Dear Indymedia UK volunteers, and media activists,

We are writing to inform you of an important decision which was made at the UK Indymedia Network meeting held in Bradford on 11 December.

At the Bradford meeting it was agreed that the UK Indymedia project would fork into two separate projects on or before 1st May 2011.

The UK Indymedia Network will be dissolved. Many issues and disagreements over the past two years preceded this decision and it is now hoped that all involved will be able to continue to work on activist media projects without ongoing conflicts.

Our new collective will take over the running of the open newswire currently at www.indymedia.org.uk, with a new name that won't include "UK" and on a new indymedia.org sub-domain, which has yet to be agreed. The existing website in its entirety will transfer to the new url.

Local Indymedia collectives will continue to run their own existing local IMC websites, some of which will also continue to develop an aggregation site.

The indymedia.org.uk domain will be used to host an archive of the UK web site which will no longer be updated (from 1 May 2011). A banner will point people to the new address of the UK site and to the aggregator site.

Local Mir sites will still be able to be accessed through the current urls, eg [local].indymedia.org.uk or indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/[local], although these urls will be redirected to the new site and url.

Who are we?

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 regional and local topics and includes parts of the UK not covered by other IMC sites via the open newswire on the front page of the existing site. We support this and want to continue doing this.

We are strongly committed to open publishing. We are committed to dealing with abusive uses of this model in ways that don't compromise the principle of open publishing itself. We believe that the best approach to dealing with controversial issues should be based on the use of critical thinking, reason, evidence based research and source checking.

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.

We're serious about consensus. We believe that consensus can only work within a network of activists who know one another, have shared objectives, and trust one another. We aim to build a network of trust in our collective.

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

When we have a name, we can name our list and submit our new IMC application. Mayday.indymedia.org has been suggested as a way of marking the date we go live, and as a way of escaping the difficulties that are posed by the use of inaccurate geographical descriptors such as ‘United Kingdom’ or ‘Great Britain'. There is an urgent need to identify and agree a name for the site, and we welcome suggestions and ideas as to how best to proceed with this task. We will be using 'MayDay' as our working name for the moment.

We are open and welcoming to new and existing indymedia activists who are committed to working on and developing the existing site and who share our aims and approach. If you would like to be involved, please send a message introducing yourself to our organising list:

http://lists.indymedia.org/imc-mayday-collective

To post to this list, send your email to:

imc-mayday-collective@lists.indymedia.org

We extend an invitation to media activists, volunteers and anyone who wants to be involved in independent, DIY media to an open meeting at 10AM on Saturday 29th of January 2011 at the Cowley Club 12 London Road, Brighton BN1 4JA, to discuss the way forward for the Mayday Indymedia Collective.

Please reply to the list if want to attend the Meeting.

If you just want to come to the screening, just turn up.

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Saturday 10 AM MEETING AGENDA (subject to change)

1. IMC Global application
2. Editorial Policy
3. Technical Issues, Equipment Purchase, New Server
4. Fund Raising, Outreach.

1.00 PM Lunch 2.30 PM Continuation and Further Discussion. 4.30 PM Close

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6.00 PM Film Screening and discussion

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