May 2005 Indymedia Meeting Report

Thursday June 09, 2005 19:30

by Anthony - Indymedia Ireland

Last Saturday week, Indymedia Ireland held a public meeting in Dublin. A number of ongoing and long-running issues were discussed and a few decisions were made:

Structure of Indymedia Ireland:

Print-outs of the proposals for defining who and what the Indymedia Ireland collective is were circulated and the issues were discussed. This discussion also covered issues such as such as how the collective works and how decisions are made by the collective(s). Much of the discussion was based on ideas and issues that have been discussed on the mailing lists over the past year or so.

The discussion also included how other Indymedia collectives might be formed in Ireland .e.g. a group based in a city or other geographical area. It was agreed that we would support and encourage the formation of such collectives and that as long as they subscribed to the global Indymedia statement of principals they would be independent and autonomous groups.

It was decided that the proposals and formalisation of Indymedia decision-making procedure would be published on the newswire so that regular site users who don't subscribe to the working lists can comment on them. It was also agreed that comments referring to Indymedia policy are appropriate for such articles where the topic of the story is Indymedia itself

After the proposals have been further debated, a second draft would be published two weeks later which would include new amendments and that this should be formally ratified and adopted at the next Indymedia meeting.

Web Site:

It was reported that the site is currently transferring over 50 GB of data each month. This shows that the site is growing in popularity as this rate of traffic is higher than what it was this time last year.

$435 was requested from the Independent Media Support Group to pay for hosting up to the month of November.
€135 was also requested from the IMSG to pay for the .ie domain name.

The proposal of using a different server for serving media other than text was also discussed but nothing was decided.

It was also agreed that much of the tutorials and site documentation which currently reside in draft format on the on-line wiki space should be formalised and added to the site itself and linked to from the left-hand column.

DVD Compilation:

We are still in the process of putting together a compilation DVD of Indymedia movies and audio pieces. We agreed that when the compilation is ready that we would put together as professional a package as possible and that we would aim to get 800 copies of the DVD pressed.

It was pointed out that distribution of the finished product would be the most difficult part and a number of possible locations were discussed.

Email policy:

We agreed that members of the collective could use indymedia.ie email addresses in the in the course of their work as Indymedia volunteers. It was agreed that these addresses should only be used for Indymedia purposes and that Indymedia volunteers should use them responsibly.

It was also agreed that members of the web site collective should use encryption keys when exchanging confidential information such as editorial passwords. Two members of the editorial collective exchanged and signed each other's GPG keys to seed a "web of trust". We also agreed that web-site editors should respect the privacy of other editors.

Next Meeting:

It was also proposed and agreed that we should meet once a month - ideally in the same venue.

We agreed that if Sustainable Ireland were amenable to the idea that we would give a workshop and introduce people to Indymedia at the next Convergence festival taking place at the end of June and that the next face to face meeting should take place at the same time. The date is provisionally set for the 24th of June. Seedot agreed to start organising this and find out if it was OK.

We also agreed that we would use this time to try to organise coverage of Irish protestors travelling to the G8 summit in Scotland.

Chekov agreed to organise a workshop for web-site editors to introduce them to new features in the next official release of Oscailt, the software used for publishing news on the web-site. The meeting on the 24th will also function as a tentative release-date for Oscailt 3.0.

G8 Coverage:

It was also mentioned that Indymedia UK had requested that we include their features within our RSS feed so that their features would get picked up by other news services such as Google News while the G8 was a current event.

It was also agreed that we should produce a guide on how to contribute to news coverage for those attending the G8 protests.