Restructuring www.indymedia.org

There has been an ongoing process of restructuring and reorganizing www.indymedia.org. It got a big boost in December when we lost the long standing donated colocation space from speakeasy.net who had decided that after four years they weren’t able to keep overing free colocation for some of our servers. This was a good thing. Speakeasy had been good to us, but we always knew we shouldn’t be keeping our central server there, or having a central server. It drove everybody forward and a lot of sites got upgraded off of the very old active code to newer systems such as mir, sf-active, and dadaimc. mir.

As part of the process we setup an informal relationship with ibiblio and archive.org to help with hosting large audio and video files. Before that we had a long time donation of hosting from loudeye.com and subsequently related friends who had high speed internet connections.

The www.indy site grew up as an accident. We’d been moving the domain www.indymedia.org to point to the latest indymedia center to start up but after doing that a few times we decided by may 1st 2000 that it was a bad idea because it kept breaking all the links to content. We had an adhoc group arise which was initially very small, one or two people, who would take stories from local imc’s or write their own and publish them to the center column. We also had an unmaintained open publishing section which was flooded with people from around the world. Eventually we switched to having a ‘featureswire’ which focused more on taking features (center column stories) from local imc’s instead of directly showing open publishing on www.indymedia.org. This switch did a lot to cut down on the ‘indymedia is a den of anti-semites and right wing racists’ flack we’d been getting.

After that we also got a notice up on www.indy about how people participate in maintaining the www.indy site and the www-features working group grew from a few over worked people to an actual functional group of about a dozen people. The site was still in english, we didn’t have categories for features, or much of an archive. It stayed like that until we lost our server, stallman and we had to upgrade. There were a number of options, but for mostly reasons of who volunteered to do the work we ended up switching from active to mir. This switch had some big implications. Not the least of which for the first time in almost four years we changed the administrative passwords and the structure of posting new features. The templates on the new site were made to look as close to the old site as possible. The open publishing part was lost, but there has been an attempt to revive it which will hopefully moved live when it’s ready.

The biggest positive step is the new system has allowed us to go multi-lingual. We did occasionally post features in languages other than english before, but it was mostly a matter of throwing in the other language text with a link to the english version. There was no way to look at the website in Spanish or Italian. How the new language stuff will work is still evolving. For now we publish features in one language, usually english, and offer open publishing of translations contributed by the users of the site. It’s worked remarkably well. It’s combined with the translations.indymedia.org to try and make globalization indymedia style just a little less english centric.

Right now www-features, the working group which maintains www.indymedia.org content, is still working on improving the site. We have a lot of progress to do on the language pages, the site needs to be redesigned, we are experimenting with using rt.indymedia.org to track submitting and editing of features so fewer get lost in the process, and we are continuing to struggle with making the site a true reflection of indymedia’s coverage of grassroots movements for social change around the world.

Of particular debate is when issues such as the recent Israeli Government Assassinates Hamas Leader, Yassin is how we as indymedia can cover and frame debates which are also quite present in the mainstream corporate news. The ideal is to get the perspective of local activists, but that is not always possible, especially in terms of breaking news from places where local activists can only get online once a week or less. Another related issue is what is dissident in one part of the world, such as talking about victims of US bombings on US television is quite common in the corporate media in Europe and dominate in many middle eastern media outlets. There is no easy solution to this issue.

I’d personally like to see www.indymedia.org to the point where it’s a very frequently updated site, in many languages, which pulls from the breadth of the indymedia movement and promotes the best content we have produced.