[New-imc] sf.indymedia.org/indybay.org Split Problems

[zogren at yahoo.com]

We decided as a collective to email this lists
rather than process and since Lisa was the only person
on the lists in our group (who is in town right now) she
was the one who sent the email.

Personally, I think the main problem is related to the DNS entry
for our site. We are doing a lot of work on http://www.indybay.org
but we are finding it hard to promote the site (and email local
activist groups about its existence) when we don't know which url 
to use. When the split happened we got sfbay.indymedia.org and
bayarea.indymedia.org as indymedia urls but we also got indybay
which was a url that pointed to the old site. While most links to
the sf site used sf.indymedia.org, Google has always recorded the
links as www.indybay.org so while we did not want to give up the
main name of our group we did gain something by keeping that
old url. When we designed the banners and emails to activist
groups about the new site we always referred to it as indybay since
this was a name that at least some people already recognized.

During mediation it was decided that we get indybay, but now the 
sf.indymedia collective is saying that we only get it pointed to us
while they will retain ownership of the DNS entry. There has been a lot
of conflict between the two collectives and briefly during the site split
the DNS entry for indybay.org was pointed to a nonexistent ip for
a week. We are worried that if we start promoting the site as indybay,
the sf.indymedia collective can make random demands of us and if 
we do not do exactly what they say we will lose all of our traffic and
many people who have started using our new pages
will suddenly have all their links to our site break. 
We assumed that when the mediation agreement said that
we get the indybay url that meant we got ownership of it not
just having it point to us when the other collective is feeling nice.

Perhaps this seems like an issue for process, but it was the main
decision in our mediation meetings (it took 3 meetings to end up
with the url split and there was one short additional meeting about
other issues likes links, equipment ownership etc..) As such it should
have been something dealt with during the approval of the new indymedia.
The main thing the other group  gained from the split was the sf.indymedia.org name
so by going through new process and getting the name and then not giving
us full control of the domain agreed to in mediation, we are stuck with 
no power to control our own site (they have power over our url and we
cant really do anything about that)

Anyway, this email is by me and not the collective, but hopefully
it clarifies why the DNS issue was brought up on this list by
our collective.

-Z 
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