Big changes are coming to Indymedia UK

Fork of Indymedia UK on 1st May 2011

On 1st May 2011 Indymedia UK will give birth to two new projects. The Indymedia UK website will be archived, it will stay were it is now, but you won’t be able to publish news. In its place there will be two distinct projects: Mayday will provide a non-regional site with open publishing and Be The Media will present the best of radical news across the regions, including Bristol, Northern, Nottingham and London.

BeTheMedia | Find out more about the history of Indymedia: article | video | pics | i - the film


bethemedia | mayday

 

Indymedia UK has been covering radical news for 11 years. During this time, hundreds of volunteers have put their passion and skills into the project, volunteering their media, stories, organising skills and technical know how. For many of us it has been one of the most amazing projects we ever participated in but now we are moving on.

 

The new aggregator site: Be The Media is currently bringing you the best of Indymedia coverage, but we plan to expand. The site is still under development, so check back for changes. We also plan to include radical news from all over the web, not limited to Indymedia websites. We are sad to see the end of Indymedia UK and we are excited to be working on bethemedia.org.uk while continuing our local sites; Bristol, Northern, London and Nottingham Indymedia.

 

Local Collectives

 

While Indymedia UK started out with one collective maintaining the UK site, the anti war protests 2003 kickstarted collectives all over the island. Bristol set up their own website, and Scotland, Manchester, London started regional sections on the UK site. Soon Sheffield and Leeds joined in, followed by Oxford and Cambridge

 

Indymedia was a hub for social justice news. But recently activity and participation in local collectives has decreased. Many regional sites need volunteers. At the same time there has been refreshed interest in other regions. Imc Northern England was set up in 2009, Nottingham set up a new site, and some local collectives have been growing and getting more active again.

 

As the article From Indymedia UK to the United Kollektives from 2004 says: “We realised that a uk wide project would need a decentralised structure, both technically and socially.” Today we are taking the next step of decentralisation, and are proud to present the new and shiny Indymedia Syndication Site! Everything you post to an Indymedia site, will be pulled together to get a good overview of social justice news, while at the same time strengthening the autonomy and independence of local collectives to focus on reporting that is relevant to their communities.

 

Indymedia still needs you! Be it reporting from the street, moderating the website, writing features, setting up a radio show, organising film screening, helping out with web design or other technical things… Find out how to get involved with you local collective or get in touch with the nearest group to set up a new one!

 

Why Indymedia

 

When Indymedia started, blogs did not exist and only few political groups had the skills and resources to set up their own website. But in the age of blogs and abundant services that allow anyone to publish on the internet, why does Indymedia matter? Isn’t Indymedia a dinosaur in the spheres of the internet, that can’t keep up with all the new services like facebook and twitter etc…?

 

Indymedia is a collective projects in many ways. There is the global network of Indymedia collectives. There are the editorial collectives running each site and organising events and coverage, producing films and print papers and much more. And there are the websites that are a collective effort by everyone who ever published anything, many many more people than have ever attended an Indymedia meeting.

It is true, everyone can set up their own blog nowadays. But if you have ever tried to do this, you know how hard it can be to maintain one. Or to get people to look at it. Also, most of those services are hosted by corporations. No matter how much love you put into your blog, how many followers you have on twitter and how many people said they will come to your facebook event: The corporations behind those services not only know where you are updating it from, and who is looking at your stuff, and might easily hand over that information to anyone who asks. But they can also lock you out and shut you down in an instant. And if you are unlucky, you risk loosing years of work, with no possibility to address this.

 

Not only does Indymedia still provide one service, that you don’t get anywhere else on the web: anonymous posting. It also allows you to get in touch with the editorial collective directly, and address any grievances that you may have. Decisions are made not with profit in mind, but on a consensus basis. And we have learned from all the server seizures Indymedia has suffered over the years and always keep backups.

 

Another important advantage of Indymedia is that it often works well as a contextualised archive of not only campaigns and mobilisations, but also of the social movements themselves. In an era where info flows through the internet in a very fast and fragmented manner, Indymedia manages to collect reports, photos, audio and video together in the form of thematic documents – features or pages – which are then easily retrievable for future reference.

 

On a blog, you can control the content. On Indymedia you will always see your posts in the midst of stuff that may be not so exciting for you, or you even disagree with. But also you will always come across other random stuff that you didn’t know about. Your posts will be embedded in a mesh of reports about social justice, and contextualised in a wider struggle. They won’t sit isolated and only attract people who are already interested in what you care about. Someone may go looking for information about something else entirely, and come across your post.

 

Indymedia is so much more than just yet another website on the ever expanding universe of the internet. It’s not just a website. It’s a constantly evolving project requiring continued effort on the part of a global network of enthusiastic and passionate media-producers and other supporters of radical media – including a large number of technically-gifted geeks who volunteer their time to ensure that your personal information and identity remain safe and secure from malicious meddling by corporations and law-enforcement institutions attempting to squash political dissent. And not simply for paranoia’s sake – we’ve recently witnessed this very thing happening – check-out information on the Fitwatch website shut-down or the disappearing twitter accounts.

 

Lots of campaigns and groups have their own blogs nowadays. But a lot of them don’t keep backups. So the campaign is over, the group is dissolved, the person maintaining the blog disappears, or the police have the site taken down. What happens then? A whole strand of the history of social movements disappears. The writing, reports, the information and the artwork disappears and becomes inaccessible. Anyone should aim to not only use internet for the short span of the present, but also for the future.

 

Indymedia has facilitated and championed citizen, grass-roots reporting for over 10 years and is unique in its web presence. It links together the myriad of ever-constant political analysis, campaigns and direct-action groups via news and information. In demonstrating an overview of social justice movements, it allows networks and other links to forge, both in reality and in people’s minds. The Indymedia project has always pushed a political envelope in a journalistic sense – encouraging its users to look beyond an alienated and fragmented, single-issue focused reportage of radical resistance.

 

More info on corporate social networking | Indymedia and the Enclosure of the Internet | Tech tools for activists

 

History

 

The first time UK protests were reported live on the web was the June 18 protests 1999 (archived version 1 and version 2) in London. At the time, there weren’t any blogs, twitter or facebook, and there was no Indymedia. There wasn’t any wireless internet either. So a ‘media centre’ was set up in the offices of one of the few friendly internet providers at the time, and reports were manually uploaded to the site as they were coming in from the City, across London Bridge and into the offices at the other side of the river brought by a network of carriers.

 

Half a year later, people set up the first Independent Media Centre for the Anti WTO protests in Seattle. They introduced something new on the Internet: on the website, you could go to an online form, and post your own articles. Up to that time, the internet had very much been a place were you could find information, but sharing information required some technical knowledge. Any city could set up their own indymedia site. The UK was one of the first to join the global network of Independent Media Centres. If memory serves, it was the third Imc to start, and the first not based in the US.

 

Indymedia UK made its first public appearance during the RTS’s Guerrilla Gardening protests of Mayday 2000. Visible at the centre of the demonstration as bike-powered computers were set up at Parliament Square allowing people in the action to type their reports unmediated for the first time. Then, the articles written by you were carried to a publishing hub in the basement of the Foundry pub where a Media Centre had been set up consisting of several computers, a dispatch telephone number where people could call in reports from the actions, and a single dial-up connection powered by a very long telephone cable extension plugged to a single phone socket. Believe it or not, this was ground-breaking technology at the time!

Zeige Kommentare: ausgeklappt | moderiert

Wie kann es sein, dass Indy UK in ein paar Tagen nicht mehr zum publizieren genutzt werden kann (laut dieser Ankündigung), auf der Seite selbst dazu nichts steht (http://www.indymedia.org.uk/).  Solllte des also stimmen, sollte es ziemlich viele Menschen ganz schön heftig überraschen.

Falls jemand weiß, wo ich diese Ankündigung auch mit Diskussion und Kommentaren finden kann, bitte Link posten!

Die Situation in UK ist ziemlich kompliziert. Der Fork (ein Euphemismus für „Spaltung“) wurde auf dem UK Network Meeting in Bradford am 11. Dezember 2010 beschlossen. Dass dies bitter nötig ist, sieht man zum Beispiel daran, dass obiger Featurevorschlag für indymedia.org.uk geblockt und die lokalen Features zensiert wurden.

 

Die lokalen IMCs (Nottingham, Bristol, Northern England und London) sehen die Zukunft von Indymedia UK in einer Aggregator-Seite während das Mayday-Kollektiv eine Kopie der nationalen UK-Seite weiterbetreiben will.

 

Um konkret auf die Frage nach mehr Infos zu antworten: Der Streit innerhalb von UK Indymedia wurde in letzter Zeit hauptsächlich auf der UK Process-Liste ausgetragen. Außerdem sind die Argumente interessant, die auf der New IMC-Liste ausgetauscht wurden. Auf beiden Listen finden sich auch dutzende Links zu weiteren Quellen, der Streit ist gut dokumentiert.

 

Eines sollte bei der Lektüre der oft hasserfüllten, manchmal äußerst witzigen und meistens sehr lehrreichen Mails beachtet werden: außer Seeds for Change, die das Bradford-Meeting moderiert haben, dürfte es keine neutralen AkteurInnen in diesem Konflikt geben, der gerade auf seinen Höhepunkt zusteuert.

Danke für die interessanten Links. Nach etwas Lektüre, noch kurz die Anmerkung: Der Konflikt steuert anscheinend in der Tat auf einen heftigen Höhepunkt zu. Und dieser ist natürlich der 01.05. - denn an dem Tag soll die Spaltung vorgenommen werden. Nur scheint das Kollektiv, dass die Mayday-Indy-Seite betreiben möchte - letztlich als direkte Fortsetzung von indymedia.uk, mit dann einsetzenden Änderungen (nach Ausscheiden des BeTheMedia-Kollektivs) - bisher keine laufende Seite zu haben und die alte Seite kann/soll/wird(?) nun zum 1. Mai unter Umständen gegen den erklärten Willen einiger geschlossen und zum Archiv umgewandelt.

 

Abgesehen davon, dass diese Maillisten in der Tat sehr interessant und aufschlussreich sind, ist es doch mehr als befremdlich, dass diese Debatten an einem Großteil der "UserInnen" und Aktivistinnen, die die Seite nutzen völlig vorbeigeht und das auch muss. Wie kann es denn sein, dass alleine heute auf uk.indymedia.org über 40(!) neue Beiträge veröffentlicht wurden - diese Seite also sehr intensiv genutzt wird - und es anscheinend keinen Hinweis darauf gibt, dass dort in wenigen Tagen nicht mehr veröffentlicht werden kann. So kann natürlich auch keine Diskussion stattfinden. Diese findet lediglich mit den wenigen  (und offensichtlich völlig zerstrittenen) Mitgliedern und Kennern der Mailinglisten statt....

Nein, das stimmt so nicht. Mindestens einen Mirror haben die Mayday-Leute aufgesetzt, höchstwahrscheinlich aber auch einen Produktionsserver. Aber ansonsten hast du Recht, an den UserInnen geht die Debatte wahrscheinlich ziemlich vorbei. Aber so ist das, wenn eine Gruppe verhindert, dass die Diskussion öffentlich stattfinden kann.

Some people involved with UK Indymedia have been talking about shutting down the UK IMC site for years [1], for a variety of reasons; an openly declared disillusionment with the original model of open publishing and wanting to move to pre-moderated newswires which don't allow comments on articles [2], a dislike of the political content that is carried on the UK site [3]; a desire to see the traffic, which the UK site gets, redirected to regional IMC sites [4] and perhaps other motivations. Those wanting the site shutdown have also blocked improvements being made to the UK Indymedia site [5].

However the activists who have been maintaining the UK IMC site are still committed to running a UK-wide Indymedia open newswire and are not prepared to see the UK Indymedia site shutdown. They believe that the UK Indymedia newswire provides a valuable service for articles and comments and it should be maintained. These activists are also committed to running UK Indymedia in a transparent and open manner and in the spirit of the initial Independent Media Centre. Prior to the UK Indymedia Network meeting in Bradford in December 2010 this group of IMC UK admins applied to the global New IMC process as an autonomous collective with a wish to continue running the UK Indymedia site. Clearly the UK Indymedia site isn't a New IMC, it's been going for a decade (the early IMC UK story is covered in the BeTheMedia article about the impending shutdown), the application was made to make it clear that there was a group of activists who were running and wanted to continue running, the IMC UK site, but with autonomy from the activists running the other Indymedia sites in the UK. The activists running the other Indymedia sites in the UK wanted to take the indymedia.org.uk domain away from the UK Indymedia site and point it to the BeTheMedia site (at the time it was all.indymedia.org.uk, it has subsequently been renamed).

"The report of my death was an exaggeration"
"The report of my death was an exaggeration"

 

This support for the UK Indymedia site was further expressed at the December 2010 Bradford meeting, by the people running the site, in a statement that was read out at the meeting [6]:

We are a group of long term Indymedia activists who have been helping run and maintain the UK Indymedia site for many years, we include activists from Wales, Scotland and England.

Indymedia UK covers global topics and parts of the UK not covered by other IMC sites in the UK, via the open newswire and we support this and want to continue doing this.

Disputes in the UK Network around the approach to controversial issues have crystallized into two approaches for dealing with them. We believe that the use of critical thinking, reason and evidence based research and source checking is the best approach, rather than simply censoring these topics.

Our aim is to maintain an open channel for information in a world where the ruling class controls the main flows of information via the corporate media, public relations companies and the like.

One aspect of the open publishing model, which was not foreseen, was the extent to which it could be used and abused for the purposes of disinformation. Our approach to this is not to close down open publishing but to take active steps to remove disinformation and expose the tactics and politics of those behind it.

Indymedia is not only a journal of the revolution, it is part of the terrain that the Empire's information war is being fought across.

With the convergence of the crises, which gravely threaten the existence of life on earth, climate change, Peak Oil, resource depletion, Imperial wars, Fascism, ecological and economic collapse and starvation, a radical alternative future is urgently needed, now more than ever. We want to help to enable humanity steer a course to a future of co-operation, peace, sustainability, equality, autonomy and non-hierarchical community.

We are committed to non-hierarchical, consensus based decision making. We wish to go through the New IMC process in order that we can be globally recognised as an autonomous collective, with our own independent site, UK Indymedia, http://www.indymedia.org.uk/.

The UK Indymedia sites is, and has for many years, been well used by activists both nationally and internationally, to circulate reports, news, analysis, media and information that the corporate media doesn't cover. People know where to find UK Indymedia, it's at www.indymedia.org.uk, we hold with Tim Berners-Lee, that "Cool URI's don't change" and believe the UK Indymedia site should remain on its current domains, indymedia.org.uk, www.indymedia.org.uk and uk.indymedia.org. We wish to be listed in the cities list as simply uk, rather than united kingdom. We think the UK Network should have it's own entry in the cities list. We wish to remain in and participate in the UK Network as a peer of the other collectives.

We are open and welcoming to new and existing activists who wish to join our collective on the basis on which it was founded.

Our Mission Statment and Editorial Guidelines only differ from the existing UK Indymedia ones in so far as references to "United Kollectives" have been replaced with references to "UK Indymedia".

When we fully gain our autonomy we wish to roll out long developed improvements to the UK Indymedia site.

Sheffield Indymedia also took the following proposal to the Bradford Meeting but this was ignored and not discussed (the Drupal aggregator is the BeTheMedia site):

  1. The Drupal aggregator should be called IMC UK Network, since it's the site of the UK Network, and it should be listed in the global cities list (which all IMC sites carry) as UK Network.
  2. The Drupal aggregator should use a domain name which isn't currently in use, eg:
    • network.indymedia.org.uk
    • net.indymedia.org.uk
    • nwk.indymedia.org.uk
    • uknet.indymedia.org
  3. All UK IMC collectives which are members of the IMC UK Network should be asked to have a prominent link to the UK Network site and be asked to carry a feature article about the launch of the IMC UK Network.
  4. The IMC UK Network site should carry the Sheffield and UK open newswire feeds and the Alt-Sheff's iCal Calendar events feed.
  5. Northern IMC's Proposal about the Docs pages, (to remove the two pages and their history from the server at docs.indymedia.org) is rejected. It was felt that the questions and accusations raised have never been answered, and in the interests of openness it was best to leave the story online.

Following a long discussion, at the meeting in Bradford, a proposal from Yossarian, to divide UK Indymedia, was agreed as a decision to fork the project into a.indymedia.org and b.indymedia.org. The agreement stipulated that neither group could use UK in their name and that on the 1st May 2011 the UK Indymedia site would be frozen and archived at indymedia.org.uk with a splash page pointing to a.indymedia.org and b.indymedia.org [7]. Support for the a.indymedia.org group, from the b.indymedia.org group, in getting the a.indymedia.org sub-domain for running the continuation of the UK IMC site on was promised [8]. A couple of days after the Bradford meeting Sheffield Indymedia published a feature article about it, UK Indymedia to Fork on 1st May 2011.

Subsequent to the meeting in Bradford the a.indymedia.org group, who wish to continue to run a UK-wide Indymedia open newswire, agreed to call themselves Mayday Indymedia and applied to the global New IMC list for the mayday.indymedia.org sub-domain for the site [9]. A great deal of time was spent on this application in meetings and on writing documentation. The b.indymedia.org group has set up BeTheMedia and haven't applied for an indymedia.org sub-domain.

However the global Indymedia working group, who's job it is to propose new IMC's to be approved globally, was blocked from proposing Mayday by Bart from Linksunten IMC in Germany [10]. The main justification for Bart's block is that he considers that UK Indymedia has "betrayed" [11] it's users by tracking abuse of the site by the UK state — the Police posts from Gateways 202 and 303 [12]. Bart appears to consider that genuine activists might have been using the secure Government gateways and that they deserve to have their anonymity preserved [13]. Mayday Indymedia has committed to abide by the new point 4 of the the global Indymedia draft Principles of Unity which was recently proposed by Bart on behalf Linksunten IMC :

4. All IMCs, based upon the trust of their contributors and readers, shall utilize open web based publishing, allowing individuals, groups and organizations to express their views, anonymously if desired. To ensure privacy and anonymity, the logging of information about users shall be kept to the minimum. The logging of internet protocol (IP) information about users shall be kept to the minimum necessary to maintain control over the server (i.e. in the event of an attack). In the event that logging is necessary, details of the logging shall be made publicly accessible, including duration of logging, what information was stored, and actions taken as result of the logging. Collectives are encouraged to have a public policy on IP logging.

Sheffield Indymedia considers that tracking the attacks from the UK state to be justified self-defence which falls within the provisions of the above Point of Unity, the site was under attack. The posts from the Government IP addresses have stopped since the abuse has been exposed. Sheffield Indymedia long argued that the abuse from the UK state should be exposed, but exposing it was blocked by London and Northern Indymedia.

Linksunten IMC has also tried to get the de.indymedia.org / germany.indymedia.org sub-domains taken away from the Indymedia Germany site and a splash page put up in it's place, this proposal was rejected by Germany Indymedia and Indymedia Buenos Aires [14] and blocked by Indymedia Switzerland.

Since the global Indymedia network has been unable to provide mayday.indymedia.org as a sub-domain for the UK site to move to and the indication that, despite the UK site not having a *.indymedia.org sub-domain to move to, there is going to be an attempt to shutdown the UK Indymedia open publishing and email lists on 1st May 2011, a block to the status quo being changed has been agreed by Mayday, Birmingham and Sheffield. Mayday Indymedia has sent the following statement to the global IMC process list about the situation:

We are, in effect, the stewards of the UK Indymedia open-posting newswire, we stated this at the UK Network meeting in Bradford in December 2010. This service is threatened by the way the Bradford agreement to fork the site is being interpreted by the BeTheMedia group (B) and within New IMC. We ask the global network to suspend any working-group actions that would interfere with our ability to operate the site until the issues are resolved, specifically the shutting down of lists or alterations to the DNS or any alteration the uk entry in the global cities list — we would like the current status quo to be maintained until the agreement can be completed properly.

Some points we would like to make about the current situation:

1) We are all long standing Indymedia volunteers.

2) Our primary aim is to run an Indymedia website for the UK that provides an open-posting newswire; we have demonstrated our commitment to this aim.

3) We have compromised by agreeing to move to a new Indymedia domain even though this will be disruptive for site users.

4) B group is claiming there was consensus on forking and going ahead with all changes on 1 May irrespective of our status at that time, we dispute this, the agreement was based on a.indymedia.org and b.indymedia.org — our understanding of the consensus was that the fork depended on us having an indymedia.org sub-domain to move to. If B group don't want an indymedia.org sub-domain that's fine, but our position is that we do, and at the Bradford meeting we agreed to the fork on that basis.

5) We are keen to proceed with the fork once we have achieved new IMC status.

6) We think forcing the site to move outside of Indymedia is unreasonable.

7) This can be sorted out fairly quickly — we can work together to resolve the New IMC issues — get New IMC status and an indymedia.org sub-domain and fork. However, a hold should be put on changes to the status quo to allow the New IMC process to progress.

8) We don't think mass expulsions from Indymedia is in the "spirit of Indymedia" — in addition to the UK newswire the indymedia.org.uk site hosts several regional IMC's.

9) There is nothing preventing group B from launching their new site and advertising it on UK Indymedia in the meantime.

However because Mayday, Brimingham and Sheffield haven't been through the global New IMC process it has been stated by Bart, a moderator of the global process list, that these Indymedia collectives have no say in global decisions and cannot block the shutting down of the imc-uk-* email lists. Furthermore Bart is trying to get the rules of the New IMC list changed so that New IMC's can't post directly to the list, apparently because of the Mayday and Sheffield New IMC applications. He has also started rejecting emails to the global process list which point out that there is not a consensus in the UK for a shutdown, stating that this is a internal collectives' dispute and therefore has no place on the global process list, even though the global process list is where the decision about shutting down the UK IMC lists is to be made.

Sheffield Indymedia applied to the global New IMC process list in January 2011 and a process, which can be completed in a fortnight, has made no progress whatsoever. This is why the Mayday statement refers to "mass expulsions from Indymedia" — Sheffield Indymedia has been up and running since 2003, it's been an eventful 8 years which has included raids by the Police and invasions by the EDL. Concerns have been raised on the global New IMC list over two wiki documents from Sheffield, Some Notes about IMC Northern and IMC UK Disinformation Documentation, these are the two documents refered to in the last point of the Sheffield proposal which was taken to the Bradford Indymedia meeting, the Bradford meeting agreed "We will not worry about docs.indymedia.org".

What will happen next is unclear, but if there are attempts made to shut-down the UK Indymedia newswire or the UK Indymedia lists without agreement then the status quo, which should apply when there is not consensus, would have been broken and point 6 of the global Indymedia draft Principles of Unity would have been ignored:

6. All IMC's recognize the importance of process to social change and are committed to the development of non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian relationships, from interpersonal relationships to group dynamics. Therefore, shall organize themselves collectively and be committed to the principle of consensus decision making and the development of a direct, participatory democratic process that is transparent to its membership.

As would this aspect of the global decision making guide:

Everyone's opinion counts. Everyone belongs to some kind of minority. And every minority has particular concerns or needs that want to be respected, no matter what the majority opinion. It shall be the network's aim to promote this understanding and eliminate oldfashioned concepts of minority exclusion, top-to-bottom structures of decision making and bottom-to-top allocation of responsibility.

If the UK Indymedia open publishing newswire is shutdown without agreement then Sheffield Indymedia will support whatever necessary steps that have to be taken to keep the newswire up and running — it's a vital resource for the UK activist community and we don't want it shutdown.

Footnotes

[1] For example at the 2008 UK Indymedia Network meeting in London there was "talk of shutting down", the "Italian Option" was cited as an example to follow — italy.indymedia.org shutdown for a number of years (subsequently to it being used as a "good example", by those wanting a shutdown, italy.indymedia.org has been recreated as an aggregation site using the same content management system as UK Indymedia). In June 2010 a proposal to "stop the indymedia front page for 6 months" was made. Northen Indymedia was founded on the basis of "The United Kollectives are dead, long live the autonomous IMC’s" and their outreach material contained "IMC Northern feels that the UK experiment has failed" and Jimdog from IMC Northern has supported disinformation attacking UK Indymedia.

[2] The London and Northern Indymedia sites don't allow comments to be posted to articles, only "additions" can be posted to some articles, this appears to go against the Indymedia Global FAQ, "If you disagree with the content of a particular article that someone has posted on Indymedia, you may comment on the article through the "add your own comments" link at the bottom of each post." The Northern Indymedia Editorial Guidelines, "restrict additions to providing factual information relevant to the particular item being added to. Remember that this is a news medium, not a discussion forum."

[3] The debates on the imc-uk-moderation list about the content of the open newswire often spilled over into debates about features in which the politically differences were never properly discussed. Some of the most controversial examples of this follow.

One example was the London and Glasgow: Brown's 'Bombs'? feature article, this was blocked after it had been published, essentially for straying into the relm of 'realpolitiks'. The feature was allowed back up after a section about a rally, which was addressed by the police, was added.

A feature article, Indymedia UK and the Atzmon-Greenstein affair was blocked from the UK front page, for more on this see, the wiki page about the case and the Saying NO to the hunters of Atzmon blog.

There has also been a tendancy to cave in to legal threats when there was clearly no need to, an article from Craig Murray was removed, for a while, after a threat, a spoof of The Metro was pulled after a bogus threat. There also seems to have been a desire to not confront the state, which is illustrated by the attempts to keep the Government posts from the secure intranet gateways, 202 and 303, a secret, see footnote [13].

Another example is the issue of 9/11, in 2006 a feature article about a 9/11 protest in London was blocked from being published on the the UK front page, see the list discussion but it was published on Sheffield Indymedia. In April 2007 Yossarian said, "If the core of the project has shifted towards a 9/11 conspiracy-wire... then I'll very unhappily pack up six years of steady work and find another project.". Jimdog from IMC Northern said in June 2010 "I propose there is a blanket ban on all further 9/11 truth articles".

[4] See for example Yossarian's concerns about the Google ranking of the regional sites compared to the UK site in June 2010, "the indymedia.org.uk site with its ten year history and millions of inbound links, will be seen by search engines as the "main" source for any articles, not the originating site (London, Bristol, Northern, or Notts)" and a comment from July 2010 (Mir is the content management system which runs UK Indymedia), "There are other collectives who have started their own non- mir sites and feel that Mir is a blockage to the effectiveness of these new non-mir sites and want to radically change indymedia.org.uk to stop these blockage and flow of web traffic to their sites. This is the general positions of London and Northern, but some people are really pushing this and being confrontational about it. Jim Dog, Yoss being the most active."

[5] The redesign agreed in Nottingham in 2008 (see the static mock-up produced for the meeting), has been implemented at a template level (see the working demo site), but these improvements have been blocked from being deployed, see for example Jimdogs's email from June2010, "I wish to block any further changes being made".

[6] This statement, which had previously agreed, by those in support of UK Indymedia open publishing, was read out at the Bradford 2010 UK IMC meeting.

[7] See the notes of the UK Indymedia meeting held in Bradford in December 2011.

[8] See this email, "statements were made by members of London imc along the lines of 'we had better make sure we help you get through new-imc so the fork can go ahead'. These statements were made both before and after the fork was agreed - in other words, it was agreed on this basis."

[9] See the documentation of the Mayday New IMC application.

[10] See the emails from Bart on 19th April 2011 and 21st April 2011.

[11] See for example this email from Bart.

[12] See the Sheffield Indymedia feature article, Gateway 303: Police Disinformation on UK Indymedia.

[13] Bart has defended the right to anonomity for the posts from the UK Governments secure intranet exit nodes, gateway-303.energis.gsi.gov.uk and gateway-202.energis.gsi.gov.uk, on 19th April 2011 he said, "It may be true that some or even all of the articles and comments that have been flagged by the UK MIR system have been written by the police or other government agencies in order to provoke readers of Indymedia UK, to authorise repressive measures or to serve as proofs in court trials. But how can you be sure that all of them have been written by agents provocateurs?" and on the 21st April, "not all postings coming from the 303 network necessarily originate from agents provocateurs". A Full list of Gateway 303 and 202 posts to IMC UK has been posted to Sheffield Indymedia.

[14] Subsequently to Buenos Aires opposing the shutdown of Indymedia Germany, Bou from London Indymedia attempted to shutdown Argentina Indymedia but they blocked this.

Ich habe das Bild im obigen Kommentar auf linksunten kopiert. Man weiß ja nie, ob externe Seiten nicht vielleicht IPs loggen.

das hängt also nur, weil linksunten blockt?

kann das nicht sanfter angegangen werden als mit einem block?

oder hat linksunten daran ein interesse, den konflikt in uk anzufeuern?

Der Block ist explizit temporär und wurde im Wesentlichen zur Klärung von drei Fragen eingelegt. Die Struktur des Mayday-Kollektivs ist intransparent, weil sie schlecht dokumentiert wurde. Die Überwachung der UserInnen durch Admins des Mayday-Kollektivs hat gegen das Gebot der Gewährleistung der Anonymität verstoßen, wie es in den Indymedia-Prinzipien verankert ist. Aber vor allem wurde die Überwachungsmaßnahme heimlich, ohne Kenntnis des ganzen Kollektivs, durchgeführt. Damit wurden Teile des Kollektivs von einer wichtigen Entscheidung (gegen das oben genannte Anonymitäts-Gebot zu verstoßen) ausgeschlossen, was dem Gebot der Basisdemokratie widerspricht, das ebenfalls in den Indymedia-Prinzipien verankert ist. Es geht nicht darum, den Konflikt anzufeuern, aber ohne einen Block wären diese Fragen nicht geklärt worden. Sie sind ja nicht einmal mit einem Block geklärt worden, denn es gab bisher noch immer keine Antworten des Mayday-Kollektivs auf obige Fragen.