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

Fri Sep 26 08:02:40 PDT 2003

Hi Lize and others,

This thread of mails doesn't belong on this list, it's so not interesting
for those who arent't personally concerned.

The application of vlaanderen shoud be considered on wheater they can
qualify as an imc or not and that jconsideration should happen according to
the same criteria as for all other applications.  As far as I know "letting
yourself be bossed around by members of another imc" is not one of them and
neither is "not seeing imc the way I do even if it is according to most
other imc-istas"

Personal feelings and animosities have no place in this process and it is
not fair to use them in an attempt to influence it.

Deal with personal issues on a personal level and don't try and turn
indymedia into a war zone.

Greetings,

Libby

----- Original Message -----
From: <tuc2002 at fastmail.fm>
To: "Imc be Process" <imc-belgium-process at lists.indymedia.org>;
<imc-vlaanderen at lists.indymedia.org>; <new-imc at lists.indymedia.org>;
<lize at indymedia.be>
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2003 1:51 PM
Subject: [New-imc] Re: [Imc-vlaanderen] IMC Belgium and proposed new IMC
Vlaanderen

>
> 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
>
> --
> http://www.fastmail.fm - Choose from over 50 domains or use your own
> _______________________________________________
> New-imc mailing list. Lista de correo New-imc
> New-imc at lists.indymedia.org
> http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/new-imc
>
>
>