[New-imc] Re: [Imc-vlaanderen] IMC Belgium and proposed new IMC Vlaanderen

[Stijn Oosterlynck]

Hi,

As a participant in the imc.vl collective, I want to respond to some of
the things Lize of imc.be writes.  To do so systematically, I answer in
her e-mail. 


> ** the testsite **
> newswire : The site is getting more known and some postings are done.
> A lot of postings are double (also posted on imc.be or imc.wvl), which
> I regret, but still imc.be bashing articles are banned, which seems 
> very positive to me.

It is important to know that so far the collective did no outreach, so
there are not many people who know about the site.  The reason why our
site is already operational is for the edito-team to learn how to do
edito-work and test the edito-policy.

Lize is right to point towards the problem of double postings.  This is
something that needs to be discussed as of course we do not aim to be a
mirror site of imc.be.

> features : a background feature on Cancun was made and from the next 5
> features 3 were posted by the imc.wvl collective (all 3 also posted on
> imc.be). the other 2 features were made by the imc.vl collective. 

Again, it is important to stress that we're only testing.  This
comparisons are only meaningful once outreach is done and the existence
of the site is widely known.

> **undone, double and competing work**
> My original enthousiasm about an extra (although separately working)
> Indymedia workforce in Belgium is slowing down again. 
> - Except from 2 or 3 background articles no covering was done of the
> protests of Cancun at the imc.vl site, although some members announced
> to do this.  

I regret that Lize, with whom I have been in good contact in the run-up
to Cancun, has not made an effort to ask us why this was the case.  I
did
not cover the WTO protests because at that time we were discussing the
role of the edito-team in reporting.  I myself am inclined to focus as
much as possible on outreach and offering people a platform for their
reports, photos, analyses, ... .  

I personally believe that making reports and analyses is only of
secondary importance for a member of an imc-collective.  I first wanted
to think through these issues and therefore I did not make reports on
actions during the WTO-top in Cancun.  I expand on these issues further
down. 

> - On 11 september a feature was made with kind of the same info at the
> imc.be feature, but talking to guido (imc.be) and vlo (imc.nl) in irc
> they were not in favour of linking to the 11 september imc.vl feature
> because they considered it 'bad quality' (e.g. the sentence : 'another
> 11 september is possible' !??) It looks a lot like this feature was
> made in a spirit of "let's compete with imc.be and try to do better".
> Of course this isn't the right spirit and only creates double work and
> energy spilling.

This is simply untrue.  I made the 11th september feature and posted it
on sunday night.  I did not know imc.be was working on a similar
feature, which was only published on monday and took over some of the
external links I've made in the imc.vl feature.  I do not have any
problem with this, but then I do find it dishonest to suggest that this
feature was made in a spirit of competition with imc.be.  Besides, if
Lize finds the feature of bad quality (hey, we're only training) then 
she might as well have told us so, so we could learn from it.  

> - The list is made for process and edito work, but contains a lot of
> 'psychological' and 'therapeutic' mails between the members of the
> collective. 

This is a crude generalisation.  I also do dislike some of the mails 
on the list, but it does ignore the important discussions we've had with
the collective (see further).  

> - the decision process about making a new feature seems to be very
> slow.
> I think (hope) the collective will learn that when covering news, it
> is very difficult to first have a coverage strategy and a task 
> division : before you agreed on this, the news has become old.

Also see further.

> **My view**
> Of course I am still convinced that we need extra Indymedia activists
> in
> Belgium. I regret deeply both collectives cannot work together. But at
> this point, it looks to me like the main motivation of imc.vl is 'to
> compete' with imc.be although I don't see a lot of energy spilled on
> thorough covering. 

One of the discussions on the list, which I deem to be very important,
is to what extent the collective is responsible for the coverage of
actions and news.  Apparently, Lize did not recognize this discussion.

Imc.BE has chosen to do a lot of coverage and news themselves, which to
me creates some problems.  One of these problems is that readers have
wrong expectations about the site and criticise the imc.be-collective
for not covering this or that actions or news (as in the past some
members were suspected of disproportionally working on issues of
interest to the groups they are part of).  Unintendedly, a kind of
consumer ethics is promoted in which people expect the collective to
produce news for them instead of them using the site to produce their
own news.  The full potential of the open publishing function of the
site does not get realised.  This tendency is reinforced by the practice
of some edito-members to post copy pastes of articles on other sites on
the imc-site (especially if they need news for their features), instead
of using external links in their features.    

Imc.vl wants to discuss all these issues thoroughly as we believe they
are important for the project.  It is unfortunate that this is not
recognized by Lize.  It also shows that her view that imc.vl wants to
compete with imc.be is biased since our aims may be quite different.
I also believe that the way imc.be works stimulates people to think in
terms of competition and full and professional coverage of actions and
events.  Maybe it is much more important to get as much people as
possible using open publishing to tell their stories, however incomplete
and 'badly' written.  I do not say that imc.be does not work towards
these aims, but I feel that it has become secondary and somewhat
undermined by the tendencies of 'professionalisation' within the
collective.

I hope this clarifies matters somewhat,
Stijn 


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