting Nov 8th
Changing the number of items on a newswire
New Mail Server
Publishing Statistics
Active XML-RPC 0.9.4 released
IMC & 2600 Hackers Conference
RSS Feeds / Syndication
dadaIMC code
Development Server
More PGP / Encryption Fun
IMC-Tech Polls
Free Software & IMC-Tech Work
NON-TECH:
New-IMC / IMC-Tech Collaboration
DC Indymedia Gathering Notes
Midwest USA Indymedia Gathering Notes
Proposal: Article Highlighting System
FBI Contacts SF IMCistas
-------------------------- TECH SUMMARY ----------------------
Indymedia Technology Options Site
Wondering what your technology options are when it comes
to an indymedia center? Check out the new wiki site where
we are working to compile everything.
http://www.bandwidthcoop.org/imc/tech
IMC-Tech Meeting Nov 9th
There was an imc-tech meeting on November 8th during
which the following things were discussed:
* Volunteer Needs
* Free Software
* MTA / Sarai
* support for new imcs
Roles/Things that need to be done:
* Volunteer Coordinator: It was proposed that we get a
volunteer coordinator to help new people get involved.
* Cachemaster: Making the imc pages cacheable and
squid friendly, somebody needs to take this on.
* DBA: Try and coordinate making the databases happy.
TimG_Hfx volunteered to do DBA work.
* DNS: Tyson volunteered to work on DNS / BIND / DJBDNS.
* FTP Mess: thallara offered to help with the ftp
software situation.
* New-IMC Helper: andy from portland offered to help
stefani in working with new imc's.
There was a long discussion about free software.
See the summary about the imc-tech / licensing.
http://tech.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=299
Changing the number of items on your newswire
If you want to change the number of times on the newswire
section of your indysite, it's the right hand column stuff,
it's easy.
http://tech.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=290
New Mail Server
After much debate we decided to use postfix and not qmail
on sarai, the new mailserver. With this resolved the
process of moving from turtle to sarai can move forward.
Publishing Statistics
Andy put together the publishing statistics for www.indy
and sydney. It's a nice pretty graph to look at.
http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-tech/2001-November/005901.html
Traffic Updates
It's estimated that the indymedia network of websites
has been getting between 250,000 and 400,000 requests
for pages every day.
Active XML-RPC 0.9.4 Released
Idanso released a new update of xmlrpc, with better
performance, expanded api, publish queue status, and
Mckoi (embeded database) support.
http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-tech/2001-November/005945.html
IMC & 2600 Hackers Conference
Our good friends at 2600 want to do a whole track of their
annual hackers conference in New York about indymedia,
media issues, politics & activism. It's in july 2002 and it
would be great for people to step up and help. Also remember
to keep helping with the Ruckus Tech camp
( http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/techcamp )
http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-tech/2001-November/005993.html
RSS Feeds & Syndication
Just in case you didn't know, imc's running active have
rss feeds of their newswire which people can use to provide
lists of new articles at cityname.indymedia.org/newswire.rss
dadaIMC Code
The Baltimore indymedia folks have written their own
version of active in php.
Development Server
For anybody needing a server to do indymedia and related
development you can get an account on kropotkin and start
hacking away. Email stefani@indymedia.org for an account.
More PGP / Encryption Fun
wiki.linefeed.org has been setup to play with ideas and
document projects related to pgp and encrypted activist
email.
IMC-Tech Polls
Contribute to a lax polling system about imc-tech issues.
http://polls.indymedia.org/poll.php
Free Software, Licensing, & IMC-Tech Work
There was a very long discussion during the imc-tech
meeting about free software. This is my attempt to
summarize what was proposed with a little text added
for context. This hasn't been sent to the imc-tech
list or approved at this point.
It is clear that the technology we use and process
by which it's constructed and articulated is deeply
political. We are creating the technical systems
that prefigure the change we want to see in society.
With those ends we have the following guidelines for
evaluating the licenses and intellectual property
implications of the technology we use.
Licenses in order of preference:
(gpl|free>opensource>other free beer>commercial|proprietary)
The factors that should be considered when rating
software of different levels should include security,
reliability, performance, simplicity, and ease of use AND
license. We are against commercial software, if it is to be
used it should be decided on a consensus basis by the tech
group. If someone uses something when there is a better
licensing alternative, it has to be argued why.
We will use http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html as a
guide, and http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
as a reference (but we know it isn't perfect)
This commitment is for imc-tech work. This is not a
mandate to all IMC's and all IMC tech things. We should
do our best as IMC tech people to encourage, teach and
help people move towards this model at local IMCs and
strive to maintain it on our servers as much as possible.
We choose GPL over all because gpl prevents closed-source
derivatives, any license that does is less desirable. GPL
does not let anyone make money with what you did besides
when using it as a tool, and doesn't benefit microsoft.
When choosing a system usability is more important than
the license which is more important than any of the
following which can be ranked according to the task:
easy of use, simplicity, performance, security.
[ I'm not sure i got this right, check the logs if you're
really interested. - ed ]
---------------------- NON - TECH -------------------------
New-IMC / IMC-Tech Collaboration
There has been more attempts at making connections between
new-imc and imc-tech. Currently Stefani does most of the
site setup, but andy from portland volunteered to help
take on part of that task.
http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-tech/2001-November/005850.html
DC Indymedia Gathering Notes
Just in case you hadn't seen them, here's the results of the
indymedia gathering that happened during the DC anti-war
convergence.
http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-tech/2001-November/006062.html
Midwest US Indymedia Gathering Notes
Similar to the DC meeting, but with imc's from the Midwest.
http://urbana.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=2851
http://urbana.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=2919
http://urbana.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=2920
Proposal: Article Highlighting System
Maffew wrote a very interesting proposal for implementing
an article highlighting system. It's important non-techies
read this as it's part of a larger debate about the future
direction of indymedia.
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~matthewa/catk/high.html
FBI Contacts SF IMCistas
They asked for our logs, we said no, and sicked lawyers
on them, they went away again.
http://tech.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=292
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The IMC-Tech summary is a semi-regular update on the activities
of the amorphous global imc-tech collective. By presenting a summary
of some of the discussions and activities of imc-tech we hope to inform
the larger indymedia community of our activities. This will help
promote transparency and lubricate the gears of our internal democratic
processes. All IMC mailinglists and working groups should be producing
regular summaries of their activities!