BarnCamp: Tech activism gathering next weekend.
hacktionlab | 03.06.2011 16:23 | Education | Free Spaces | Technology
Brought to you by HacktionLab, BarnCamp 2011 will be three days of workshops on topics ranging from renewable energy to foraging for food to citizen journalism to using free software for activism, up to four nights of camping, open space sessions, evening entertainment, great food on a beautiful farm co-op high in the Wye Valley.
BarnCamp takes place on the 10, 11 and 12 June this year, so for full effect best to turn up on Thursday 9th. There is a charge of £30 in advance for the event to cover costs, but this includes camping for up to four nights and food for the entire three days of the event.
More information at
http://hacktivista.net/barncamp and to book visit https://registration.hacktivista.net
2011 will mark the forth BarnCamp convergence at Highbury Farm in the Wye Valley (Wales) where people interested and/or working in the areas of alternative media, renewable energy, on-line video distribution, free software and any other form of activism that utilises technology came together to share and discuss. Based on feedback from the previous years, we are deliberately continuing to keep this year's camp less geeky than the previous years by having a more open range of workshops and open space sessions, but we are also inserting an extra day to allow for more, longer workshops - some of which might be geeky!
More information at
http://hacktivista.net/barncamp and to book visit https://registration.hacktivista.net 2011 will mark the forth BarnCamp convergence at Highbury Farm in the Wye Valley (Wales) where people interested and/or working in the areas of alternative media, renewable energy, on-line video distribution, free software and any other form of activism that utilises technology came together to share and discuss. Based on feedback from the previous years, we are deliberately continuing to keep this year's camp less geeky than the previous years by having a more open range of workshops and open space sessions, but we are also inserting an extra day to allow for more, longer workshops - some of which might be geeky!
hacktionlab
Homepage:
http://hacktivista.net
Comments
Hide the following 23 comments
be the media camp?
03.06.2011 19:58
Barge poles spring to mind...
hmm
barncamp != btm
03.06.2011 20:25
Barncamp is supposed to be an open space and there is and has been a public invite to do workshops, of which there are many planned. There are many people coming who most likely know little or nothing of btm, mayday or the UK indymedia fork dispute.
Hope that clarifies things.
hacktionlab
At least 2 involved BTMers have proposed workshops
04.06.2011 07:27
Proposed by Syder (Bristol IMC of which Syder is a member were one of the first IMCs to propose sweeping sanctions against Mayday, despite there being no other Indymedia url to move the site to)
Distributed Social Networking With Diaspora
Proposed by yossarian (London Indymedia have been at the forefront of the witch hunt against MayDay and yossarian is the person who proposed the terms of the 'Bradford Agreement - it is also known that yoss contacted sarsnic who then added a second block')
Oh and here's yossarian claiming to behind the organisation of hacktionlabs:
"We've organized half a dozen conferences (including the Hacktionlabs, and the Hyperactive Summit) to provide a forum for politico-technical debate and beer drinking."
"Barncamp is supposed to be an open space and there is and has been a public invite to do workshops, of which there are many planned."
Indymedia too is supposed to be an open space, and yet these two hacktivists have caused major unpleasantness with attempts to kick people off lists, stop them using wikis and even IRC)and have done their best to see this site moved off an Indymedia url to be replaced by their own tightly managed aggregator.
The majority of people who have proposed workshops and Hack Sessions are IMCistas who are perfectly aware of what has been going on.
Therefore the answer provided by hacktionlab is, at best, an obfuscation of the truth. Right now hacktionlab is a part of the problem.
The issues are likely to spread to non-tech campaigns as well.
ftp
BarnCamp and IMC
04.06.2011 14:36
Between 4-7 workshops at BarnCamp have been proposed by people involved with Be The Media (the range is because I'm not aware of everybody involved in BTM). The others (there have been a total of 17 workshops proposed) have been proposed by IMCers not involved with BTM, or not involved with Indymedia. All hack sessions were suggested by IMCers not involved with BTM. One of them has then been modified by several people, including some involved with BTM.
ftp said: "The majority of people who have proposed workshops and Hack Sessions are IMCistas who are perfectly aware of what has been going on. " This is true, but I don't really see the relevance. I am involved with a local IMC, but not involved with BTM. I know several other people going to BarnCamp that fit into this category. I am aware of what has been going on in Indymedia. I do not see why this should prevent me being involved with HacktionLab & BarnCamp.Especially since the parts I am most interested in are supporting non-tech activists to use tech to their advantage (and to avoid some of the pit falls). Thus I do not see my involvement with this group as 'part of the problem.'
A non-BTM BarnCamper
@ 'A non-BTM BarnCamper'
04.06.2011 21:18
"There are many people coming who most likely know little or nothing of btm, mayday or the UK indymedia fork dispute."
Basically I am suggesting that the claim is untrue.
And hacktionlab is part of the problem in that it is organised by the same small group that also organise hyperactive(BTM)/Tachanka and aktivix and who have recently displayed their propensity to damage tech collectives in their rush to fuck over the Mayday collective and this site.
If you sleep with dogs, you get their fleas :-D
ftp
@ftp
04.06.2011 23:35
But I, as one of the main organisers of Barn Camp this year, but who is not involved in any of Hyperactive / BTM / Tachanka / Aktivix know that the claim is true. I do not dispute that many people involved in organising or who will be attending BarnCamp are involved in theses four collectives. But I also know that many people that are coming to the event are not involved in any of these (or any at all) tech groups. So I believe (having seen all of the people that have signed up to date) the statement that "There are many people coming who most likely know little or nothing of BTM, Mayday or the UK Indymedia fork dispute" is true. It is also true to say that many people involved in these collectives will be at Barn Camp.
If I am sleeping with dogs, and therefore will get their fleas, some of these might be coming to Mayday as I am also working with (but not part of) that collective at the moment :-D
A non-BTM BarnCamper
people's front of judea
05.06.2011 14:36
Battle of the techy-cliques? Erm no thanks.
bitchfest
Why has the mailing list gone
06.06.2011 10:53
Query
"a proper Indymedia site"
06.06.2011 13:04
Further Query
Where have you been hiding - Query
06.06.2011 13:34
Hyperactive Production site Indymedia NPOIU
Where have you been?
First off BTM techs have closed the lists for admining this site as an authoritarian punishment for those of us who think that a UK wide open publishing site is worth protecting from those that seek to shove this site and its time served admins into obscurity, replacing them/it with either an editorialised aggregator or a splash page that serves only to send a message to the world that IM UK has been successfully split by the forces that like to divide and rule.
Some of those same BTM techs have produced a replacement CMS - Hyperactive for IM, that until 10 months ago was storing *all* User Agent data permanently on disk into the data base. This irresponsible act has only recently been rectified, now only some UA data is stored, but there still remains a problem for this CMS - it's the fact that it can be very easily reverted to a state where UA data is once again stored permanently to disk and if some nefarious admin wanted to they could switch off the mod - remove_ip - that is supposed to stop IPs being stored permanently to disk in the data base, this CMS Hyperactive also looks like it's been designed to ease the problematic task of data mining.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that in the case of two IMCs in the UK that run Hyperactive there is no oversight of a single admin who regularly goes and tweaks the Hyperactive code without reporting what's been tweaked, in terms of activist security the lack of scrutiny and oversight over single admins must be seen as a serious risk.
We set up a Hyperactive production site Indymedia NPOIU" and reverted a single file in the rails app "path_tracker.rb" turned off mod remove_ip and presto within ten minutes of setting up our site we were logging our own IP addresses permanently into the data base. Here is entry 173 from the rail stats table in the Hyperactive database from after we reverted the file. (The IP and other info has been changed for security reasons)
"173" "62.218.127.120" "UNITED KINGDOM" "en-us" "hyp.eco.net" "hyp" "
You can see quite clearly that Hyperactive has the built in facility to store the complete set of User Agent data including visitor IPs permanently on disk.
But what do the developers of this CMS say about this, they say they
".... would like to make it clear that it does not log, monitor or
filter the IP addresses of those who visit or publish on this
website. The hyperactive code that indymedia london and others
[1,2] run on does not have these facilities built into it."
So a lie, and you have to ask why lie about it? and what does lying about it do for trust?, I mean do you trust people that you know lie? And what has the response been from those techs that support the BTM approach? Well instead of some searching questions about at the very least, the aptitude and attitude of these coders wrt activist security, the response to these very serious potential risks to activists has been what can only be described as 'groupthink', hand waving and plausible deniability.
2% from the Maydaft collective.
2%
You'd expect BeTheMedia to be more proficient
06.06.2011 14:25
very poor show
@2%
06.06.2011 16:52
adelayde
Why Here?
06.06.2011 17:05
2%
Rules of Engagement
07.06.2011 13:31
I am saddened by the negative comments towards the event, and the hijacking of what was an honest post to the UK Indymedia site to promote the event and encourage people to come. However, this is open publishing, and comment is free, and that is one of the reasons I've spent more than 10 years involved in Indymedia and so I guess I have to accept it.
Like others involved in BarnCamp, I've worked hard to put BarnCamp together and to keep it as much of an open space as possible - hence there's a public wiki for workshops and hack space suggestions and for organising in general - and we've tried as hard as possible to keep the UK IMC issues out of it; and this hasn't been easy, believe me! The reason for this is not to cover up the issues, to bury our heads in the sand, no: it's because if we didn't, this issue would creep into another good project and start to destroy it, and I'm not up for that personally.
Despite some of the Mayday collective's members' disbelief, it IS indeed being organised in the majority by people NOT Involved in BTM, Aktivix or Hyperactive, or indeed Indymedia. And, out of the 60-70 people we are expecting, we are expecting something around the number of 6-8 people who are at all active in those aforementioned projects. As you can see, a minority. It would be fair on the other 85-90% of the attendees and the organisers if we let either Mayday or BTM or indeed Indymedia or any of their disagreements take over this event.
I know the UK issue is really bad: I know there's a lot of hurt, mistrust and downright paranoia going on, and I really feel for everyone who is entrenched in the conflict. That said I beseech those in the dispute to bear in mind that some of us are just trying to get on with doing some activism, working with our social and community networks, and trying to make best use of our time to achieve this.
Anyway, as a summary, I ask everyone involved in the dispute, and especially to ftp and 2%, who have responded so negatively to our posting and generally hijacked it, to please consider whether the following Rules of Engagement ring true with what's going on here, and whether you think this is the most appropriate way to behave:
1. My friends' enemy must also my enemy.
2. My enemy's friend must also be my enemy.
3. In the event of any conflict between 1 and 2 above, the maxim "you're either with us or against us" shall prevail.
4. Anybody involved in anything that my enemies are involved in, go to, or in anyway give a thumbs up to, are also against me and may be my enemies.
5. In the event of 3 or 4, I should ignore any efforts by 1 and 2 to explain that they are not my enemy. I suspect they are part of the conspiracy through association.
P.S. What happened to Dave's two responses to the IP logging issue? He does seem to have a point that what you're saying is that if you enable software in Hyperactive/Apache that logs IPs, then it logs IPs, but out of the box Hyperactive doesn't log IPs.
adelayde
Have a lovely BarnCamp
07.06.2011 14:07
I have posted one comment to this thread and then replied to your question.
so saying that I have responded :-
"so negatively to our posting and generally hijacked it"
is a misrepresentation and again instead of dealing with the serious issues I raised in that comment you question my motivation.
I judge people by their actions and have no pre conceived ideas about whether they are 'enemies' or whatever.
Have a lovely BarnCamp
2%
selective censoring
07.06.2011 14:36
It is 100% about hyperactive. Your only link is that you are aware that some people who contributed to hyperactive will probably be at barn camp. It is the start of the going off topic. It should too be hidden.
Now of course it is completely up to indymedia.org.uk to decide what to hide and what not to hide, it is after all your baby but what is going on is not open publishing guided by stated editorial guidelines so you shouldn't claim that it is.
Dave
@2%
07.06.2011 14:57
"I have posted one comment to this thread and then replied to your question.
so saying that I have responded :-
"so negatively to our posting and generally hijacked it"
is a misrepresentation and again instead of dealing with the serious issues I raised in that comment you question my motivation. "
Well I did say "ftp and 2%". Ftp started criticising BarnCamp and making the links to Hyperactive and BTM, and you 2% then ran with it by posting all that stuff about IP logging and Hyperactive, which I believe to be off topic.
I don't think I'm misrepresenting you, I am looking at the comments posted, the threads, and considering that as you and ftp are both moderators of this web site and members of Mayday, and consider that you have both hijacked this posting as a means to bring up (any where and anyhow you possibly can) your continued dispute with BTM, Hyperactive, Aktivix and Indymedia Global and therefore responded in a manner that reflects negatively on our project and event in order to further your own arguments. That's how it looks to me 2%.
"I judge people by their actions and have no pre conceived ideas about whether they are 'enemies' or whatever."
That isn't the impression that either of you have given me, but again that's just my personal reaction to your comments. Think about it, please?
"Have a lovely BarnCamp"
Thank you I will. I hope you guys can sort yourselves out, drop the paranoia, and we can all get back to doing some good stuff sometime soon, and stop wasting our time.
P.S. I don't consider any of you to be my enemy. I just wish you'd fucking chill out about everything and stop looking at everything through such paranoid eyes.
adelayde
Calm down and have a cup of tea
07.06.2011 15:24
Well you'll have to take that up with ftp I think ftp's questions about Barn Camp are legitimate ones even though you may not agree with that judgement, I think you have also given a good if statistical reply to his concerns, which is why open publishing is cool. Why not take it up on moderation if you're still concerned?
I know that the questions I have raised are out of a genuine concern for activist security, that's my motivation, It's a pertinent issue to a group of people who get together to make the tools activists use AFAIC.
In this snip adelayde
"to bring up (any where and anyhow you possibly can) your continued dispute with BTM,"
is your preconceived stereotype of what you think the "out-group" Mayday are about.
"I just wish you'd fucking chill out about everything and stop looking at everything through such paranoid eyes. "
again a stereotype and a misrepresentation, My judgments are evidence based, I showed you evidence to support what I said. So I wish you'd take off your rose tinted glasses and look at that evidence instead of attacking the messenger. I'm perfectly "chilled" ta very much.
Hope Barn Camp is as chilled, it looks like a beautiful spot and I've canoed the Wye and it is a stunning location may the Sun shine on your Barn Camp (and not outta your arse ;-)
cya
2%
2%
@2%
07.06.2011 15:37
adelayde
Just a tecnical meeting & left wing Al-Qaeda fundamentalists?
07.06.2011 18:47
So now we have left-wing fighting left-wing, never in my life have seen such a stupid a******s.
What they want? OK this is what they want; let's go for it, they start; let's attack their sites too & fight them in the streets, or so..?(!)
What elements in that fundamentalist nitwit group are escalating this? Ahh... as we know, there must be agents of several agencies in any group. So they like to stimulate this conflict, or might be even behind the whole conflict performed by psychological sub-culture operations and setting up activist against others. Activism is not the goal anymore, but getting control over other activists, keep them busy with molesting each-other, or throw them that don't fit their psychological operations, out.
This is about a technical meeting that can be fruitful for any social activist, nothing more, nothing less, period.
Al
fuck it
07.06.2011 19:30
Wheras any other european hacker-camp or laptop-LAN-party would get fields full of happy campers.
rz
I don't believe you
07.06.2011 21:04
Where is the official statement of the group of "media-activists" you say to speak for?
"media-activists" against "the most horrific, tyrannical, Stalinist wankerism" !!!
This looks crazy to me, or someone with brain dis-function. Or you really think that indy.uk does not have an open news-wire, one only slightly censured to get off-topic in a sub-category? Comments about something else than the bar-camp are off-topic in this thread. They even aren't censored, but darkened a little and visitors themselves first have to click somewhere to get the thread cleaned-up so they can read what belongs to the bar-camp.
You're trying to falsify history about who is censoring; who is in favor of open news-wires and who want to have more control (some collectives) about what fits their fundamentalist political views (sometimes covered/formed by agencies/infiltrators) and should get into the open news-wire?
And you're trying to spam here, so hoping that this site also goes on strict moderation, so then there will be no argument anymore, to the statement that here the news-wire often is more free than elsewhere?
Al
@ adelayde
07.06.2011 22:55
My intervenbtion was a direct response to the claims by 'hacktionlab' who posted comment number 2.
As such I can't see what your problem with it could possibly be.
I don't have a lot of respect for tech groups that try to limit activist access to resources.
ftp