At a UK Indymedia Network meeting held in Bradford on 11th December 2010 it was agreed that the UK Indymedia project would fork into two separate projects on or before 1st May 2011 (fork in the sense of a Free Software fork). Many issues and disagreements over the years preceded this decision and it is now hoped that all involved will be able to continue to work on activists media projects without ongoing conflicts. One collective will take over the running of the www.indymedia.org.uk website, with a new name that won't include "UK" and on a new indymedia.org sub-domain, which has yet to be agreed. The other group will continue developing an aggregator site they are working on. The indymedia.org.uk domain will be used to host an archive of the web site which will no longer be updated.
This won't have much direct effect on Sheffield Indymedia, the web site will continue to run as part of the renamed UK Indymedia website. Sheffield Indymedia will remain on sheffield.indymedia.org.uk (and hopefully soon also be available on sheffield.indymedia.org) and it is our hope that the Sheffield Indymedia newswire will be syndicated to the aggregator site.
www.indymedia.org.uk
At the meeting in Bradford the collective which intend to continue to run the www.indymedia.org.uk website, under another name and on another domain, read out this political statement (it was written before their global application to the New IMC process was withdrawn):
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 topics and parts of the UK not covered by other IMC sites in the UK, via the open newswire and we support this and want to continue doing this.
Disputes in the UK Network around the approach to controversial issues have crystallized into two approaches for dealing with them. We believe that the use of critical thinking, reason and evidence based research and source checking is the best approach, rather than simply censoring these topics.
Our aim is to maintain an open channel for information in a world where the ruling class controls the main flows of information via the corporate media, public relations companies and the like.
One aspect of the open publishing model, which was not foreseen, was the extent to which it could be used and abused for the purposes of disinformation. Our approach to this is not to close down open publishing but to take active steps to remove disinformation and expose the tactics and politics of those behind it.
Indymedia is not only a journal of the revolution, it is part of the terrain that the Empire's information war is being fought across.
With the convergence of the crises, which gravely threaten the existence of life on earth, climate change, Peak Oil, resource depletion, Imperial wars, Fascism, ecological and economic collapse and starvation, a radical alternative future is urgently needed, now more than ever. We want to help to enable humanity steer a course to a future of co-operation, peace, sustainability, equality, autonomy and non-hierarchical community.
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 are open and welcoming to new and existing activists who wish to join our collective on the basis on which it was founded.
Our Mission Statment and Editorial Guidelines only differ from the existing UK Indymedia ones in so far as references to "United Kollectives" have been replaced with references to "UK Indymedia".
When we fully gain our autonomy we wish to roll out long developed improvements to the UK Indymedia site.
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