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Indybay Feature

Open Letter to the Global Indymedia Network from San Diego

by Phelps
A recent open letter from the SF Bay Area IMC letter stated that "What has happened here with the SF Bay Area IMC seems to be quite unprecedented within the history of the IMC Network". Unfortunately it is not.
The San Diego IMC faced a similar internal conflict between two groups of collective volunteers.

Ostensibly the argument was about censorship on the newswire, revealing names of anonymous posters, and IMC principles of unity (POU). However, the dividing line could also be labelled personality conflict.

In November of 2002, the disagreement reached a peak when a group of activists presented a letter alleging that the SDIMC volunteers had violated POU's in revealing the name of an anonymous poster (http://www.sdimc.org/en/2002/11/2970.shtml and
http://www.sdimc.org/en/2002/11/3017.shtml). The meeting in question was marred by accusations,
yelling and hostility. Soon, the newswire was fucntioning like a message-board flame war. Accusations around issues of authoritarianism, free-speech, anonymity, police informants, and editorial policy took up much of the group's energy.

Changes were made to the editorial policy in an effort to increase group unity. However the changes in policy were not matched with action.

Venues for professional mediation were found and certain members attempted to organize a process to solve the differences. However, many members of the collective did not put any effort whatsoever into mediation and the process never took place.

Instead the group fractured into two factions. San Diego having a much smaller pool of volunteers than SF, ended up with 4 volunteers leaving and approximately 8 remaining.

After the split certain local activist groups start an informal boycott of the SD IMC and stopped posting their events on the newswire.

More recently the remaining IMC collective made their discussion group private to block out all but the IMC volunteers that they choose.

As with SF, the internal crisis effectively prevented the group from doing their work and discouraged new people from wanting to join the group. Like SF departing IMC volunteers removed equipment from the IMC space. Like SF there are now two groups.

You are not alone SF.
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Comments (Hide Comments)
by guess
actually, I don't think SD's 12 volunteers is a "much smaller" group than San Francisco's, although I'm not entirely sure how many sf and bayarea.imc have right now. Was it ever more than about 20 people? Do you count people who mainly do articles, photos and videos are volunteers? The group constituting sf.indymedia was mainly techs and editors, with a few specialized video/radio people who formed a branch. But once there were some qualified people doing various key tasks, I don't think a lot of new people joined.
by just wondering
are enough?

by Big bad wolf
Dividing into two groups is exactly the right thing to do. That is the natural inclination. Hopefully these two groups will become four with nuanced differences and do exactly what those of us who were in on the first Indy center did. This is about coverage, dialogue, and insight, not edifice or institution building. It's keeping the focus on the issues that is important. If personalities clash, divorce is the answer. Then find the issues that require particular skills. That's what we're doing, aren't we.
by san diego imcista (info [at] sdimc.org)
There was no "group" of people. There was one person. He doesn't deserve to have his anonymity protected at this point, because his actions have reached such a level of unscrupulousness and grotesque vindictiveness that his name should simply be stated here, if for no other reason than to warn other people that this person can be dangerous and destructive to other groups. This one person, who attempted unceasingly to drum up support from outside the group when he couldn't get his way from inside, finally decided to leave of his own accord and launch a relentless campaign of harassment and undermining, going so far as to methodically target new people who were volunteering at the IMC beseeching them to avoid us. This is why we made the mailing list closed and subscription-only. It was not to "lock out" anyone but him, or any aliases he may have adopted.

I write this as a volunteer, not as an agreed joint statement of the group, and the contact info above is for contact purposes only, and not official endorsement of my statement here.

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