Oceania IMCistas meet in Melbourne
19 Jul 2004 04:09 GMTIMCistas and other media activists travelled from around the Asia Pacific region to gather in Melbourne for the first ever Oceania Indymedia Conference. Highlights from the four day conference included workshops on online video compression and distribution, writing news and features, analysis and direction of the Indymedia project.
IMCistas meet in MelbourneIndymedia Centres or working groups represented in some way included: Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Aotearoa, Quezon City, Vancouver, Indybay, UK, Global features and the Sydney tech collective Catalyst.
The conference came several months after the launch of the Oceania Indymedia website which draws together news stories from around the region and has facilitated collaboration between the many regional IMCs. The conference kicked off on Thursday evening, with a discussion of, and proposals for new features for the website. Participants proposed more collaboration and (irc) meetings to consolidate the connections made. Also on the agenda were money issues and issues of personal and collective harmony, particularly in regard to the Brisbane IMC.
On Friday afternoon the Oceania meeting broke up to observe and participate in a Reclaim the Streets action (pics, more pics) organised by the Students Of Sustainability Conference. On Friday evening participants were able to attend a fundraiser event: never before seen footage from Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein's film, The Take, screened at the Victorian Trades Hall. About 100 people attended and watched the film. Afterwards, Augusto, an activist visiting from Argentina, gave a brief statement with questions from the audience.
Saturday, in a program called Transmission, was filled with three workshops on: System Interrupt! Why do we work as media makers? ; Information Society ; Avenues for syndication and distribution. About 100 people participated in some way on the day. Workshops facilitated the cross-fertilisation of ideas between activist media makers and information distributors, including radio activists from community radio 3CR;, video activists like SKA TV, and Oceania Newsreal, and print activists such as Spinach7 and Anarres Books.
Alex, visiting from Quezon city in the Philippines, said "The record of the Philippine progressive press shows that journalists can indeed be powerful catalysts for social change." Alex detailed the important role of progressive journalism in the Philippines. "If journalists stayed away from the struggle for social change, the world would be the same whether or not they existed, and it would be as if they never existed at all. They have the responsibility to take part in the fight for a better world." he told the conference. (Journalism as Agent of Change: The Philippine Experience)
This was followed by screening of the Oceania Indymedia videos and dinner. Several bands performed at a music Benefit held at a pub that evening.
Sunday provided practical workshops on software, hardware and collective process issues (As an introduction see: Structure in Collectives). Probably the most important aspect of the conference is the collaboration and trust building between individuals, infusing more energy into the Oceania project. The conference has allowed some self reflection and analysis, and hopefully empowerment of individual IMCistas.
The Oceania IMC collaboration came out of informal gatherings of individuals from regional IMCs at the Electrofringe festival conferences in 2000 and 2001 in Newcastle. Then in 2002 IMCistas met at the Borderlines conference in Adelaide and decided to create a site which syndicates features from regional IMCs, which resulted in the Oceania Indymedia website.
-- This article was workshopped on Sunday Afternoon, 18 July 2004 with additional links inserted by Takver
More info
gdm 19.Jul.2004 12:12
Hey!
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/LatestNews
Thanks for the report, Takver and everyone else who contributed. The conference was absolutely amazing - so impressive to meet so many people with so many stories and inspirations and love of the project and the importance of open-publishing from all over the region.
Today, there were further workshops on some of the different imc codebases, an introduction to web security issues as well as a key-signing session. Other activists exchanged information and ideas; links were made and distribution of media - particularly video - was discussed.
Overall, I was totally impressed with the way people - non-tech and geek - were so into learning new methods of sharing information and collaborating (like the wiki, irc, video compression and streaming etc). Everyone contributed to a collective resource on the wiki pages - available at
with love and solidarity,
--gdm
Oceania dictatorial take over
Kimci 18.Aug.2004 19:41
"collective harmony, particularly in regard to the Brisbane IMC" was discussed without any Brisbane members present. At that meeting it was decided to disband Brisbane against the expressed wishes of most of its editorial collective. This is because 3 weeks before the conference for a week 20 emails were sent to the Oceania list by BIMC members in that week. The arguement was over whether Oceania should intervene. 2 out of touch members thought it should, 2 thought that was preempting the unused existing process of appealing to a general meeting of all the BIMC groups. There was then nothing except for 2 emails confirming that mediation had been arranged. However there was an arguement between BIMC and CAT over CAT not explaining why it changed the site root password a year before in order to expel one BIMC member in favour of another. CAT members decided BIMC must still be split by this and therefore was dysfunctional. They asked Oceania to ask them to fold the site which CAT hosts. The conference took the side of the BIMC members who had complained to the Oceania list and CAT and took over the site.
This was all decided with no notice and no BIMC member participation at all. Everyone who was at that meeting is now considered biased by most of BIMC and BIMC is considering leaving Oceania IM. GDM and Takver were at the meeting.