[New-imc] IMC Romania - first meeting report

[joanne richardson]

Greetings Bart & Boud & the rest of the gang at new-imc,

First, to give you an update, I tried to contact Laszlo Szabo and Joseph
Lyons who sent in the IMC Transylvania request form last summer. Joseph
replied that I should contact Laszlo, Laszlo never replied and noone has a
phone contact for him. Seems a lost cause. I did manage to have some real
email exchange (actually about 20) with Cristian Bowie who asked about
Indymedia Bulgaria/Romania. As it turns out he is working with some
friends at Bootlab in Berlin, and since we have some Goethe money I
invited him and a few others to come to Romania to do a sound performance
and workshop with our radio group at the end of February.

I already sent in the new IMC request form (some of the fields were kind
of funky and wouldn’t accept stuff I copy-pasted, or my replies were too
long, if it didn't arrive in a decent format, please let me know and I’ll
resend it by email. I’d also like to also send you now the report on the
first Indymedia Romania meeting last week in Cluj (which I wrote for the
Next 5 Minutes editorial group and for a few Romanian mailinglists).

The Romania IMC meeting was organized by the group in Cluj (we still don’t
have a name or the status of an NGO) that formed last year in October
after the N5M Cluj event.  The group includes Radio Fara Frecventa
(Frequency Free Radio), a video production group, Realitatea SF (Reality
Science Fiction), and the tech/IT group. Actually it’s not really 3
separate groups but about 18 people (most are students in early 20s)
working together exchanging knowhow across the board. We moved ourselves &
our equipment into a corner of the Peace Institute in Cluj last November,
and now that we’ve expanded our activities the PI has agree to let us take
over their basement (for the net.radio & lounge) and one room on the first
floor (for Indymedia & video group). We hope this is the beginning of a
collaboration that will result in the creation of the first public access
media lab and free internet café in Cluj (actually in Romania).

What we have been doing since October is in an important sense part of the
Indymedia horizon – attempting to create an alternative to the mainstream
media monopoly thru self-produced media. So we decided after some
discussions (and, to confess, after a few reservations about the
homogenous content and look of many IMC sites) that forming a Romania IMC
would benefit both us and the IMC network by bringing international
attention to local issues and vice versa. The scope of the meeting last
weekend was to bring together people/groups from other cities in Romania
who can collaborate on the project.

Participants in the January 24-26 Romania IMC meeting included:
Joanne, elected coordinator for first 6 months (subsol:
http://subsol.c3.hu)
Liviu, Mihaela, Andrei, Mihai - Radio Fara Frecventa, Cluj (net.radio
group)
Diana - Realitatea SF, Cluj (video production)
Duti - Philosophy & Stuff, Cluj (philosophers who publish quarterly
magazine)
Dan - Anchete.ro/Human Rights Report, Bucharest (independent journalists:
http://www.anchete.ro)
Levi, Pati & Albert - Societatea Alternativa, Bucharest (anarchist
association: http://alter-ro.tripod.com)
Dacian - Underground Music Festival, Timisoara (musicians who organize
concerts http://ugtm.go.ro)
Tavi - TPN, Tineri Pentru Natura, Timisoara (ecological group)
Tibi - ASCII - Amsterdam Subversive Code for Information Interchange
(http://www.squat.net/ascii)
Others who didn’t attend the meeting but will contribute: Peace Institute,
Cluj; Attitude (Gay/Lesbian rights group), Cluj; Dan Perjovschi
(artist/writer) Bucharest, Sandu Vakulovski (poet/novelist) Cluj, Luna
Amara & Los Pogos (musicians), Cluj ... and hopefully more to come.

Discussion during the meeting focused on the kind of content that would go
on the site. We agreed to have the standard Indymedia coverage (local
campaigns, demonstrations, police and media abuse, translations of
international news).  But also and in addition the site will include:
() gray monologues - some more nontraditional pieces of writing including
manifestoes for nonexistent presidents, poems written by anarchist music
groups, tragi-comic reflections on absurdities of everyday Romania
() news from noman’s land (Drakula Park Romania, as Sandu Vakulovski calls
it)
() a cultural section (events, interviews, reports of people who are not
engaged in oppositional culture but creating alternatives forms of
production and life)
() basement theory - translated material uploaded in thematic sections
(starting with ‘tactical media’ - already translated material which I
edited for the Romanian magazine Balkon);  we are debating whether the
follow up section will be on borders or hacker culture/ethics.
Contents are still up for discussion, but the general resolution of the
group was to have an Indymedia site which has some offbeat content and a
sense of humor. And if it is not too rude of me to say, which considers
the aesthetics of design an important thing, alongside content.

After the meeting:

1. We set up a provisional mailinglist for the editorial group (we are now
15) who will produce the site, add content and provide tech support &
maintenance. We will set up another more public list for circulating news,
information, announcements, discussions, etc ...

2. We discussed with one of the members of ASCII in Amsterdam (who is
originally from Cluj and was here visiting family) the donation of Linux
machines to be used for Indymedia production, and also for the free
internet café we want to set up in the Peace Institute. Most PCs will come
to Cluj, a few will be distributed to Indymedia editors in other cities.
We will make a trip to Amsterdam by van to pick them up. (Since our
meeting ASCII was invaded by the police who confiscated their hard drives,
so their situation is somewhat precarious now).

3. We created a quick html sample page for the Indymedia Romania website
(just as a first step for editors to discuss ideas of design and possible
content). The tech group is deciding between software options (between
Active & Slashcode) - actually, the bigger debate in the group now is that
the free software rule, acknowledging its advantages, has the immediate
effect of slowing us down considerably & centralizing the website
production in Cluj since no one else has access to a PC running on Linux.

We are now:
-waiting for our newimc request to be approved by Indymedia :)
-waiting for editors to suggest additional content for the website
-asking more people to collaborate by contributing material/news from
their cities
-recruiting subscribers for the public discussion mailinglist

... ciao, Joanne