Indymedia linksunten invites you to Heidelberg for the next meeting on the weekend of 23 and 24 May within the framework of the Campus Camp starting at 1 pm. We want to camp together there so bring your tents. But we can also organise sleeping places for you in shared accommodations; for that contact linksunten at indymedia dot org. After the last three big protests which linksunten supported with live news wires we want to share experiences and pass on what was learned. This invitation also specifically addresses media activists who want to co-moderate and take care of the technical infrastructure. We are especially looking forward to more women in our collective.
The NATO summit on 3 and 4 April in Strasbourg was the first large event for IMC linksunten. Together with the Infopoints, the Legal Teams and media activists from all over the world we organised a live news service (ticker) for several days in German, French, English, Dutch and some Spanish. On 1 May there was on linksunten a ticker in German and English against the Nazi marches in Hanover, Mainz, Siegen und Ulm, which we produced together with several anti-fascist groups. A good week later on 8 and 9 May followed another ticker against the racist Anti-Islam congress in German and English in cooperation with Cologne anti-fascist groups.
The website is used locally and regionally by many different people and groups for a broad spectrum of topics. As well as articles, many dates are also announced whereas only few texts are copied from commercial media. The complementing function is used very meaningfully, there is hardly any spam and we have to hide only very little and hardly censor at all. The chat is used regularly, many support inquiries can be directly answered there. For now the time spent on moderation work is manageable, but we would be happy to get more media activists wanting to engage with linksunten.
The project went online in early February after an organisation phase of a year from March to December 2008 and a subsequent building up and programming phase of the home page. Many mistakes have been remedied and new features added – all in all we are satisfied with the technical infrastructure. Our server first stood in Great Britain but after a raid on Indymedia UK, which also indirectly affected the server we used, we migrated the web site to New York City at the end of March.
Thanks to Varnish Reverse Proxy Cache the website was able to cope with the two million clicks by non-registered users on 1 May. We will not keep any more detailed statistics in future, either, because we do not store IP addresses in order to safeguard the anonymity of users of linksunten.indymedia.org. Our thanks to the techies of indymedia.org, autonome-antifa.org, aktivix.org, tachanka.org und mayfirst.org, the many translators and all authors and media activists.
Autonomy is the foundation! Solidarity is the way! Decentralisation is the goal!
IMC linksunten
Communiqué of 10.05.2009