[New-imc] Re: membership/affiliates/allies: Independent Newssite in Goa (India)

[boud]

hi blue pi, everyone,
 i don't think we're in any disagreement on general principles here,
the problem is getting into concrete details.

And since this is a long mail: the most useful result seems to
be that at the end of the section

"NEW IMC PROCESS - HOW IT WORKS"

on http://newimc.indymedia.org

we should put something like

############################################################

<p>
Hints on how to <it>5. O - R - G - A - N - I - Z - E !!!!</it> 
a face-to-face meeting so that no one individual or group dominates
are Food not Bombs' practical guide 
<a href="http://consensus.net/ocaccontents.html">On Conflict and
Consensus</a> and 
<a href="http://www.geocities.com/collectivebook/index.html">the 
Collective Book on Collective Process</a>
<p>

############################################################



On Tue, 24 Dec 2002, blue.pi wrote:

> Sheri Herndon writes: 
> 
> > hi new imc people, 
> > 
> > this is kind of along the lines of what matthew wrote and what blue 
> > commented on following that post.  this is also a topic that has been 
> > floating around in the network for about 2 years.  and it has to do with 
> > our relationships with our allies and with groups who would really 
> > probably like to retain more of their own identity than to "become an 
> > indymedia site"....but they still want to have a connection with us. 

There's a page for allies to be listed:
http://www.indymedia.org/links.php3

And there's nothing stopping allies contributing to the synthesis of
central column features either on a local site or the global site. It
requires a bit of work, but less than for becoming an official site, 
and it's enough for locals or people interested to know that the site
exists.


> I don't know if it is so much about people who want to retain more there own 
> identity or let's say I simply don't know anything about that. What I meant 
> was more about the process. Here is my reply to boud, I wrote two days ago, 
> but didn't send because I was without internet connection: 

OK, back to the theme.
 
> I would have found nothing wrong with your position half a year ago, but now 
> I feel that the whole approach is very Western, very much based on our 
> experiences in social movements in Europe or North America. 

That's a risk. A simple solution would be to have liaisons from all IMCs
outside of Western Europe and USA/Canada/Australia/Aotearoa to have 
a global non-western discussion on a new version of the principles of 
unity and the membership criteria. But it would be good to label these
with version numbers, since the translations are unlikely to be updated
regularly.  GNU/Linux works with version numbers, i don't see why we
can't - a process is an algorithm (named after that fellow born in 
what is now Uzbekistan).

But i don't know if would happen - there's the intrinsic problem of 
poor internet connectivity, and other priorities...


> I don't say that these experiences are wrong, maybe they are the key to 
> organizing any movement any where in the world. The problem is: They may 
> seem strange to other people, maybe they just need some more explanation, 
> but maybe they need to be revised like matthew is suggesting. You are 

i don't think anyone in new-imc tries to force the process on a new
collective in a blind fashion, we try to make some human judgment of 
what's going on.

"more explanation" - well, the first bit of this is translation. i've
tried a bit in this direction. And the next bit is for a new-imc
helper to join in the mailing list and patiently explain things
that people have misread/forgot/missed the first time/etc.  But this
only functions if a mailing list is functioning.

> hinting that if a group has problems with the process (and if they don’t use 
> their mailinglist enough, at least this is how I interpret your link to the 
> Jakarta list and also your agreement with Petros who didn’t know much about 
> imc Beirut except for what he saw on our mailinglist) than they probably 
> don’t have a sustainable group. Well, I am saying, maybe they don’t 

As long as you keep the "probably" in there, then that's more or less
what i'm saying, though here's a more careful wording:

If a group has problems with the process, and is not using their mailing
list, then there is a big risk that their group may not be sustainable, 
may be susceptible to becoming a sect, may not be able to call for help
or be contacted easily, etc.  They might in reality be sustainable locally
as a functioning media activist group, but not as a group open to an
increasingly wide and unstoppable growth in networking among socially
constructive groups. 

> understand this whole concept of organizing the same way we understand it. 
> 
> When Petros wrote that same email you are refering to here (and by the way 
> this is not what I meant, I was talking about what imc Beirut had been told 
> more than half a year ago before I moved to Beirut) 

If cannot point out the URL, neither i nor petros cannot easily comment on
it. 


> http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/new-imc/2002-October/004166.html 
> 
> I was pretty angry, because he implied that I was acting as a missionary. 
> Well, sometimes I do feel like one, but (and I maybe repeating myself here) 
> precisely because I insist on this damn process. I don’t exactly know what 
> is so difficult about the process, so I can just guess and try to extract 
> here what came out of all the discussions I had with people about this topic 
> in Beirut and of course what I observed at our meetings. 
> 
> When we went through the process in germany, even though I wasn't really an 
> active part of it, I can say that everything stated in the indymedia 
> documents was not strange to us, we could decide on it in a single open face 
> to face meeting because we had read that kind of stuff many times before in 
> our activist lifes. Some things sounded funny to us, because they were very 
> American, but we immidiatly regognized them as such and could live with 
> that. There were also some heated discussions about some concepts, however, 
> there was never the moment of not understanding. 
> 
> In Beirut we don’t have these heated discussions (that doesn’t mean we don’t 
> have heated discussions, but they are not really related to anything stated 
> in the documents). Our group is quite heterogenous nationality whise, also 
> some of the Lebanese grew up abroad or studied there. I observed that there 
> was clearly a gap concerning this whole process from the very beginning and 
> there still is with the Western educated picking up on it easily while 
> others got annoyed, questioned the point of it or didn’t really participate 
> even though they are really active members when we discuss other questions. 

This sounds like a problem with the methods of organising meetings,
and also whether people genuinely accept equality and non-hierarchy.
> 
> This experience is not unique to the indymedia group. After the 
> demonstrations against Israel in April this year some people organized a 
> leftist plattform to coordínate work between different groups. They worked 
> out a paper that was very similar to our principles of unity (again those 
> were people who had grown up abroad and based it on their experiences in 
> Europe). I was there when we tried to discuss the paper (more as an observer 
> than a participant because I was very new in Beirut), this discussion ended 
> in a disaster. Now the plattform just decided not to decide on the paper but 

Again sounds like a problem in meeting organising style.

> to keep working on pratical issues, which works fine, but what I find 
> amazing, because it wouldn’t work in Germany that way.

Is it really working fine? Is it really working in an open way which
is continually welcoming new people from diverse groups and having them
participate as equals?

If so, great!

However:

http://www.geocities.com/collectivebook/ploys.html

: Ploys Used To Subvert Consensus
: 
: The following are some common ploys that can come into play at
: collective meetings and within the organization's group dynamics
: whenever influential or domineering members attempt to steer
: decision-making.

[my comment: the domination may well be unintentional]

: 7. Scoffing at adherence to process, implying or claiming that only
: do-nothings are concerned about following procedures while there's
: real work to be done.
: 
: 8. Treating meetings as pedantic and tiresome (perhaps never getting
: around to drafting or agreeing to a schedule for meetings).
: 
: 9. Claiming there is no need for rotating tasks because the most
: competent people should do what they're best suited for. (Note that
: task rotation ensures power sharing--something that domineering
: members usually don't want.)
: 
: 10. Claiming to know the organization's protocol (which is
: unwritten) in dealing with any given situation. Pulling rank
: (seniority, experience, or special knowledge) if anyone finds reason
: to object.
: 
: 11. Insisting that those who do the most work in the organization
: have more say in decision-making. Consensus does not recognize merit
: nor status: all members are truly equal.
 
All of these are habits people are likely to get into, IMHO, 
whether intended or not. Maybe we should modify this to something
like

; 7bis. Scoffing at adherence to process, implying or claiming that this
; is a patronising Western method for people only worried about dominating
; and preventing real work from getting done.

> I can’t tell you why this is and I find some of the explanations I get here 
> not satisfying. It may have something to do with the socialization during a 
> civil war, with a long communist tradition and a very young “new left”, but 
> also with a complicated relationship with the West. 
> 
> But one thing I can say: it is not as easy as you state here. Not: 
> sustainable group = easy process. 

i didn't say this, and i disagree. A sustainable group may come from
the results of hard work on process; and theoretically, at least, a
non-sustainable group might seem to go easily through process but not
really take it seriously (but i'm not aware of any real examples).  So
the two are not equivalent.

i think that 

[ doing the process fully & sincerely => more or less sustainable group ]

but the process may still be difficult.


> Or: problem with the process = hierarchical or somhow not functioning group. 

i do think that:

[ problem with process => 
risk of hierarchical or somehow not functioning group ]


> On the opposite, the whole process introduced a hierachy into the
> group that wasn’t there before and will hopefully and most probably
> disappear again as soon as we start more practical work.

Nothing is stopping you doing "practical work" (starting a web site),
and maybe that could help people see that process is necessary.

But it sounds to me like people may need help in practical ideas for
organising meetings. i realised this was missing for IMC PL local
groups, and IMHO, two excellent sources seem to be:

http://www.geocities.com/collectivebook/index.html
http://consensus.net/ocaccontents.html

The problem is that these are very long, in English, and undoubtedly
some of the specific techniques and style are very
culture-dependent. But the logic and the basic physics of
communication (in the purest information theory sense) can't be very
different from culture-to-culture, IMHO.
 
> I think the process is necessary and I certainly don’t have an alternative. 

On this we agree.

> And I would have thought that the whole problem might be unique to the 
> Lebanese situation until I read Matthews email. So I would like to hear more 
> about the situation in Jakarta (just seeing that they didn’t communicate on 
> their mailinglist doesn’t tell me anything) or about experiences from other 

Look at http://jakarta.indymedia.org and it's clear that the
spam-to-signal ratio is extremely high.

> places. Sheri, are you forwarding this discussion to matthew (I did’t find 
> his address in the cc box)? 

But best to contact the Jakarta people directly on their mailing
list. You can contact the .au based supporters of IMC Jakarta also
by emailing to the list imc-jakarta, or else to imc-oceania:

http://lists.cat.org.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/imc-oceania

BTW, if you are from Germany, then it should be easy to find people of
Indonesian origin there willing to help in translation, though keep in
mind that many (of course, not all!) may be close to the elite of
Suharto's bloodthirsty ex-regime.


So, concretely, what does everyone think of the above suggestion (see
top of this message) for an addition to the newimc basic info? i'm
sure there are other changes which could be made to the page, but
IMHO blue pi's point is different to that of maffew, since blue pi
agrees that process is important. It seems to me that adding some
useful pointers on organising f2f meetings should respond to blue pi's
experience in Bierut.