Indymedia Birmingham, UK | Indymedia needs YOU

Indymedia needs YOU

The global indymedia network is the work of hundreds of volunteers on many different levels, from the people who read the articles are speak to other people about what they read, the reporters who post their photos, video or first hand accounts, to the admins who check posts for breech of open posting guidelines, and the techies maintain the servers and develop the software....

The global indymedia network in general needs more techies and the UK collective in particular is badly in need of more coders so that it can contribute to the global development of the program used by the IMC UK site.

There are only a handful of programs being used by IMCs around the world. They include the now unsupported 'active', the newer 'sf-active', 'dadaIMC', 'MIR', 'Drupal', and the new kid on the block 'Oscailt'.

IMC UK originally used 'active' but migrated to MIR in 2002 in order to facilitate regionalisation of the project. MIR is an Open-Source content management system based on java / tomcat Servlet-engine and postgresql database. Other Indymedia websites that currently run using Mir include: Germany, Netherlands, Euskal Herria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Switzerland, Poland, Ambaziona (Africa), Brazil, Rogue, Portland, Beirut (Lebanon), San Diego, Seattle, Milwaukee, India, Romania, Armenia, Burma, United States, Galiza, Chile, Ottawa, FTAA, Biotech, and the global site.

It is really important that the UK network has people who can directly contribute to the developer pool of MIR coders since many of the proposals made for improving the site simple can not move forward rapidly when it is left to the limited number of coders who are working with so many other sites.

A similar situation exists with some of the global infrastructure sites such as radio.indymedia.org and video.indymedia.org. Both have very few developers active on the projects which means that adoption of new technologies can be slow and integration of the services into local IMCs is a long way from reaching it's potential. The video site uses PHP, MySQL, Pear and Smarty and could really do with more developers. The radio site runs an ICECAST streaming server and the sf-active codebase but ideas for new approaches would probably be most welcomed.

This is basically a call for increased active involvement in the technical aspects of indymedia at all levels. Even if you can't code Java applets for the MIR codebase you might be able to do CSS style sheets and templates for regional collectives and so free up some of the existing techies so that they have more time to work on learning postgres or whatever and joining the MIR coders.

If you know about media RSS, PHP, Java, MySQL or postgres and have some time to spare for indymedia. Please get in touch with the tech lists and your local IMC collective (see contacts).