Letter re. merging with York - JimDog* - people

To: imc-uk-network, imc-leeds, imc-york

Dear UK Indymedia Network,

Here at IMC Leeds/Bradford we’ve been finding that some people get confused by the existence of IMC York. They get confused because for people living or active in the East and North Ridings of Yorkshire (as well as County Durham, Tyne and Wear and Northumberland) York is geographically closer to them, but they can see from http://york.indymedia.org.uk/ that the site isn’t in regular use.

We’ve asked around and it seems that there isn’t an active collective in York at the moment. We’ve been talking about how we can improve things in a way that best serves activists and communities working for radical social change in our region. These discussions are still ongoing, but we have come up with some initial proposals on which we have consensus within our collective, and haven’t heard objections to from elsewhere. We feel ready to propose these formally to the UK Network, so as to allow other people active in the UK to comment. We’re doing this because we would like to achieve consensus on the changes within the wider UK network, although we also expect people from outside of our region to respect our desire for autonomy.

PROPOSAL 1: THAT ALL SUBSCRIBERS TO MAILING LIST IMC-YORK ARE SENT A MESSAGE SUMMARISING THESE CHANGES AND INVITING THEM TO JOIN LIST IMC-LEEDS, THEN IMMEDIATELY SHUT DOWN IMC-YORK AND IMC-YORK-CONTACT

PROPOSAL 2: THAT THE PUBLISH FUNCTION ON SITE http://york.indymedia.org.uk/ IS DISABLED

PROPOSAL 3: THAT SITE http://york.indymedia.org.uk/ DISPLAYS A MESSAGE INVITING POSTERS TO USE SITE http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/leedsbradford/ INSTEAD

PROPOSAL 4: THAT SITE http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/leedsbradford/ DISPLAYS A MESSAGE WELCOMING FORMER USERS OF SITE http://york.indymedia.org.uk/

PROPOSAL 5: THAT THE IMC-LEEDS COLLECTIVE UNDERTAKES TO HOLD AT LEAST ALTERNATE MEETINGS IN AREAS OUTSIDE OF LEEDS, BUT CLOSER TO LEEDS THAN ANY OTHER IMC, TO ACTIVELY INVITE PARTICIPATION AND STIMULATE MEDIA ACTIVISM IN THE REGION

In light of of our diversification, and being the closest IMC for Newcastle, Durham, Scarborough and of course York; we will be considering changing the name of our collective in the future to better represent the area that we will provide coverage for. Possibilities that have been discussed include: IMC Yorkshire, IMC North-East and IMC Northern. This is because the region using our IMC has several large urban population centres, smaller towns and rural (former mining) communities. Naming the IMC after the city where most of our collective live (Leeds and Bradford) doesn’t reflect the breadth of posters to the site or our aspiration to include and work with them more actively.

In the event of there being substantial opposition to any of these proposals, no action will be taken until the next IMC Leeds meeting. If no changes or only minor amendments are suggested, we will wait 7 days from the date of this email then check for consensus over a 24-hour period on the imc-leeds (NOT imc-uk-network) mailing list then hopefully enact the changes.

In Solidarity,

IMC Leeds/Bradford


JimDog* 2009-05-05	Have changed signing off to Leeds/Bradford as until we propose the name change I feel we should be consistent with the current setup. Is it worth adding the proposal to work towards renaming the collective IMC-Yorkshire in this letter, even though it may be blocked by Sheffield at this stage, pending a move to a new CMS?


JimDog* 2009-05-05	Added proposal 6, does this reflect what was agreed on sunday? My hope is that it will speed the process up if we can get a feel for any objections from the beginning, though my thought is that this may be blocked by Sheffield. Despite this, I think the rest of the proposals will go through ok and the yorkshire issue can then be discussed in a larger forum, though I can’t see why we can’t go ahead with that proposal even without uk consensus. :-) Off to work tonight but will try and check in later. Should we aim to send this letter by tomorrow morning (tuesday) if we can agree on the Leeds/York issue to keep the momentum. Dos anyone know who has access to the york code (ekes?) that we can get access to modify the changes in? Also we would need to manually add our existing feature content and make leeds newswire articles more prominent somehow. For this reason I would like to stick with Mir until the Hyper site is ready and so propose shutting down York and redirecting to Leeds with a banner change to IMC-Yorkshire (keeping the address as it is) and a startpage special outlining the changes that are happening. Then stage 2 could be to get the new dns address yorkshire.indymedia.org.uk active but with a redirect to the mir site. Then, stage 3 being to finish writing Hyper site, remove the redirect and point the dns at the new live site. That way, people could get used to typing the new address and still be able to use the /en/regions address for a while before the regions address has the redirect removed and becomes a static archive. Naturally this is only my opinion of how I would like us to proceed :-)


nathan_barley 2009-05-05 2009-07-06	re. proposal 6: I think that’s pretty much what we agreed, but I thought we were leaving the name-change until later, so we can have a bit more time to think about how it affects other people re. banner change from leedsbradford to imc-yorkshire: for the same reason as above, can we just do the york merger first? I’d like to know what George, Jess and Protag think about this… are you folk here yet? :)


JimDog* 2009-05-05	me too! echo-o-o-o-o-o


JimDog* 2009-05-08	OK have finished the final draft and sent an email to active members saying I will send in 24hrs if there are no more amendments/objections.


jess 2009-05-09	Re: change to ‘imc yorkshire’: Maybe in addition to these proposals we could say something like: ‘in light of of our diversification, and being the closest IMC for Newcastle, Durham, Scarborough &c; we will be considering changing the name in the future. Possibilities include: IMC yorkshire, IMC north-east, IMC Northern …’ It opens up the issue, implicitly ilicits other suggestions, and makes it less of a ‘surprise’ when/if we suggest a specific change. Otherwise, I’m completely happy with the letter. Thanks for the work, JimDog. x


JimDog* 2009-05-09	Hehe can’t take credit as Marker wrote the bulk of the letter, I’ve just been systematically wrecking his work :-) Ok I’ve added in Jess’s suggestion with a brief bit of ranting explining why this is necessary. I personally think this is better like this rather than a firm proposal as it’s likely to get less objection at this stage. Does anyone else want to amend this to make it sound a bit better before it gets sent later? Will hold off for a bit in the hope that comments are left here that people are happy with it, or not as the case may be.


protag 2009-05-09	I’m happy with the letter and impressed by the work you’ve all been doing. I’m going to be away from my computer now until Tuesday so ominous silence is not significant. Cheers Ptg


markr 2009-05-09	I’ve just tweaked the geographic/population distribution bit. I’m happy for it to be sent as it is.


JimDog* 2009-05-09	cool i’m happy with this :-)


JimDog* 2009-05-09	Ok its sent. Fingers crossed! I’m going to try and remove the ability to edit this file further now so we have a permanent record of exactly what was sent should we ever need it. :-) I suggest we try and get this site ready to open up to imc-leeds once the time has elapsed too, anyone else got any thoughts on this? Shall we move that discussion to the main message board rather than here?