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

[tuc2002 at fastmail.fm]

Hi Lize,
Some response from inside the IMC-vl collective.

1) We are thinking about the double postings. 

2) We indeed announced articles on the Cancún-negotiations (two are still
on my C-drive, nearly finished ;). The reason why we stopped working on
them was because we agreed not to take a lead in the content-posting on
the website. After we posted the first two articles we had a discussion
in the collective on what work should be done first. We agreed it was way
more important to do outreach and self-reviewing at this stage. The risk
of doing too much content of the site from the beginning is that we would
bolster the classical media producer-consumer division. I guess a lot of
us are still thinking on this one. The agreement was that we would
facilitate feature-making (writing for example a how-to) in the first
place instead of upholding the "why don't the IMC-boys-and-girls write
something on X or Y" idea.
I personally quit writing articles on Cancún because I saw that the issue
was important for the collective. And it is. So right now, I don't think
content-producing work is the main issue for is.
I ask myself if it ever can be the main issue for IMC-volunteers, but
anyway. In the near future we might decide to write features ourselves
again, after the how-to is online and while starting to do outreach.

You could have send an e-mail to our collective on the Cancún-articles.
We would have had no problem explaining any of the decisions of the
collective and you would'n need to be let down too much (or get a view on
the rationality of some decisions).

3) I don't know anything of "bad quality" of the IMC.be feature on 11/09.
Linking the two features was not collectively discussed. The feature was
thus certainly not treated by the collective as a tool in competition
with IMC.be (how would an unknown testsite compete with IMC.be in the
fisrt place?). I don't discard the risk that competition is going to take
place, but at least this was not the case here. It must have been an
individual opinion that vlo an guido registrated on IRC and was "blown
up" to be a collective opinion of all IMC-vl volunteers (probably not by
them and not on purpose).
Look at our mailing-list and read the communication on the feature in
case. Besides that, why would we mention the work on Cancún on the IMC.be
website in our own feature if we planned to compete and not linking
features and articles???

4) There is indeed a lot of different communication going on on the
IMC-vl mailinglist. That's partly because we only have one list available
(I thought the standard for NewIMC's). We are thinking of asking for
more, so we could for example start our tech- and edito-group lists.
Besides that, it seems that all eyes are on the IMC-vl collective, and
only on that collective. That's why we are really afraid to use private
mailings and personal mailings too much. Whenever we would do that (for
which reason whatsoever), everybody would say we were discussing things
in private and no-transparant. Even for the "psychological" e-mails. One
result of this is that everything is sent to the IMC-vl mailinglist.

>>> 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.

Indeed this is something we might need to learn. But given my statements
above: this is right now not our main problem, since methods can be
loosely changed in order to be applied faster. We don't want to transform
ourselves to classical research-and-publish journalists. In the first
place IMC is about giving a platform to ordinary people out of our
communities. If the newswire is from the start monopolized by (although
hard-working) professional and fulltime activists, I don't regard IMC as
a succes. That resembles in no way the open publishing philosophy. I
don't say that IMC-activists cannot participate in the content-producing
aspects of an IMC-site, but IMC-activists should in my opinion be very
aware of patterns of expectations that are created indirectly by their
behaviour.
The risk exists that, in the case that the IMC-vl-collective exclusively
starts to write articles and features, take pictures, etc. that BEFORE we
know it we end up in a relation writers-public. It's the platform that
counts. Again: that's why we agreed not to finish the second
Cancún-feature.

5) You didn't read in our report on the meeting last sunday that we were
going to ask for an IMC-url. I explained it in a personal mail to Guido,
but I see he didn't take the chance of explaining it in his reply to your
mail. IMC-vl is a testsite, and we have today set the url www.imc-vl.org
and www.indymedia-vlaanderen.org in action. We are not going to apply for
an official IMC-url. That is not possible, which is totally
understandable in my opinion.

6) If you regret why IMC's cannot coöperate together, join the
mailinglist turlututu has started. It was created especially for
coöperation between Belgian IMC's. Up to today, the following people did
subscribe themselves:
freeallcows at hotmail.com 
joeri at indymedia.org 
klaasysebaert at hotmail.com 
tuc2002 at fastmail.fm 
turlututu at indymedia.org 
yannindy at yahoo.fr
laurentnelen at skynet.be 

Feel free to join it. As you see, no-one from the IMC-be collective is
subscribed yet. 


7) "A lot of discussion among the imc.vl members is what most energy is
spilled on now."
To be honest, I think it would be a bigger problem if a new collective
didn't "spend its time" on discussing what to do and where to go. I think
that is what is expected from the NewIMC process in the first place: to
get a better view of where you stand and what your role as a collective
should be. Otherwise it might be a little too late...
We are thus still discussing the project. And since we are expecting a
follow-up on the IMC-wvl en liège proposal (where does it stay, for god's
sake ;) the furture will bring more and more discussions. As long as
everybody tries to improve the situation and stays somewhat rational and
constructive, I guess this self-reviewing stage is not a bad thing for
Belgian IMC's...


Hopefully I could explain some of our decisions through this e-mail.
Again, feel free to communicate with us (be it through our mailinglist,
the coöperation mailinglist, IRC, our even the forum).

greetings,
TUc
from the IMC-vl collective, but writing in his own name.



On Wed, 24 Sep 2003 21:27:28 +0200, "lize" <lize at indymedia.be> said:
> Hey,
> 
> Almost 1 month has passed since I' ve sent out my last mail about my
> view/my report on the proceeding of the proposed new IMC Vlaanderen.
> http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/new-imc/2003-August/004187.html
> http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/new-imc/2003-August/004300.html
> 
> The new imc.vl collective has organized some open meetings and finally
> opened an open maillinglist for all communication. 
> 
> ** 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.
> 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. 
> 
> **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.  
> - 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.
> 
> **imc-vlaanderen list**
> the communication is now open and done through a mailinglist. 
> http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-vlaanderen/
> - The list is made for process and edito work, but contains a lot of
> 'psychological' and 'therapeutic' mails between the members of the
> collective. My estimation is 3 out of 5 mails are not really about
> decision making, which makes this list look more like
> 'let's-help-ourselve-list' than a list of a collective preparing
> themselves to get approved by global as a new IMC.
> - 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.
> 
> **approval by global**
> I dunno about the final procedure to be recognized as a new IMC but I
> read in the report of the imc.vl meeting that they are planning to go
> 'online', to make flyers, to do mega outreach, to have an Indymedia url
> etc. before the Bombspotting action of 25th October 2003. In fact I
> don't read in their report any feedback on how the recognition process
> with global is going on. 
> 
> **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. A lot of discussion among the imc.vl members is what
> most energy is spilled on now. 
> 
> The competing imc situation in Belgium is a very sad situation and I'm
> afraid it will only get worse. The proud of both collectives is
> enormous. At the bombspotting action, the two collectives will be
> fysically present and will be 'competing' each other in front of all the
> peace activists. We are ridiculous.
> 
> Regards,
> lize 
> 
> 
-- 
  
  tuc2002 at fastmail.fm

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