[New-imc] some thoughts on new imc involvement in local list discussions

[joanne richardson]

Dear Boud,

Although I’ve enjoyed our offlist thread a lot and found your comments and
replies extremely insightful, I have to tell you that I’m angry about your
posts to the imc-romania list. Since I don’t think this should remain a
conversation between the two of us, I am sending it to the new imc list
(and also sending the link to the imc-romania list) because I want to pose
some questions about the policy concerning interventions from new imc
volunteers into local list discussions.

>hi joanne, everyone,
>i hope my comments didn't sound aggressive ... If they did, sorry!

I did find your comments aggressive as well as irresponsible.

>mission statement, editorial policy, mailing list policy are all
>supposed to be collective decisions. Maybe it's clear in the Romanian
>language part, but in the English part, it's unclear ...
>Maybe joanne just forgot to make this clear, but as i read it, it's not
>clear.

For everyone who has not seen the original post in question (you can check
the imc-romania archives for February and March), my draft of a mission
statement and mailing list policy sent as an English language text was
prefaced by a Romanian introduction which said that this was formulated in
discussion with the group in Cluj, that was in part copied from our legal
statute for a new ngo we are founding in Cluj (not indymedia) and that
since this expresses our ideas as a media ngo (the radio & video
collectives and the programmers), I wasn’t sure how well the other list
members found their own interests and concerns expressed in it. So the
message was a request for others who are less concerned with media and
more with social activism to make additions, changes, suggestions, or to
express their dissent if they didn’t agree with any of the points. It also
explained why the rest was written in English.

I think it is your responsibility to understand the context of a post
before you reply to it, so if you wanted to know what was in the Romanian
preface you should of asked rather than insinuate – which I thought was
the subtext of your message - my failures to democratize this process
sufficiently.  I found your replies flip, especially when after my reply
you responded that the ‘main people I need to reply to’ were not you but
those on the list – which I fully intended to do, I just replied to you
first as a courtesy.

I’d like to say a few things about what I perceive as your failures in
this process. It was not until your third post to the list that you
explained that your comments were “just my personal
recommendations, they're *not* any "official" point of view of the
Indymedia network.” For anyone on the imc-romania reading your first
comments (maybe except me) they certainly came across as an official point
of view. You introduced yourself as a new imc volunteer and started your
post as “A couple of comments on joanne's messages” without any qualifier
about the dimensions of your claims. The comments were phrased as a list
of what we “should be” doing, what the process is “supposed to be”,
what “there’s no need” for us to do (that one twice), what “the only way
to reduce the sending of unwanted material” was, and other similar
statements: “you won't get much spam.  So why slow people down with
moderation of messages from non-subscribers? Remember that many people are
newbies to the internet 
” For someone concerned with non-hierarchical
participatory decision making based on collective opinions, your comments -
 which were phrased neither as questions nor as suggestions but as a
series of affirmations – came off as extremely authoritative.  As far as
your argument for having posts from non-listmembers (by the way this was
how the imc-romania list was originally configured, the Romanian preface
to the English message you replied to explained the reason for changing
this), you made it not once but three times, attempting to convince us
that it would be ok, that we would have only “moderate spam,” that we
won’t have “much spam” that we won’t get any “serious spam.” Well, I’m
sorry but we don’t want any spam. In your first and second mail you also
mentioned the PL list as the only example, when you know that there are a
lot of other IMC lists which require admin approval of posts from non-
listmembers – I think your selective use of the PL list as an example (you
didn’t state clearly that it was just one example among others and in fact
not representative of the other lists until your third mail) was
irresponsible and bordering on skewing information to serve your own
argument.

>i just tested imc-prague and imc-hungary:
>* imc-prague does *not* require admin approval for subscribing
>* imc-hungary *does* require admin approval for subscribing

imc-romania also does *not* require admin approval for subscribing. imc-
romania-editorial does – so please be more careful about your
characterizations. It wasn’t clear to me whether you were talking about
imc-prague or hungary the general discussion lists or editorial lists,
since you used imc-romania indiscriminately to refer to both imc-romania
and imc-romania-editorial. I am sincerely curious about the differences in
policy (for subscribing, messages from non-listmembers, etc) between
general discussion lists and more specialized tech and editorial lists in
the same country/regions, so I would appreciate it if you or someone else
on the list can let me know.

As a brief explanation of the admin approval for subscribing to imc-
romania-editorial. This is a list for a combination of tech issues, site
design, and center column content discussions. The first list we founded
after the meeting in January (the first list was on yahoo) was an
editorial list meant strictly for discussing issues about software, design
and content, intended to get a preliminary version of the site up & ready
as soon as possible. A lot of people subscribed to the editorial list and
started sending petitions, announcements, advertising of their own events,
private communications to each other, etc. The majority of the first two
weeks was spent on a sometimes tedious discussion was about what the list
was supposed to be used for. Two people on the list, despite the
discussions, continued to send what they were specifically asked not to.
The tech people on the list got extremely angry and frustrated because it
was interrupting our discussions about software and they threatened to
unsubscribe from the list unless someone moderated it and forwarded only
the mails dealing with discussions of the site. I replied that the
moderation was a bad idea and that it was better to create two new lists,
one general list where anything goes and where anyone can subscribe, and
another to be used by the people who are working on building the site,
where not anything goes and where people who want to subscribe should
introduce themselves first and express their interest in being part of the
editorial collective (neither of the lists is moderated unless you count
admin approval for posts from non-members which is a feature of most of
the imc lists I had contact with so far). The admin approval for
subscribing was discussed by members of the editorial & tech group as a
less drastic measure to assure that the people who are most active in the
initial steps of putting together the website are not threatening to quit
the list because a couple of people ignore the list guidelines after we
already discussed them to the point of exhaustion.

>If you create the "barrier" to membership of the group too high,
>many people who would otherwise wish to participate will not do so.
>In typical Indymedia groups there's no formal concept of membership.
>People become de facto members because they're active, or because
>they make one or two useful, constructive criticisms.

I think our ideas about being ‘active’ and ‘power’ are a little different.
I do not think that someone who is subscribed on a list for a year and
sends one or two message is active. I also do not think someone who is
doing nothing in their community except voting once every few years is
active. Or someone watching a TV show and calling in to answer a question
or voice an opinion once in a blue moon – the mainstream media already
allows for this ‘caller’ type of activity. And so yeah, I think a self-
organized media organization should demand more. An active participation
in a group is not only a privilege but also a responsibility. It’s often
because people don’t take responsibility when they can that they’re in a
position of powerlessness and passivity. So I find it a little strange
that you are first implying that our group (I guess what you meant was me
specifically) are not sufficiently anti-hierarchical and democratic and
that you’re simultaneously criticizing us for being too demanding (or
setting the barrier too high) in asking people to participate actively in
the group in terms of making decisions, making a regular commitment to
send materials for the center column, or making a commitment to volunteer
to be on other imc lists – because we don’t want power to be concentrated
in a few hands. The list description did not say that everybody who signs
up on the list should make this commitment, it only explained the
distinction between being an imc-romania listmember and participating more
actively in the group, which is what we really need more people to do at
the moment.

>The only positions of power generally include things like having password
>access to the website, or access to a bank account ... Typically, some
>evidence that people are active and trusted by the group is needed in
>these cases. But they usually do not have any more power than other
>people except what is unavoidable.

I think it is unavoidable that some people in any group have more power
than others but I do not see this as a bad thing, because I do not see
power as a bad thing. Power to me is the potential to do something, a
possibility to create (things, social relations, whatever). It can be used
in a way to enable other people to do it as well, or it can be used to
suppress them. I don’t deny that I have more power than other people in
this group right now because I have experience in founding and working
with NGOs, access to funds, knowledge of how to write grant applications,
connections in other parts of the world, ability to get donations of
hardware 
 and most of the other people in the group do not have this
potential to do the same things - yet. The programmers and hardware
specialists also have a lot more power than the others in another sense.
The people who have more power in the group right now don’t want to hoard
it, we think the other people in the group should acquire similar
potentials to do things in the future (and this was part of the mission
statement) – which is why we are asking that others take responsibility
and get involved actively rather than waiting for us to make the site,
decide about content and policy, and limiting their own participation to
sending an occasional email.  This level of involvement or responsibility
will not happen overnight, I worked with the radio and video group in Cluj
for a few months before they got to the point founding the ngo themselves
rather than asking me to take charge of it. I have never seen or worked
with any completely vertical, flat group in which everyone had the same
level of power and responsibility at the same time. During the first
indymedia ro meeting, we discussed that since people have different
potentialities to do things in the group at the beginning because of their
backgrounds and also quite simply because some people are just willing to
do more work, the best way to make sure that everyone had both the
opportunity and the responsibility to participate actively was to have
rotating functions. So for the first 6 months I was chosen to coordinate
the activities of the group – which means I am acting as a mobilizer who
is getting other people involved. Other people are coordinating the
website production. To be honest we don’t like it, it’s a lot of fucking
work, and this is why we are asking other people to share the work and to
take the responsibility of shaping the direction of this project beyond
sending an occasional email to the list or taking part in a ‘consensus’
process - if consensus means setting a deadline for people to reply or at
least not to voice opposition this is already part of our
parliamentary ‘democracy’ ... and we know how well that works.

A few last suggestions about the new imc involvement in local lists. I
think sometimes it might be extremely helpful for people in new imc to
send suggestions to newbies, but I would recommend that you please be
careful about how you intervene. Boud, your tone was aggressive and I felt
it was meant to put me on the spot. I don’t scare easily, but a lot of the
other people on this list might, and your message created an unpleasant
atmosphere. One person called me at home to ask why we were being
surveilled by the indymedia people and why they are telling us what to do
in our own group. If this reaction seems a bit strong to you, I would ask
you to remember that after making a series of assertions about what we
should and should not do in the group your closing remarks in the first
message were:

>Hopefully someone else from the new-imc working group will turn
>up to help talk you through these sorts of discussions.

Now “talk you through” reminds me of movies in which the pilot of an
airplane dies or passes out and the tower control has to talk one of the
passengers through flying the plane because she or he does not know how to
do it. It’s also what happens when I have a problem with my computer and
can’t figure out how to fix it, so I call tech support and some ‘expert’
gives me step by step instructions. So at the risk of sounding rude, I
really hope noone else from the new-imc working group turns up to “talk us
through” flying our project.

I would like to ask that the new imc volunteers discuss and set some kind
of policy for intervening in local lists so that it is clear from
someone’s first post that you are giving suggestions and not directions,
that you accurately represent how other IMCs work, not just your own, and
that you create an atmosphere of friendship and support rather than one of
critique – especially taking into account that you’re sending something to
a new list that just got off the ground.  And if you’re replying to
something written (partially) in a foreign language please take the time
to figure out what it says first.

Ciao,
Joanne