[New-imc] Online form: Proposed new IMC! ()

[cudrnak at nm.psg.sk]

Submitted by: Michal Èudrnák <cudrnak at nm.psg.sk> on Wednesday, March 24th, 2004 @ 5:11:11 pm (-0500)

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HTTP_USER_AGENT:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)

Online Form Fields
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imc_name:
Indymedia Slovensko 

city:
Bratislava

state:


country:
Slovakia

contact_name:
Michal Èudrnák

contact_email:
cudrnak at nm.psg.sk

contact_phone:
+ 421908198270

tech_name:
Daniel Hromada

tech_email:
hromi at kyberia.sk

tech_phone:


supporting_groups:
Burundi Studio (media lab)
League of Human Rights Advocates (monitoring and reporting
on the human rights situation in Slovakia)
Kyberia.sk (digital community)
Slobodná Alternatíva (forming activist group)
Slobodná Vo&#190;ba (NGO attempting to legalize marihuana for medical purposes and pushing against police repression of innocent users)

regional_focus:
yes

issue_focus:
yes

event_focus:
yes

critical_dates:
preliminary organizing and ideas exchange on discussion board - since january 2004 

resources:
People, a server with solid webspace and bandwith, some initial support (soon to be broadened), starting media lab with (yet to be obtained) hardware. To put it shortly, not to waste words in this kind of distanced communication medium (form) - we\'re ready! What else could you wish for :) Well, it ain\'t that perfect, but what is? 
Concerning resources we could share - our commitment and enthusiasm, video and radio skills, others will come up from the process as we learn and realize what else could spread from us to the network.

outreach:
It all started on a discussion board on kyberia.sk. As a matter of luck, we\'ve met there as people interested in starting slovak secion of Indymedia. So there\'s the core of our group - people who\'ve done some Indymedia screenings before, others with campus radio background, web journalism... Not all of us can be labeled this way - belonging to some group or specific media practice - but everyone has some skills to provide. 
As mentioned before, we\'ve already got a server confirmed to host the website, so you don\'t need to care about another local indy \"exhausting\" main indymedia server. 
Concerning groups \"outside\" - initial contact has been made with League of Human Rights Advocates, which you recommend as a potential partner for Indymedia in Slovakia. If all goes well this could evolve into a interesting collaboration - LHRA\'s local volunteer monitors in Roma communities writing themselves the news and publishing them on indymedia website.
Other mentioned groups and its members are also users of kyberia.sk digital community, so the contact and the will to cooperate is not a problem. 

introductory_statement:
Make your own media! That\'s the message we want to spread and put into practice. Not the only one, of course - there are other reasons for us to start Indymedia in Slovakia, like ballancing the distorted image of \"anti-globalization movement\", which got a pretty narrow and low publicity in slovak mainstream media. But on the other side, our interest stays connected to local events and issues. There are and will be many, since Slovakia is only beginning to come to grips with what is happening as we enter the \"western world\" - many people are unaware of the other (darker) side of westernization. Anyway - we\'re not about to inform them about \"real state of things\", the aim is to point to certain problems we perceive and tell \"this is how we see it\". Also, there is a humble but strong hope that we could help to be a \"meeting point\" of separate activities and groups which operate here in the fields of activism, human rights, labour etc. Many of them are diffused and no
 t connected, in the sense that they\'ve all got their own websites which don\'t cooperate, so in the end you\'ve got some internet resources, but \"dissapearing\" since not many people are willing to surf all of them to get an alternetive to corporate media. Actually there\'s one website (changenet.sk) which kinda does it, but only in the sphere of NGO\'s and that can be somehow limiting (but there\'s collaboration with them underway:)
Internet is the medium of choice, because many other are under control of state bureaucracy (almost as anywhere else in the world where tight laws prevent diversity in radio or tv stations). We think that millions watching the same TV news everyday at 19.00 is a perverse but sadly true image of a media landscape, which got so much controlled that people gave up their imagination and do not even think of alternatives. Feeding people with the same information equals to channeling the same reality. We think that there are many other options to be explored. Indymedia will be our experiment as to how.