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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Notes from St. Louis on IMC Midwest Regional Gathering (finally) |
Current rating: 0 |
by Matthew Berliant
(No verified email address)
Address: St. Louis, MO |
28 Oct 2001
Modified: 04:12:44 PM |
This last weekend, three members of the St. Louis IMC went to Urbana, Illinois for the Mid-west Regional gathering. There, we met up with folks from IMCs in Chicago, New York, Madison, Springfield, and the Twin Cities. Over the course of the weekend, we got to know each other, share skills, and brainstorm ways to better share resources and meet the challenges of expanding to all media and to continue our mission as independent news gatherers and reporters in a consensus and non-authoritarian manner.
Below are notes from the various workshops. |
On the Issue of General Operating Process
We talked about creating a production plan that allowed for regular meetings, regular updates of the page, regular writers’ meetings, and regular audio/other media meetings to provide consistency to the effort of keeping up with events and keeping the site current and running smoothly. We also talked about utilizing this plan in such a way as to separate tasks and meetings according to interest, so that people don’t end up having to sit through meetings about things they’re not interested in participating in, and can therefor spend their time and energy being effective in the areas they are most excited about.
We also went over the notion, adopted by the Confluence, of using a consensus policy wherein those members who showed up to meetings would make decisions (by consensus), and then these would be posted to the email list. People would then have a week to block consensus before the decision was final.
We also went over the difficult process involved in expelling a member from the group (should such a need arise). Twin Cities had recently gone through such an ordeal. We all seemed to think it would work best to keep the lines of communication open, to discuss with the individual(s) the reason why certain behaviors were injurious or damaging to the group or the group’s goals. If the behavior still didn’t stop, we thought it would be best to convene an emergency meeting, wherein the individual was invited, to discuss further action. Decision to expel a member would have to be made by consensus of everyone else in the group, and would have to have some way to reverse the decision later, also by consensus.
Most of us hope we won’t ever have to face such a difficult decision.
On the Issue of Expansion and Outreach
Several great ideas were discussed. We talked about the need to develop and maintain rural contacts and ongoing relationships various groups in the outlying areas around our IMCs. The idea of compiling a list of Left and community groups was proposed, for the purpose of contacting them for press releases, co-publishing with them, and re-printing (or broadcasting, as the case may be) articles and pieces they produced.
Somebody emphasized the fact that, prior the IMC, there usually existed a number of independent media outlets in each of our cities, and that it would be a good idea to develop some working relationship with these groups. We felt it would be a good idea to work with these people, to encourage cooperation rather than competition between us.
We also talked about establishing some kind of standard email to contact people who posted to the newswire (if they left their email address) so that we could encourage further posting, and possibly greater involvement. These notes would include encouraging words, a list of possible articles to write about, other possible ways to get involved (meeting schedule), and an invite to join the email list.
Finally, we talked about some ideas to encourage more people to be reporters themselves, rather than spending so much time going out as reporters ourselves. We could give disposable cameras to a group of school-kids in the ghetto to document their daily experiences. We could do the same for women in a retirement home. Other ideas? Put them into practice today!
On the Issue of Impartiality
The myth of objectivity was exposed during this discussion. There was some disagreement about whether people should even try to get a ‘balanced’ perspective in reporting on events. We all agreed that first person accounts were a central element of IMC coverage and should be encouraged. When it came to reporting on events that the ‘reporter’ was not directly involved in, there was discussion about trying to get quotes from various sides of the issue where possible. Some also placed a lot of emphasis on going more in-depth into causes and possible causes of events, since in-depth reporting is something the mainstream, corporate press doesn’t tend to do very often or very well.
We all more or less agreed that it was our job to continue to challenge ourselves to tell the stories that weren’t being told in the mainstream press, and that the challenge became one of beyond merely our own interests and into other areas that were still under-reported and lacked coverage in our communities and the communities that surround us.
This led to our next topic:
On the Issue of Diversity—Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Low-resource communities, etc. Involvement in the IMCs
It was decided that it is a good idea to frequently reinforce and remind people about the consensus process, and that caucuses can be a very effective and important element in that process. Also, having good facilitators who know how to encourage under-active participants to join in the conversation, or at least to make sure their thoughts and ideas aren’t being left out or ignored was stressed.
Caucus-based tech-sharing was a suggestion that seemed to get a lot of nods.
Developing strong working relationships with minority groups in the local community was strongly encouraged, as well as people learning to accept and follow minority leadership.
The St. Louis Organization for Black Struggle has a good set of guidelines that lend themselves to a more democratic meeting/discussion. They put out a card suggesting that comments should be limited to 1-2 minutes per person (or other agreed upon time limits); once a participant has spoken, s/he will not be called on until everyone else who wants to speak on the issue has spoken; the facilitator will pay attention to gender, race, class, and age balance in the discussion; and that it is the group’s responsibility, not just the facilitator’s, to enforce the above rules.
It was also suggested that the IMC should pay attention to issues of import to local minority and women’s groups, not just on what the members of IMC feel are important issues.
When it comes to talking to people about the IMC or distributing its print versions, people stressed the importance of not pre-judging people’s interest or lack of interest.
There then ensued a discussion of the distinction between ghettoizing and self-sectioning. It’s one thing for a group of white men to decide they’re going to (or not going to) make a ‘gay’ or ‘youth’ or ‘women’s’ section in their projects, and another thing altogether for a group to decide, for their own reasons that they WANT to have their own section. People seemed in favor of supporting the second, rejecting the first, and that by accepting self-sectioning doesn’t mean that topics that also relate to the issue in question can’t also be printing in other sections.
Somebody came up with the idea that we should create ‘sister-IMCs’ sort of like sister-cities, where an established IMC teamed up with a developing IMC to share resources, ideas, etc. This would also be a way to decrease the so-far overly American and Euro-centric flavor of the IMCs.
On the Subject of Outreach
For this section of the discussion, people were encouraged to spend the allotted time shouting out ideas about how to make outreach more effective rather than talking about these ideas in a discussion format. Here’s what we came up with:
Parlez-vous Francais? Well, non-English coverage was a hot topic at the conference. We need to figure out ways to incorporate it into our IMCs.
We should take some time away from writing and production to spend an equal amount of time on this very important element of our projects. Going along with this, we thought it might be good to budget as much money as resources to outreach as we do to other aspects of making IMC happen.
We should develop multiple media outlets, to reach as many different audiences as possible.
Titles help people remain accountable for what they’ve committed to. At the very least, having ‘point-people,’ people who are willing to put in the work to coordinate a given event or action, works better than just saying, ‘oh yeah, we should do this’ and hope the group does it.
Follow up with those people who post to the Newswire and leave their email address, encouraging them to participate further and/or come to a meeting.
Have a tutorial page to explain how to do open publishing—it’s not always as self-explanatory as we think. Also, being able to make face-to-face presentations about what IMC is about can be helpful.
Create an allies page and/or a community calendar that can list events going on in the community that have been organized by other groups in town.
Approach everyone—don’t prejudge interest.
Diversity your cultural events/fundraisers. Don’t always do the same thing that tends to draw the same kind of crowd.
Set up a regular evaluation process/event. Make it easy for people in the community to let you know how well they think you’re meeting your proposed objectives, how easy they think it is to be involved, their criticisms, etc.
Rolodex reliable contacts, including name, #, and their network connections.
Map your community. Use the map to see what you’re covering, and what you’re not covering.
Map people’s networks—who people know—(churches, sports, entertainment, schools, work, support groups, etc.) to help get an understanding of what you’re covering, what you’re not.
Approach schools of journalism for fresh blood.
Listen to other people’s priorities. Get behind projects people are already doing, or projects they propose doing. Don’t be too distracted by what you are already doing.
On Ways to Make the Individual Web Sites Better
Again, we had people shout out proposals. Here’s what we hollered:
Post noes, summaries, and meeting minutes to the Web Site to make process more transparent.
Allow for audio, radio, video feeds.
Link to source material and parallel studies within articles.
Give hot topics their own page (like the ‘Terrorism Returns Home’ page on St. Louis’ IMC).
Create a standard email to send out in response to good posts encouraging further participation. Create a different standard email to send out to spammers reminding them of our posting policy and possible consequences for spamming (each IMC has their own policy—some hide the posts, some remove them, some let them be).
Create a way to sort by number of comments, other search criteria.
Create a tutorial on how to work the site. One person proposed creating an animation in Flash, an Anarchist Cheerleader perhaps, who would pop out if you clicked on the ‘help’ key to explain the site and how to use it. Other people said they would puke if such a thing every happened.
Going along with the above, people talked about having a ‘help desk’ page.
Make better use of the ‘about us’ page, with CURRENT, up-to-date contact names, email addresses, etc.
Creating cross-medium projects based on original medium (i.e. creating a radio show based on Newswire postings, etc.)
Write good summaries that include all the key words for the article, as it is the summaries that are used by the ‘search’ option.
For those with visual impairments who use our site, alt.tag graphics to include a description of the graphic.
On How to Make the Global Decision-Making Process Better
This was sticky. Most people felt that Global should not really be its own entity, but really just a place for local IMCs to work collaboratively.
Here is a list of things that people felt the Global entity should have the power to make decisions about:
- how to use the money contributed to the National site (currently around $12,000)
- what articles get posted to the Global Features column
- approving new IMCs
- possibly creating a legal-defense fund
- possibly creating a travel fund
- who gets to use global equipment (if there is any) or equipment donated to Global
People felt strongly about the local IMCs maintaining full autonomy.
People suggested that Global develop a way to use threaded-discussion boards to make the decision-making process more transparent, as well as possibly a separate page that listed only proposals, time-frame for deciding on said proposals, blocking comments, and amended proposals.
People talked about the consensus process, and the possibility of designating deadlines for when proposals must be blocked before being assumed passed. Due to language barriers and different time zones, no less than a four day time period was suggested for this decision-making process.
People were urged yet again to take note of the language factor, and to try to develop better ways of translating discussions.
On the Topic of Security
The Security discussion centered around three main areas: tech, legal, and political.
In the tech department, it was suggested that people make frequent back-ups, use independent servers from each other IMC, promote tech-knowledge far and wide, possibly using free space on less-used servers to create mirror-sites, and working to possibly create our own ISPs.
On the legal front, it was suggested that we work to actively network with local lawyers who might be allies to our cause. The ACLU and the EFF, as well as some other electronic privacy groups, have both expressed avid support in the past, so keep their numbers handy.
On the political side of things, people maintained that keeping the IMCs decentralized was critical. Rotating facilitators and promoting a wide-knowledge base was also suggested. Registering equipment, bank accounts, and building titles to the group rather than to individuals is highly encouraged. Advertise any and all harassment far and wide through every medium possible. Use the consensus minus one approach to oust members who seriously threaten the IMC decision-making process or the security of various IMC projects. Create a protocol for doing this kind of thing BEFORE it comes up.
Notes on How Local IMCs Can Improve Content Inclusion or something like that…
Local IMCs could cross-post articles of interest to many sights, but only store it on one of their servers!
Send each other ‘care-packages’ by snail mail that included copies of each other’s print media for distro in local infoshops, media libraries, etc. As a side note, someone suggested we target local office waiting rooms for prime placement of alternative media.
Each site/radio show/print version could have a Global highlights section.
There could be a box in the Newswire Publishing Form that people could ‘check’ if they wanted their article to be considered for the Features column.
On How the Local IMCs Can Communicate With Each Other, Better
Creating a Global Minutes Board where local IMCs posted their meeting notes.
Have more of these regional gatherings, PLEASE! They’re fun!!
Going to todo-indymedia.org and seeing what’s there.
Making strong personal connections with people by a process where you actually spend time in close proximity, maybe even seeing their faces.
Creating a ‘point-person’ to be your Ambassador to other IMCs, to participate in the Global IMC decision-making lists, etc.
Create regional file-sharing/message boards.
Encourage more active communication before events of common interest.
Is there a way we can automate some of these processes? Can we hire automatons? (just kidding!)
Create a wish list on the front page of each IMC outlining equipment, resources, and skills we need.
And that’s all folks. Hope you find it helpful. Other participants are urged to add their insights, observations, etc. to these notes. Hope people find these suggestions and ideas helpful.
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See also:
www.stlimc.org
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Comments
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Thanks! |
by Paul Riismandel
paul (nospam) mediageek.org (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
28 Oct 2001
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Thanks to the St. Louis folks for providing such a complete yet consise summary of the discussions we had at the gathering.
It was great to meet you all and I hope this is the start of the regional IMCs working more closely with one another.
--Paul |
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