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

[bradsukol at yahoo.com]

Submitted by: brad sukolsky <bradsukol at yahoo.com> on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004 @ 11:21:08 pm (-0400)

Client Variables
----------------

HTTP_USER_AGENT:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)

Online Form Fields
------------------

proposed_imc_name:
BellinghamIndyMedia

proposed_imc_url:
bellingham.indymedia.org

current_url:
www.submittothis.org

city:
bellingham

state:
wa

country:
us

contact_name:
brad sukolsky

contact_email:
bradsukol at yahoo.com

contact_phone:
360-676-0614

tech_name:
Ian Harper

tech_email:
iharper at softhome.net

tech_phone:


focus:
issue_focus

critical_dates:
none

supporting_groups:
There is a university in town, and a smattering of supporting clubs and org.\'s from up there.  There are also all of the groups that have expressed support for the effort, from the local foodnotbombs to the Lummi Nation.  Not entirely sure what is being asked here...

introductory_statement:
I submit a draft mission statement:  We are a collective of people in Bellingham who aspire to embody anti-hierarchal, consensus-based, cooperative and transparent decison-making and will constantly endeavor to outreach into our community
to represent the diversity of voice and creative expression.  We feel that the events and activism that occur in our region merit an alternative news
source for the community that is not profit-driven or intended for a narrow audience and rather presents a forum for community discussion.  We desire an alternative without corporate interests or concerns for sponsors, rather a free format that allows an outlet for everybody and anybody to participate in news-related discourse.  We believe that any
person is qualified to share their perspectives regarding community events and issues, and that independent media is a powerful tool to challenge the corporate media monopoly and to dispel the myth of the singular version of truth.  We need a new form of news media that legitimizes the voice of the people.  It is also our hope that a BIMC will connect individuals and groups within Bellingham, and throughout the global indymedia network.  We strive to motivate by example.  We recognize the importance of the evolution of our movement and it is our mission to consider this a constantly working draft and welcome new visions to this fluid process.



resources:
One of the members of our collective has vollunteered some bandwidth, sadly, few here can contribute much in terms of technical ability.  We intend to fully integrate ourselves into the network (and a few of us, myself--brad--included, are just as excited about involvement in globalimc as in bhamimc).

outreach:
We have flyered/handbilled around, pretty much non-stop for a while now.  We\'ve made purposeful contact with campus and community groups, and actually went outside of our known community in an attempt to bring more folks in.  We\'ve informed and invited involvement from, for example, members of the native tribe and local Hispanic and Slavic communities.  There was also, about a year ago, another group of folks attempting to form a bhamimc.  We have attempted to draw them in as well.  

identity_makeup:
Much of the effort described above has had little effect; in discussion we think that involvement of these groups underrepresented in our current collective will increase after organizational/set-up.  However, one big division in this area is between members of the university community and those who are not students.  Our collective has bridged this chasm pretty well, and the age range of members-though still predominantly early 20\'s--is good.  The gender of our collective might be--probably is--mostly male, though barely. 

steps_represent_diversity:
in regards to groups that have not responded to outreach, we think that once the mechanism is in place, more will follow.  We plan on soliciting articles directly from these groups, and hope that tangible (e-tangible?) effects will be encouraging.  Our last meeting we talked about how this sort of thing would/could be possible/beneficial. We also plan to continue the outreach efforts to these groups.

steps_involve_new_workfields:
Rotation.  We are a little short on techie skills, and so as to not rely on one/acouple of people, and so that everyone has a chance, one of our techpeople is putting together, first HTML tutorial/workshops, maybe later others.  Each meeting (in the best world) is facilitated by another person.