reads MUCH better!
thanks vince

The site is looking good but i think its is lacking a forum for people to share there views and ideas. i no that it is difficult to organise but i just thought it might be a good adition to the site. x

I had the impression that the UK sight would work like the global sight – that the front-page features on the regional sight would automatically be added as “newswire” entry’s to the UK sight then the editorial crew of the UK site can then write reports based on these regional features as the UK middle column with an added Europe/global perspective.

This would mean that the UK site features and newswire would all be “checked” and verified stuff directly linked back to the grass roots. The whole process would be open and accountable as any one can get involved at any level – but the push of what is “news” would come from the grass roots not from some cleack at the top.

The current way of working with mir is producing sights that are all pretty much a mirror of each other… you are reading the same stuff on each sight… this is envitabel when you have the ability to cross post to all the regional and uk sites… what’s needed as I see it is that the should be a system set-up which encourages people to amalgerment and illustrate in a wider context issues and stores with links back to the original sources.

That is every major story is written at 3 levels:

* First hand immediate reports

* Action summing ups

* Putting the action into the bigger perspective – connecting it to other actions and global events.

The first is the role of regional newswires, the second regional front pages and almgernated onto UK sight newswire. The final on UK front-page stores.

This is how I expected the devolution process to work as did lots of other people I talked to, was quite dismayed to see the MIR system in action which works in quite another way… the metaphor I outline above is kinda how the global site works so it is already tried and tested

(though am sure it has some faults one I can think of is that the articles on the global site are remarkable dull – no humour or personality – read like the were rightern by committee)

When was it decided not to do it this way?

The idea that the uk frontpage newswire would automate itself, displaying simply the title of middle column features displaying on regional pages (as does the global indy portal at indymedia.org), was just one of the many ideas of how a new site might work during the discussions held on email lists, on irc internet chat and at physical indymedia meetings.

There is still the possibility for a function like that, but at the moment there are only a few regional imc pages. So if the uk frontpage newswire only had headlines from the regional features of the current subsections, then an awful lot of the country would be excluded. So there needs to be an open newswire not related to regions. Similarly there needs to be features that may be unrelated to the regional subsections.

As the new site has only recently launched, sure there is quite a lot of similarity between features, but as everything develops there will be a greater diversity. The most important development though is that for example the oxford newswire should contain postings related to oxford - a local newswire.

Time is needed for everyone involved in the new site to develop working practices and info flows to best exploit the new system - to learn how we can all work together and get the best out of the new code.

Further enhancements will of course be developed as things progress.