UK Indymedia Newswire Archive
UK Indymedia and Twitter
08-01-2012 00:16
Since Indymedia started over a decade ago, the web has undergone major changes, with many more people and campaigns using their own blogs and sites. Corporate sites such as facebook and twitter have also become players in the exchange of information. Recent convictions of Facebook users have shown that using corporate sites can mean an increased risk for users, and whilst twitter has been more assertive about challenging police requests for user information, it remains another database which the state can potentially mine for information, for example the recent court request to Twitter for Occupy users IP addresses in the US. At Indymedia UK we still strive to find ways of getting out information about actions and campaigns to as wide an audience as possible, whilst bearing in mind the need to maintain anonymity and to reduce the risks to our users. We are currently reviewing our twitter strategy with a view to expanding the user base and getting information out to as wide an audience as posssible.
Dispelling disinformation
24-12-2011 23:44
Earlier in December a series of false articles were posted on Indymedia about SHAC activists and hunt monitors in the Bristol and Bath areas, including impersonations of the Bristol Hunt Saboteurs. We would like to ensure everyone knows these to be fake.Daily Mail bribed police officers
14-12-2011 16:03
Independent media accounts of attack on Occupy Oakland in US
26-10-2011 23:04
Indymedia, Terror, Anti-Cuts demos & the CPGB-ML
26-09-2011 23:34
Merkel, Sarkozy plagiarise from indymedia
18-08-2011 18:04
Indymedia UK, Assange and Rape Apologism
15-07-2011 12:26
A short article on the censorship and rape apologism which appears to have pervaded Indymedia UK. Published on Indymedia Scotland.Dealing with trolling - may be of interest!
13-06-2011 16:47
Claire Hardaker at the University of Central Lancashire has conducted research into the practice of 'trolling' and come up with suggestions for dealing with internet 'trolls'....Noam Chomsky to speak at Rebellious Media Conference in October
12-06-2011 12:23
Noam Chomsky to speak at Rebellious Media Conference in London thisOctober. Buy tickets now:
http://rebelliousmediaconference.org I'm glad Indymedia UK is still here!
11-05-2011 20:56
I'm sure this constitutes "non-news" but it does also constitute a collective sense of relief at still having an open publishing platform to express whatever's on your mind....Review: Whatever happened to the anti-globalisation movement
09-05-2011 13:08
My account of Sunday's film screening in OARC - the Oxford Activist Resource Centre.Autonomy for the UK
09-05-2011 11:44
On 1st May 2011 the UK Indymedia Network forked into two autonomous projects, running two different websites, UK Indymedia and Be The Media. Also, a snapshot of the UK Indymedia site as it existed on the date of the the fork was created as an archive.
There was a consensus in the UK Indymedia Network that the project needed to fork, so that Indymedia members with different views could all work on developments they were happy with rather than come into constant conflict. An agreement was made in December to implement the fork on May 1st but the agreement broke down at the eleventh hour. Mayday believed that part of the agreement was that their collective was to have globally recognised Independent Media Centre status at the time of the fork. Be The Media had interpreted this differently and did not see it this way. The consensus that had been thrashed some 4 months before had now snapped and activists, being activists, took action. Be The Media started implementing the changes to the site shortly after midnight on May 1st. Mayday saw what was happening, considered the blocks to have been ignored [1] and felt that if this proceeded it would have in effect shut down the UK Newswire. After several hours of discussion and consideration they agreed they couldn't let it proceed like this and so, in the early hours of May 1st, sleepless techies migrated the entire web site to a new server, thus effecting the fork on the agreed date but not in the way originally planned.
What's happening with Indymedia UK?
09-05-2011 10:14
You find it where it always was, it looks the same and uses the name, but it no longer is Indymedia UK.On 1st May 2011, Indymedia UK had it's name and URL taken over by a number of volunteers calling themselves the ‘Mayday collective’. Although the site looks and feels like Indymedia UK, it is no longer the same project. It is now under the sole control of a faction of Indymedia UK admins. The volunteers from Indymedia London, as well as Bristol, Northern England, Nottingham, and other Indymedia UK volunteers, no longer have any access to it whatsoever, including some people who have helped maintain the UK site for the past 11 years.
Imc Notthingham article:
https://nottingham.indymedia.org/articles/1746 Quick intro: What is Indymedia?
Indymedia UK is two things: It is a website, this is probably the part that you are most familiar with. It is also an organisation; the Indymedia UK network, which organises on email list and at network meetings, and makes decisions in consensus. The Indymedia UK network includes local collectives as well as unaffiliated volunteers, who all contribute their time and effort to the project. The UK in Indymedia UK stands for United Kollectives.
What the fuck happened?
On 1st May, the Mayday collective took control of the Indymedia UK url, indymedia.org.uk, and set up an identical copy of the Indymedia UK website (i.e. all the articles, images, everything that you see when you
look at it or publish something) on a different server, against the wishes of the rest of the Indymedia UK network.
In spite of this, it looks exactly like the Indymedia UK site and uses the name of Indymedia UK. Members of the Mayday collective have said publicly that it is their project and they do not wish the rest of the Indymedia UK network to be involved with it.
The United Kollectives are no more. To use some potentially loaded language: Indymedia UK has been hijacked.
What's up with UK Indymedia?
08-05-2011 10:55
Many users of the UK Indymedia site will have seen some strange changes over the past week and may be confused over what is going on on the site. This is an attempt to explain what is going on behind the scenes as briefly as possible. Of course, it is our own version of events and others may dispute it.
First of all, it is important to realise that the Nottingham site isn’t going to change at all. We will still be here and our feeds will still appear on the Be the Media site. They disappeared from the UK site for a few days but appear to be working again today.
When it was set up, the UK Indymedia site was the site of a London-based collective which later split up into a network of local collectives. Over time, political disagreements and interpersonal conflicts led to a total breakdown of that network as a body that could make decisions together. This was formalised in the final meeting of the network in Bradford last year. Two competing ideas for the site existed that were not mutually compatible. Because all attempts to come to an agreement over the future of the site had failed, a decision was made to ‘fork’ the site into two separate projects. In the minutes these are referred to as Group A and Group B and which have since become known as Mayday and Be the Media. The minutes note that ‘Everything has to be done by the first of May’. After this date, neither group would be permitted to use the domains indymedia.org.uk or uk.indymedia.org or call themselves UK Indymedia. In other words, the decision lay the groundwork for the closure of not just the UK network but also the UK Indymedia site:
We accept to archive www.indymdia.org.uk, indymedia.org.uk and uk.indymedia.org and indymedia.co.uk as static html with a banner on
top of each page that says along the gist of “this a archived version of the site For a active version of this page go to a.indymedia.org, there is also the aggregator at b.indymedia.org.”
There will be splash page at / that links to the archive site, site a.indymedia.org and b.indymedia.org
We agree that henceforth noone can call themselve Indymedia UK, UK network and UK collective anymore.
- Minutes of Bradford UK network meeting, Dec 2010
Nottingham Indymedia was broadly aligned with the Be The Media collective, but we agreed to support the Mayday collective’s new Indymedia application.
In April, the Mayday collective disputed that the 1st May deadline still applied because the Mayday collective’s New IMC application did not look like it would pass before that date. All prospective Indymedia collectives have to go through the New IMC Process in order to be accepted into the network. The minutes refer to a.indymedia.org and b.indymedia.org. Since Mayday did not have an Indymedia subdomain, they claimed that the Bradford agreement did not apply. A feature explaining the implications of the fork was blocked by members of the Mayday collective because they did not agree that it was accurate. No resolution to this disagreement seemed possible and 1st May approached with Mayday aiming to continue maintaining the UK site and Be the Media aiming to implement the fork.
On 1st May, the Mayday collective did not implement the fork. Be the Media claimed that they had broken the Bradford agreement and implemented some of the changes specified in the Bradford agreement (archiving UK Indymedia and putting up a splash page to link to Mayday and Be the Media sites). Mayday called this ‘an attempt to shutdown UK Indymedia’ and undid the changes. They have also blocked administrative access to UK Indymedia to all members of Be the Media.
Those who want to know more about the ongoing events surrounding this disagreement should look at the UK Process list archives.
We hope that the situation can be resolved and that both projects can continue in independence from one another.
Ode to IMC UK: keep it going....
06-05-2011 13:56
Britain's Left Defeats Itself Again.
04-05-2011 14:06
On November 30th 1999 thousands of anti-capitalist/globalisation activists gathered in Seattle, USA to protest against and successfully shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). A large part of their grievance was that the WTO was effectively operating in secret with no reporting of the decisions it was making and the effect those decisions were having across the world. So by way of a solution a group of activists set up the Independent Media Centre or "Indymedia" for short. The idea was create a network of un-moderated, open publishing websites so people from all over the world could share news about the decisions being made in the name of globalisation and the actions that were being taken to protest against them. The Independent Media Centre was probably one of the most successful ideas to come out of the Seattle protests and there are now 180 Indymedia sites across the world in places as diverse as Japan, Israel, Kenya and Burma making Indymedia the blueprint for the sort of "Citizen Journalism" that's become so fashionable recently.New calendar support on Oxford Indymedia
03-05-2011 14:34
We have added a new feature to the Oxford Indymedia calendar.
You can now add individual events to you on-line calendar, or subscribe to the whole Oxford Indymedia calendar.
IMC UK Shut Down #IMCUKshutdown
01-05-2011 07:32
The Bradford consensus decision is invalid on two counts if it was the intention, deliberate or otherwise, to expel Group A from the global network.The Attempt to Shutdown UK Indymedia
29-04-2011 00:00
Some people involved with UK Indymedia have been talking about shutting down the UK IMC site for years [1], for a variety of reasons; an openly declared disillusionment with the original model of open publishing and wanting to move to pre-moderated newswires which don't allow comments on articles [2], a dislike of the political content that is carried on the UK site [3]; a desire to see the traffic, which the UK site gets, redirected to regional IMC sites [4] and perhaps other motivations. Those wanting the site shutdown have also blocked improvements being made to the UK Indymedia site [5].
However the activists who have been maintaining the UK IMC site are still committed to running a UK-wide Indymedia open newswire and are not prepared to see the UK Indymedia site shutdown. They believe that the UK Indymedia newswire provides a valuable service for articles and comments and it should be maintained. These activists are also committed to running UK Indymedia in a transparent and open manner and in the spirit of the initial Independent Media Centre. Prior to the UK Indymedia Network meeting in Bradford in December 2010 this group of IMC UK admins applied to the global New IMC process as an autonomous collective with a wish to continue running the UK Indymedia site. Clearly the UK Indymedia site isn't a New IMC, it's been going for a decade (the early IMC UK story is covered in the BeTheMedia article about the impending shutdown), the application was made to make it clear that there was a group of activists who were running and wanted to continue running, the IMC UK site, but with autonomy from the activists running the other Indymedia sites in the UK. The activists running the other Indymedia sites in the UK wanted to take the indymedia.org.uk domain away from the UK Indymedia site and point it to the BeTheMedia site (at the time it was all.indymedia.org.uk, it has subsequently been renamed).
Poster/flyer for next OARC film screening.
28-04-2011 10:52
