The Sad Decline of Indymedia

Because otherwise once more people are going to se ghosts, this article is back on showing.

I had another reason to hide it because for me it's advertising for a website http://www.infoshop.org/inews. Little bit sad to critisize indymediasites but to make an advert for your own site who looks the same as a indymediasite.

Like I let Alison know, this week also another text was published on this site about the working of the indymedianetwork.

If the real goal of ChuckO was to have a debate than he had to poste it to a lot of sites, I only found five. So I ask myself the question if it really was Chuck O who posted it here.

By the way, Alison, the problems like racism and anti-semitism are not so great here, people do their best to censure. And with doing their best, they even censore left-wingers who don't know that they are talking racism.

And Alison, this comment sad already enough about the text:

"An interesting example of academics discussing this alternative publishing medium of ours. The discussion was prompted by an article on Infoshop by Chuck0 entitled "The Sad Decline of Indymedia".
"Two short comments on this article:
First, unlike as in more traditional forms of massmedia, disagreements within the Indymedia newsnetwork are often out in the public domain. So, before seeing this as a representative comment of one of the problems with open
publishing, I recommend looking into the background of a story like this.
Second, Chuck0 is talking about the global site. That is only _one_ of the many Indymedia groups. There are now about 80 of them. I have not collected material from all the collectives, but I know that each one of them has its own editorial policy and an own way of dealing with racism or other 'unwanted' articles and comments in the main newswire. Some are more pro free speech, and some are more restricted in what they 'allow' on the website.

Anyway, here some more texts about indymediaworking:

Indymedia's future, between the elite core and the global decentralized consensus process

There has been a standing critique that indymedia is developing an elite core of activists who could dominate the network. These are people who've gained respect through organizing and facilitating projects. They've accumulated some social capital and influence in the network. There is a fear that this core might take over or transform the network in to something less radical or powerful. This especially comes up as we try and address issues of money and network decisions. The party line response is that we need to replace it with some sort of global grassroots decentralized democratic consensus process.

Part of what they say is valid. There are people who play critical roles in the network and have built up social capital (Ughgh nasty term). Another way of saying it is that they've built up respect. In the same way that there are people who want to accuse the techies of holding all the power people want to have that elite conspiring to take power. The reality at least from the tech perspective is as far from that as possible. Hell we went on strike to demand that the rest of the network take power and decisions away from tech.

We have had people who were very central and big organizers who've left for more ngo-ie jobs. Jeff did a HUGE amount of the initial organizing but now is not involved on a direct level at all after he took the job as director of Media Alliance. We've also had very central and influential people step out without things falling apart. Maffew and manse are both good examples of people who've done tremendous work but had to step back to do other things.

Now, is there abuse of power? I'm not sure. For example I used the social capital I'd developed from writing features.cgi and working with many imc's, to coordinate and get through the features newswire. At the time of the features newswire proposal there was already a proposal on the table from George King. Now it wasn't a terrible proposal either but I liked mine better. Because I knew people and people had grown to respect some of my work it was much easier for me to get my proposal approved. Also because I am a techie with passwords and the ability to implement my own proposals and George is not I was able to get my proposal implemented.

The same might be said for my current project to ship computers to south American imc's. Because of the social network I knew who to ask to track down funding, help, and generally make it happen. I actually was pretty open about asking around for help. The reality is that people who have tended to come through in the past came through again. Those people who tended to have a history of not following through on past projects didn't come through on this one. It's not intentional but you do start to develop connections and provide mutual support for people who supported you.

I think this, and temporary leadership based on respect and personal accomplishment isn't inherently a bad thing. It's when it becomes a power structure, formal or informal, which is undemocratic and authoritarian that the problem develops. One of the things that has made indymedia a success is that we've created a space where we can both allow individual autonomous initiative and have collaborative projects under a broad umbrella.

My real fear isn't that we'll have a small group of people trying to take control over indymedia. My fear is that we'll not be able to communicate the solutions and functional models of what a sustainable grassroots democratic and participatory indymedia movement could be. We have too few people participating in this documentation and knowledge sharing process. Even though the biggest imc's have dozens or hundreds of active members there is almost never more than three people from any given imc participating in network work. Consistently when there has been effort to bring decisions that need to be made by the network to local imc's, the local activists aren't interested. The network is complicated and people are busy. They say that the few people who follow things can make the decision. This isn't true of ALL imc's but it's the case with a lot of them.

Sometimes I think this is really sad. Because we have a principle of making sure we have as broad and democratic decision making process as possible. If we had a stronger network we could address critical issues. We could have some coordinated way of dealing with and mediating conflicts such as what's happening right now with the Palestine imc. The reality is we don't have that kind of structure. At best we can have things explode in to long email flame wars on the global lists. Eventually we hope that the local people will be able to work it out. Somebody may have to bow out such as what happened in Russia, or a neighboring imc might have mediate such as with the devolution of the France IMC in to local city based collectives. We lack the ability to coordinate some amazing large projects which could have a global impact. We lack the ability to effectively work with many traditionally structured organizations such as AMARC. In some ways we function so differently from ngo's and other non-anarchism inspired organizations that we clash constantly. Collaborations between indymedia and Democracy Now and Greenpeace to take two examples have been failures.

Now, is this a bad thing? I'm not so sure. As much as I'd like to be able to have a solid decentralized and democratic decision making structure in place I'm not sure it would actually serve us in the long term even if we COULD implement it. What we have is a network which doesn't make decisions as a whole. It doesn't need to. We are perfectly able to operate in well over a hundred cities, in over 35 countries, 22 languages, on 6 continents without this formal process. Sure being able to develop a way to spend that $42,000 we have sitting in the mythical global fund would help. But we've been able to buy buildings, maintain dozens of offices, acquire and run over 30 servers, start radio stations, produce and air television programs, have half a dozen governments attack us in the courts, and generally cause a ruckus without that structure or money. The question is, is there a way in which we can use and approach both money and a decision making process which will reflect the qualities which made indymedia a success, embody our values, and propel us forward to continue our work on a wider scale. Even with these impressive accomplishments our work is far from done.

With the fear of an elite taking hold we have a potential reaction which could be as harmful as a centralized power grab. We could regulate ourselves in to disfunctionality. I believe it is fundamental to the success of indymedia and that we must protect it's basis in spontaneous autonomous action and projects. Most IMC's and projects started autonomously without permission or knowledge from the existing network. There is nobody to ask permission from, nobody to grant permission. No authority in the form of a leader, council, rule book, or even popular democratic assembly. Without this authority we've been able to grow a culture of creative anarchy. This essence is built not upon a democratic meeting process or consensus but arises through action. Simply put, the organizers of the Seattle imc created a model where by they facilitated the work of four hundred autonomous self managing media maker activists. When people walk in to an imc during a major action it's like walking in to the brain or never center of the movement. Like the real brain there is no single point in control, rather the intelligence and power derives from simultaneous self-coordinated actions of individuals and groups. It is the network and the links which make us strong.

Indymedia thrives when there is enough background infrastructure for a space of autonomous action to place, and dies when it the process work either dominates or is unable to construct that infrastructure. As we consider the growth and structural evolution of indymedia we need to balance the need for resources and coordination with need to build a space in which self-organization and initiative can take place. Our decision is not between an ngo like hierarchy with an elite core or a radical form of decentralized democratic consensus processes. Our path needs to be one of determining how to grow and deepen our work while maintaining the magic energy that has inspired us to get this far.

____________________________________________________________

Indymedia Finance & Arguments For A Tactical Media Fund
This is something i wrote a month ago, but never got around to posting. It's from an email where i was trying to layout the nature of indymedia decision making processes when it comes to money, and why we have a network wide fiscal body. It's especially apropos given discussions about the newly formed Tactical Media Fund.

Note: I'm still learning and trying to understand Latin American politics. I may be quite off in the parts of this which talk about fundraising in Latin America. It's never something I investigated directly, rather inferred during my time in Latin America.
I chatted with Gaba for about an hour or so about this. One of the problems I think we're facing is that there are simply fundamentally different ways in which activist and media groups get funded in different countries. In Latin America, as far as I can tell, to fund your organization which is most often a party, you take control of something and divert funds. This happens with student government, agencies, city and national governments, local unions, and just about any other place where groups can get a foothold. It's not considered corruption because the faction that gains control presumably has the political backing and understanding of the organization's members. There is also money from northern NGO's and some UN agencies. As far as I can tell foundations simply don't exist in the way they do here, and where they do they stay far away from projects with any kind of potentially radical politics. So there is the default assumption that funding works like the way they know it. Just for some strange and inexplicable reason, corporations give the funding through their foundations. This is mostly my impression from talking to Pablo and Gaba, but it also came up on the N5M Latin America list, people were a little dumbfounded at the idea of going to foundations for money. As an example the Brazil IMC had inquires about receiving US $10,000 from the PT controlled city government of Sao Paulo to run an ad. They of course turned it down. I think this is part of people intellectually getting that the Ford Foundation isn't the Ford Motor Company, but not being able to appreciate the difference emotionally.

This difference in funding is why the Zapatista rallying cry of "para nosotros nada, para todo todos" (for ourselves nothing, for everybody everything) is so powerful. It's about breaking out of the corrupting cycle of self serving graft which infects many powerful southern social change movements.

Now there is another issue, that is groups in the US who have much more direct experience with how foundations work. The fear is of becoming institutionalized, and through that both professional and politically timid.

In Europe they have many more resources than we do both with the government actually funding all sorts of left cultural / media organizations, squats, and real unemployment benefits. This doesn't mean there hasn't been amazing activist projects eaten up and becoming institutionalized.

So we have two issues. First imc's in the global south have experience where you don't just get money to support your cause, but money means obligations. For the most part I think the solution to this is a way of clearly explaining how organizations get funded in the north. If we put something together and had it translated I think this would help a lot. I think we could learn a thing or two about how you can use institutions in society as a way of gaining political resources and enact struggle. To much of American society is so de-politicized it tastes like soggy bread.

The issue of getting funded and becoming institutionalized is the stickier issue. Many people in the north, by which I include the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, are deeply afraid of indymedia becoming institutionalized. The most important thing to acknowledge is that this is a valid fear. Many amazing and vibrant movements have become professionalized and turned in to liberal advocacy groups or apolitical community media organizations. Some powerful radical projects have even become worse and ended up as part of the for-profit media multinationals such as the 60's underground press which become the alternative weeklies market segment.

So far we've done a pretty good job at not becoming institutionalized. Although there are definitely some imc's which have taken different perspectives. The Indypendent for example has chosen to take some limited ads to support its monthly circulation of 15 to 20 thousand copies. Some IMC's have purchased buildings or run centers which require institutional structure to keep them functioning.

The fear isn't that we'll institutionalize a democratic and cooperatively self-managed structure. It's the fear that the only kind of structure we have a chance of becoming is that of a traditional authoritarian non-profit corporation. In the US and Europe we have ample evidence to show that many organizations can go in that direction. Some people choose to have no organizational structure over the potential of becoming a de-radicalized organization. I'd say the majority perspective within the indymedia network doesn't agree with that no-structure perspective. The rough consensus seems to be that we should have solid local consensus based collectives which do embody the kind of institutions we want. This is not to say that the specifics of what people within an IMC want don't vary quite a bit from imc to imc. The real point of conflict comes when people consider the local imc's relation to the network. My sense is that people feel either that the network should make no decisions at all. All decisions are to be left up to the local's. Or, if there are decisions to be made they should be pushed out to the local imc's which have organizations we can touch, feel, and trust.

At the core of what we call indymedia is a very deep belief in radical decentralization and autonomy. Michael Albert saw this when we had the round table discussion about indymedia with him at the World Social Forum. He said "gezz you guys don't want to make any decisions at all do you?" He wasn't quite right, we are able to make decisions as long as we aren't making decisions FOR somebody else. This is a principled and good stand that fits solidly within the anarchist tradition and it's rejection of representational politics. It's the ideal of Direct Democracy.

What does that mean for our network organizational structure and money. Access to resources and money in some form is necessary for us to be effective activists agitating for radical social change. So far the process that has been laid out in the imc-finance working group has tried to embody the local decentralized and network process to make decisions about the global fund. The global fund itself appeared through unsolicited donations. We have the money and we have imc's with resource needs, so imc-finance pushed forward to develop some way to spend it. What we've basically created is fund/grant for project model. This is a similar model to how the small progressive foundations such as Resist, Haymarket, and others work. IMC's submit a proposal for funding a specific project on a project by project basis. It is a two tiered system where by small emergency grants can be approved by just the imc-finance group. Larger funding is supposed to be sent out all the local imc's and translated for them to reach consensus on. The larger or non-emergency funding process has two critical problems. First the imc-finance group has never been able to get a majority of IMC's to have an active liaison subscribed to the list. Even with a push to get local imc's to review and approve of the process very few imc's participated. This is due to language problems, people being busy, and not being able to follow the discussions. It is also due to people being tied to their local activities and not having time or interest in network activities.

The lack of participation in the imc-finance process means that it is quite week. Even though proposals for non-emergency funds have been submitted, the imc-finance process hasn't yet been able to get those proposals out to local imc's for review. I doubt many local imc's are even interested in spending their meeting time reaching consensus on every non-emergency proposal. This suffocation by democratic decentralized consensus process is something I've heard cited for one of the down falls of DAN. The problem with each local reaching consensus is that they, through their deliberations, will come to consensus on different things. We saw this in the decisions about adopting the open publishing standard. When people go through the consensus process, they rightly discuss and come to a new agreement. Many of the imc's modified the open publishing document as part of their work of coming to consensus on it. When all the results were sent back to the list we had a problem. 10 IMC's and consensed one way, 3 another, 6 more had rewritten it and come to consensus on their new revision, and half a dozen others simply never acknowledged the process was happening. That was back when we were a much smaller network too! Now we have over a 100 imc's and 20 different languages.

I'm not rejecting the use of decentralized democracy, but rather questioning which decisions we actually want to all be making. We do not make decisions decentralized decisions as part of the new-imc process. That important task is handled by a working group. The applications are forwarded to the imc-process and anybody can object, but in reality imc-process has become a rubber stamp for applications from new-imc. There have been whole applications that went through without ever being translated in to English and nobody who couldn't read it objected. The point is that we have a network has survived and flourished without reconciling the contradictions between our values of decentralized consensus based direct democracy and making network wide decisions. Because money is such an important decision, we have assumed that it must be done in such a way that overcomes that contradiction.

Perhaps that isn't the solution. Perhaps we should let what has happened continue in a more open way. We have had people doing fundraising and supporting imc's. They have been some imc's, some self forming groups of people, and some people operating wholly outside of indymedia. Maybe if we can't have an effective decision making process to deal with this money, or if we don't want to create a structure for handling money, then we shouldn't. Indymedia exists within an ecology of media activist collectives and organizations.

If we can't or won't take on the institutional dangers of a network wide fiscal structure then let's not do it. Let's instead consider the benefit of having a series of tactical media funds be created to support indymedia and the other collectives that operate within our broader network who are committed to tactical and participatory media for social change.

http://www.anarchogeek.com/archives/000070.html#000070

Group Forming, Indymedia Crediblity, and the Forming of Asambleas in Argentina
This week i've been following the creation of a new list called group-forming which is looking in to how groups form online and organize themselves. Some of the folks want to more look at the dynamics while others are thinking of comeing up with some new software. I think both parts are pretty interesting and important for the future growth of indymedia and social movement's use of the net to create change. I'm including my intro note to the list which talks forming groups, networked crediblity in indymedia, and the process by which the asambleas formed in argentina.

I find the process of how groups form and articulate themselves to be very important as we settle in to a networked society. I think if we can create systems which take advantage of this end to end network, we can use this to create new social organizations which are more egalitarian. The ability for people to find and associate themselves with other like minded individuals easily across geographic, national, and even potentially linguistic barriers is amazing. Now that the dot com boom has died down we can the get to fun part of using the net to do amazing things instead of just using it to sell more ads.

With indymedia we've faced a real need to tackle the problems of forming groups. We've got a news philosophy which embraces everybody's ability to become their own journalist. The problem is that some people write what seem to be conspiratorial rants or espouse political perspectives which are off the wall.
In the American news media you know a story is credible if the New York Times runs a story on it. Once that happens the story gets picked up by other papers, radio stations, websites, and the TV news. Because we represent both a politically dissident perspective and advocate a model for the news with is fundamentally participatory we need to develop a different model for what is credible. For example, Slashdot has one model. They take hundreds or thousands of potential article submissions a day and have a group of editors who pick the most interesting or important 25 of them for each day. With indymedia sites, we have something vaguely similar. Each local site has an editorial group which makes decisions on which stories to feature and promote. Those go in the center column. All of the other stories stay up on the site and are listed as being news, where as Slashdot deletes them. There are still serious problems with the way we do things. When you look at an article you have no way of knowing the history of the author, what other people think of this or the author's work, or generally assessing the credibility of what's stated in the article. With the New York Times you don't need to know the author. The history of the institution embodies all the credibility. With indymedia for us to develop credibility we need to realize that we can't have the single monolithic institutional credibility that a traditional news organization has. We advocated many people becoming involved in the process of journalism. We often don't have any connection with, nor have we even met or confirmed an identity of the people who submit news articles to our site. The solution I'd like to come up with is find a way to allow groups of users to form and let them to the work of determining specific credibility. With EBay a buyer or seller has credibility ranked based on their history of delivering the goods. With news credibility isn't such a one way street. What may be credible to me is both irrelevant and totally non-credible to you. The thing that is true is that these opinions about what is credible and what isn't tend to be held by groups. For example one group of people might think that any article about Palestinians dieing under the Israeli occupation is ipso facto anti-semitism. An opposite group would say that all stories of Palestinian suffering and massacres are legitimate and credible. A third group might find credibility and relevance in some stories and not others.

The point of this is that news and what is a credible telling of truth is relative. For indymedia and other projects such as p2p journalism to work we'll need to find easy ways for groups to form opinion and articulate it about the work. Those opinions will then need to be made easily accessible to users outside of any of the groups.

For more info about crediblity you can read my posting on Indymedia, Credibility, & Covering Palestine from a couple of months ago.

I'll finish up with a little story about how groups can form. It's not directly related to online group forming but I find it interesting to mull over. To understand it you've got to get a little background first. In Argentina a year ago the government shut down the banks to prevent a run on deposits after years of recession. In a country where the cost of living was roughly the same as the US or Europe there was overnight a restriction to $1000 a month on withdrawals. The government then after a time converted much of people's savings deposits in to long term government bonds. This whole process tended to upset pretty much everybody who had a bank account. People weren't able to pay rent, car payments, or even buy enough food to feed their families. Many companies weren't able to pay their employees. Economic activity shrank by %70 in one month alone.

Now the point of this isn't to dwell on the economic problems of Argentina but to understand how groups formed as a result. As people got upset about this situation they would go out on the street in front of their houses and bang pots and pans. It was an "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" type statement. Because everybody else was in the same situation other people would here this and come out of their houses banging their pots as well. Pretty soon you'd get a whole neighborhood standing on the street corners banging pots and pans. One day some of the people got even more desperate and started marching downtown to the presidential palace. When the TV and Radio reported on this, other people got the same idea and joined them. It didn't take more than a day and the president partially responsible for the mess was forced to resign. His palace and the congress were besieged by the pot banging protesters.

Once they got rid of the president the banking problems didn't go away. The banks were still locking down their deposits and economy was in shambles. But now there was a critical difference. Everybody had watched their neighbors come out of their houses to join them. They knew they were in the same situation. Now when they came out to bank pots in protests they started talking. People who hardly knew their neighbors before started trying to do something about the problems because the government had failed them. Over the last year these assemblies, asambleas in Spanish, have organized protests but they've also helped workers reopen closed factories, setup community soup kitchens to feed themselves and their neighbors, work with hospitals to make sure there they are stocked with medicine and supplies, organize open non-money based barter markets, and generally tried to support their community and keep society functioning.

While the asambleas weren't organized online, they are groups which formed from a specific constituency, for specific reasons. Then the groups have evolved to continue to serve their members. The most significant thing about the asambleas is they were not planned or organized by some outside group but they really arose organically out of the pot banging protests without leaders dictating their growth. In this way it seems similar to how many online groups for around specific interests or activities.

For more info on asambleas in argentina read an interview i did about them with dru. Dru's also on the group-forming list although he hasn't contributed much yet beyond his introduction.

arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)