[New-imc] IMC Romania - mailinglists

[joanne richardson]

hi boud, all,

this is a very quick reply cause i'm off to oslo in a few hours. my email
access for next week might not be great. by the way, if you have a direct
email contact for imc norway, could you please pass it on. i sent
something to the whole list asking to meet while in oslo, but it's still
pending approval & havent heard anything back.

>> Indymedia's own anarcho-communist position, raised to the level of a
>> universal truth.
> ;)

had a feeling that one was going to come back to bite me. didnt expect it
so soon though. hope you liked the text, despite its critical tone and
maybe hasty generalizations. it was based on my knowledge of people
working with imc in italy, and on one particular video, admitting that the
video production is not quite the same level of open publishing as the
websites.

> Just to clarify: i would suggest that both the mailing list for the
> editorial group and the public list
> - be open to anyone who wishes to subscribe and participate
> - have public archives

now we only have the editorial list, which is public and anyone can join
without invitation & archives are public. the second list is for public
discussions (public is a modifyer for discussion not the list) and as we
wrote the thing, the second list would be "more public" than the first. it
was a translation from the romanian, in which it is probably more obvious
that the lists are both public, though intended for different things. but
it's also a question of a bit more than semantics. it was written with a
bit of caution because, to be honest, the first week after we set up the
editorial list was pretty disappointing. we sent an announcement to a
couple of other lists in romania (with the URL address for subscribing),
and we had a few new people join, who despite the announcement that this
would be for editorial policy and discussion of the content to go up on
the first site launch, sent general news announcements, petitions, and
anything else you might imagine, to the tune of 5 mails a day and everyone
got really frustrated. a good deal of the initial trafic on the list was
for re-explaining what the list was meant for and what constitutes spam.
so although both lists (or perhaps more than two, since we want to have a
separate one for radio & video) are publicly accesible and archived, i
think we need to be careful about how we advertise them to subscribers -
who would ideally be also producers & decision-makers (taking into account
that what happened last week after the flood of announcements was not
exactly either).

> As long as Window$ is installed first, it's possible to install Linux
> as a second operating system and have both running on the same PC:
> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+Windows-HOWTO/
> Of course, you should probably get the agreement of the PC owner first
> ;) ...
> If you install linux first, and then window$, the risk is that window$
> will damage the linux installation; linux is tolerant of intolerance

andrei (our tech contact) installed red hat on a windows XP machine
before, and there were a lot of installation problems because XP is
particularly intolerant to everything. on the PC we have (which we need
windows for the video production) we will change from XP to 2000 before
installing linux, which should run better. the problem is that most people
in other cities have access to computers at their workplace, so they won't
be able to install linux. a couple have old PCs at home, but on a 6gig
machine i wouldn't recommend a linux partition. anyway, the idea for the
future is that we would have linux only machines (after this donation we
expect from NL) and be able to keep the windows machine just for video
processing. the condition of ascii for giving us machines for internet
cafe is that they would stay as linux only and that we would do some tech
training to get people used to it.

> for the next steps in the process, especially
> "NEW IMC PROCESS - HOW IT WORKS"
> You've clearly done steps 1., 2., 3. and 5., and plan to do 4.
> So it looks like steps 6. and 7. are next...!

thanks. just to be clear, i'm assuming we can request the mailing lists on
indymedia.org before sending the mission statement and reply to membership
criteria, no?

more later
joanne