[New-imc] Online form: Proposed new IMC! (IMC Bellingham )

[imcbham at yahoo.com]

Submitted by: Seth Vidaña <imcbham at yahoo.com> on Wednesday, April 16th, 2003 @ 7:09:40 pm (-0700)

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HTTP_USER_AGENT:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)

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imc_name:
IMC Bellingham 

city:
Bellingham

state:
Washington

country:
US

contact_name:
Seth Vidaña

contact_email:
imcbham at yahoo.com

contact_phone:
360-738-2919

tech_name:
Anathema

tech_email:
anathema at mootrealm.com

tech_phone:
398-9800

supporting_groups:
Western Anti-war Movement
Peace Resource Center
The Peace Zone
Not in Our Name, Bellingham
The Peace and Justice Center
The University Environmental Center

regional_focus:
yes

critical_dates:
None yet

resources:
Server/bandwith contribution: None yet. We are working on finding a local, non-profit internet service provider to donate server space in the future. 

Technical contribution: Our workgroup has one very experienced webmaster who is available for service as well as two other technical assistants.

Organizing skills: The IMC Bellingham workgroup contains core members from some of Bellingham\'s largest social justice and environmental citizen organizations. 


outreach:
Two months ago, a group of activists from several Bellingham peace, social justice, and environmental citizen groups came together to discuss the need for an alternate source of media in Bellingham. The result of this meeting was a commitment to a three-part campaign entailing the creation of progressive media outlets using the local public access channel, a new print publication, and the internet. The internet portion of the group decided to pursue becoming part of the IMC network and began to call itself the Bellingham IMC workgroup. Over the last two months, the IMC workgroup has encountered several individuals interested in becoming regular reporters and photographers for the site. 

One month ago, the Bellingham IMC workgroup sent out an email to all the social justice and environmental groups in Bellingham and the surrounding county (~25 groups). This group included groups focused on issues of labor, the environment, people of color, peace, and health care. The email asked local groups to first, read our statement of purpose and respond in support or not, and, second, become part of the media creation process.

At this point, the response has come from mainly the peace/anti-war community. Six groups have contacted us in support of an IMC Bellingham site. No one has raised objection to the site. We are also working with individuals who are already running websites concerning local issues. We hope to have links to their sites, and use one of them specifically as a community calendar.


introductory_statement:
The Bellingham IMC workgroup would like to participate in the Indymedia Network for several reasons

1)	Need for a community hub.

Several citizen and non-profit groups in Bellingham have expressed the desire to form a media hub for activist information. Recently, there has been confusion as to the location or time of an event, mainly because the information is posted by several groups at once, sometimes with conflicting information. The Bellingham IMC site would provide a comprehensive events calendar (or link to an existing calendar), with links to the local activist groups that are organizing the event. This could help local groups coordinate their efforts more efficiently.

2)	Need for non-corporate controlled/ media.

Our local newspaper, the Bellingham Herald, routinely subverts collective efforts for a just and peaceful world by a) rarely covering issues of interest to the activist community, b) putting a conservative “spin” on the issues they do cover, c) severely underestimating the attendance at local events, and d) making it difficult to publish a guest Op/Ed article. Locally, there are few citizen publications, and those deal mainly with the Bellingham music scene. Our largest non-corporate news source, the Every Other Weekly, is now defunct.  Even this publication did not attend specifically to activism in Bellingham. The Bellingham activist community is looking for a way to publicize its efforts in a positive, accurate, and truthful way. We would also like to facilitate open internet publishing to the many local groups and individuals who do not have access to the Bellingham Herald. We hope that the IMC Bellingham site can help us to do just that. The Bellingham IMC site would al!
 so provide access to the Indymedia network along with the global and local issues it spans. 

3)	Need for community dialogue

We hope that the creation of local media outlets, including the IMC Bellingham site, will inspire dialogue about what the media is, and what it could be. We would like to involve local citizens and their groups in the process of creating their own media, and, by doing so, generate more enthusiasm for socially and environmentally projects and actions. In addition, by holding open, consensus-based meetings, we would provide a model for transparent decision-making in the greater community, spawning the question- “How do the newspapers make decisions?’ Access to the Indymedia network could also facilitate networking between regional activist groups.

4)	Indymedia name.

The Independent Media Center network has made a name for itself as a source of non-corporate, progressive media. The IMC Bellingham workgroup recognizes that the IMC name is well known in the local activist community and beyond. We hope that we can attract and involve more local media makers through recognition of the IMC name.