The Adventures of ilsott in Grouchland
infoshop volunteer ilsott, reporting.

Indymedia-Italy, after 6 years since its birth, needs to rethink it's method of being the media, and to do that it needs silence, to be quiet, and needs to restart without the web and to widen the discussion 360 degrees.

Indymedia was born from the streets and from the piazza, places that have found space on the different parts of the site: the newswire the center column, the thematic categories, the original reports, but also on the forum and the mailing-list.

Through it all, Indymedia has always maintained its nature of a local/global network that now returns to the streets and to the piazzas to close the circle.

With the passing of the years people and tools entered into conflict, and the most revealing case was right there on the newswire, the area of open publication, direct and without filters (concepts at the bottom of open publishing), and around that you could find constant arguments about what was hidden and why, about the publications of photos or films that show the faces of people or their personal data.

The mailing-lists also entered into crisis, between scarce participation and/or difficulty in the discussions, and the search for consensus, or what is really the harmonization of different positions and undercurrents, it became increasingly difficult.

All of this was the subject of continued reflection because self-criticism forces us to put ourselves (again) in discussion, as always, but the background noise is deafening and so there needs to be silence. It is a way to be able to listen, to observe, to consider, and to concentrate all the energy on the ideas that otherwise would risk being submerged. The silence is useful for this. Of energy and ideas, let's talk about them together, starting from scratch.
Indymedia Italy closes to start over again.

The e-mail that sparked the debate:
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/ahimsa-tech/2006-November/1104-u4.html

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CURRENT SITUATION
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we find ourselves without a server and without the resources to pay for one. What are the technical and economical aspects that need to be taken into consideration?

THE CHOICE OF SERVER
-the server needs to be put in a place that gives us a garauntee or trust (we've seen previous cases of sequestering, etc)

-for legal reasons it's preferable to find it outside Italy.


one proposal is the Online Policy Group (link) that hosts indy san francisco and seems to give the neccessary garauntees. (http://www.onlinepolicy.org) would be useful to hear from other national nodes to find out who they are using for hosting and coordinate with other "evicted" IMCs to see how they're organizing.

BANDWIDTH
-The utilized bandwith(wasted) now on indy italy is 1,4 terabytes a month

-to get an idea of what we're wasting, see:
http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/italy-list/2006-November/1111-zq.html

MONEY
-we don't have a euro

-for our needs the hosting costs would be somewhere within the tens of thousands of euros a year.
[...]

there was a proposal to ask jeff to continue to provide hosting, promising to not involve him in questions of process, but to many it wouldn't be wise to even ask.

many people expressed the need for a few techies to explain the possible practical solutions in a way to free the field of fantastical proposals and think about something concrete.

VARIOUS REFLECTIONS
there have emerged various reflections on the current state of indymedia, on what it is, what it was, and what it could be in the future. The question at the bottom of this: close shop (maybe thinking of a new project) or be reborn?

a summery:
indymedia isn't seen as a point of reference, as a necessity of the movement. There isn't anymore that subjectivity that needed indymedia as a tool, nor that those who wanted it to be a tool for focalizing a community.

Today there is a near total absence of project-making and indymedia has survived independently with the energies and with the willingness of those who make it, this has brought with it a de-responsibilization in respect to the initial project.

Currently on the web there exists a huge quantity of information, are we interested? How do we interact with this information? The next role of indymedia could be that of aggregating all of that information that is confictual, independent, and critical.
Indy wasn't the media of the movement, it wasn't a blog, it wasn't a PR agency, it wasn't Web 2.0, it wasn't MySpace. It was all these things and completely the opposite. We treated it badly, not ever understanding it's real revolutionary potential to overthrow systems of media, not political ones. What could it be now?

##Open Publishing as it is doesn't work. Indymedia worked well when it there was a social and political movement that did it, that produced it...now (at least in all of Italy) there are few of us and we continually are guilty of accusing comrades that day after day work on the ground. Maybe it was the fault of Open Publishing that didn't "work" on the ground as a source of information from the grassroots (dal basso), and we perhaps "unconsiously expected and waited" from those who posted "news," but apart from those who were from our world (social centers and all those who gravitate around the "movement of movements") we didn't develop information from the grassroots.

70% of posts on indymedia are reposts from mainstream media, 20% are communiques from the movement, 10% are stupid posts from weirdo trolls. It wasn't but it became a sad bulletin board for the movement on which people left way too much space for ranting and nothing for the production of social relations (not to mention the lack of information).

The Consensus Method is shit. Or better, "the italian version" of the consensus method! Who the fuck has really applied the consensus method on the lists? Have we ever seen a real work of facilitation, etc...?

Indymedia is a fundamental tool even if it doesn't always work. This, however, isn't a limit of Indymedia, it's a limit of the movement. It's the movement that's infighting, shitty, asocial, alienating all too often. As we know it goes in alternating phases: growth and decline, it gets bigger then smaller again, winnings and losings, triumph and suffering. It's natural. We need to arrive at a realization that if we close we loose the only media that is fluid: uncontrolled space, unguided, unselected, uncommanded, and more than anything in constant evolution.

We need to get back on the road, to explain what Indymedia is, how you do it, and why we chose to do it like this. There won't be any technical innovations that will make a new Indymedia (also that, but it won't lead everything else) but it will be a new approach we'll have to talk about and remake an informational process with people, before anything we'll have to discuss the tool and how to use it and how to be independent media in 2006. Who remembers the example of the media centers? That's it, those were good examples of the socialization of indymedia: a technical tool that is also a point of convergence of content and people.

PROPOSALS
these are the proposals for the survival and rebirth (if they exist) of Indymedia Italia

-self-financing
-redimensioning indymedia

-decentering the project
-technical solutions

SELF-FINANCING
an obligatory step if we want to keep Indymedia alive.

As said above, we need to understand if other individuals or realities exist already who are available to finance the project.
If we could communicate effectively our intentions and our needs we could probably, with a few initiatives (tabling, meetings, big events) nd the money. But who would be willing now to make a donation, would they be willing again in the future? Or would Indymedia survive only for a few months or years? We need to organize a financing that can last for the long term. This would come about only if we put the tool back in the hands of people. Asking for money because WE need to make Indymedia doesn't make sense, we need to make it so that it's THEY once again that need to make Indymedia as a communication tool from the grassroots. We could easily decide to give it a year, beyond which we make a recap of the situation and we evaluate it in concrete terms that which we've been able/not able to do.

METHOD:
-prepare a splash screen that rests up a long time and in organize furiously in the meantime. -ask to Soci di Remedia (for those that don't know: Remedia is an association created in the old days to round-up donations) and ask them what they plan to do.

-bring out the old material (tee-shirts, cds, posters, and all the rest) and begin tabling to finance future initiatives.

Let's forget about managing money with the same schizophrenia with which one manages the publication of a feature. We can't do it, both from the legal point of view (the balance of an association is kept in order, you absolutely do not screw around with that) and for the responsibility that we have for the money we've received.

REDIMENSIONING

Indymedia has become a huge elefant also because in our heads is always the idea that we are larger than life. Not necessarily from the political point of view, but in the way we communicate on the site.

With self-financing in front of us, one possibility to reduce costs would be to thin out the site and consume less bandwidth.

POSSIBIILITY
-Work on the big images and the video that are published for example cancelling them from the posts that are hidden.

-Propose more restrictive limits on the dimensions of published files
-apply the policy in a more strict way to eliminate all the crap (attentive to not widen the scope too broadly and censure)
-Have someone else host the heavy files (New Global Vision, using torrents)

-Initiate a block of comments when they become useless and boring.
-Login for posting on the newswire (a non-optimal solutions other IMCs have tried)

-minimal graphics on site (a text-only version, etc)

DECENTERING

The proposals are fundamentally two:

-Dissolution of italy as a "central nerve," passageway to the local nodes (with the consequent responsibility for local nodes to find their own resources) who would see how to put up a functional system of aggregation and central coordination.
-"Federation of Thematic Affinity Groups" Each workgroup for issues (that could be general or local themes) and try to share the shareable. We could also think about a technical structure based on the R* plan of Autistici/Inventati. Indymedia could be a series of "federated blogs" with the same graphic (or not) under the brand of (((i))). The "common" site could remain a collection of RSS feeds from the blogs to the central page and as a newswire the RSS feeds of the comment posts on the thematic blogs. Maybe leaving the shared calander, that would be shared "oppositely" (that is, the RSS feeds would be shown on all the federation blogs). This would make the bandwidth distributed but the content shared.



IN FAVOR
-indymedia has become impossible to manage between 100 or more persons between admins and those list subscribers.

-could push those who use the local newswire in a passive way to take up the job of giving life to the various local nodes in crisis
-closing the dead local nodes would save resources, if nobody is working on them it's not necessary they live

-relations on the ground would grow, including more people, more trust and project making with who would re-launch the project
-who made indymedia would be further made responsible in an acritical and superficial way

-there isn't enough energy available to re-think and re-organize all of indymedia on a national level.

AGAINST
-if the same people do it, I don't see how the things could get better. Risk of localization of the current dynamics.

-in a few months, one of the (few) notes could build itself up to be the "de facto" substitute of italy.indymedia and would bear the same burden as current situation, meaning we would be back to square one.
-many of the local nodes are in crisis, a solution of this kind could make them disappear, taking away a resource to who uses the local newswire even if they don't administer them. -disappearance or localization of the thematic categories -it would signal substantially the end of the indymedia project and the beginning of new projects. -if you close the local nodes instead of helping them, it would be impossible to create relations in those zones.

-what would stop a node from constructing relations in the area, to organize initiatives in their territory, if they don't take part in a national project?
-there would be a saving on resources only if the local nodes were left to die, otherwise there would be only more sites for which there would be a bigger request of bandwidth and database dimensions.

-one of the roles of indy is to be the glue between situations and analysis from all parts of Italy, something impossible divided in local nodes.

-how would the questions of national and international presence be answered?

This is my first post. I'll be making updates on (if you're too lazy to read my category list) what I do on the Infoshop site, reposting news that I find particularly interesting, including but not limited to news from midwest america and news from Italy, which is where I'm writing from.

Plus I'm here to do some, whatttya call it? troubleshooting. Even though I have another blog (DeAshiBarai.net), I want to write here so that I can make the Infoshop blog my home-away-from-home so that I can beautify not only my own blog but the blogs of others.

I have some things in mind, like Delicious links and such, which we'll be impementing in a little bit (I think in a week or two) and so getting over here and starting to blog just makes sense. Another thing will be personalized blog styles, which I've done for myself and so now I can finally help other people do it to their blog. Anyway, there are a few kinks to work out with this blogging platform, so here I am.

onwards and upwards.

ilsott