To: imc-leeds, imc-uk-network
Greetings to you all from the imc-leeds/bradford/york collective. As you can see we have a bit of a problem about what to call ourselves these days, and that is partly what this letter is about. Let us tell you about what we’ve been doing lately.
Over the last 8 months or so we’ve revived our imc. We’ve recruited new members, run lots of educational / outreach events (including lots of skill-shares, in association with The Common Place IT Collective), we’ve improved the quality and quantity of our output and made links with activist groups near and far.
It’s become clear to us that in order to serve the informational needs and reflect the identity of our users, having an imc named after a city or cities isn’t helpful. Because we’re the most northerly of the uk imcs, we carry posts from West & North Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Humberside, and all the way up the the Scottish border including Tyne & Wear, County Durham and Cumbria. We’ve spoken to people from all of these areas and none of them have enough local interest to set up their own local imc, yet. We want to address this.
We’ve been impressed by what imc-london have done recently. We like the hyperactive CMS and we see the benefits of making a break from imc-uk. So we’ve decided that we will work towards setting up our own publishing platform, using hyperactive, and we’ll go through the ‘new imc’ process to establish our identity as a truly autonomous, regional imc. We will adapt the ‘neighborhoods’ tagging system in use by London to allow people in different localities throughout Northern England to identify content. We’re hoping that some of these localities will gain enough experience to set up their own local collectives, given time and support.
We’re all committed to the (draft) principles of unity and to working with other imcs. We want to see Indymedia working better all over the British Isles, but we think that the current indymedia.org.uk (MIR and the way it’s being run) has had its day.
We’d like to see some form of aggregation of news from all over the British Isles, with an aggregation and/or editorial system that is open, cooperative and isn’t at the whim of an inward-looking clique. We hope that most people on these lists share these views and we look forward to working with you all to make it happen. We’re letting you all know about this to ask for your feedback and ideas, but we do expect the rest of the network to respect our autonomy.
Solidarity,
IMC Northern England
(we’ll be using this name from now on)
