At Indymedia linksunten tickers are regularly being made for larger events since the start beginning of February 2009. Every few minutes, as soon as there is new information, a new dispatch appears on the website. First of all the information is meant to support activists on the ground, but tickers also give people in other parts of the world the possibility to follow actions and they provide a detailed archive of the resistance.
Until now there have been tickers against the NATO-summit on April 3rd and 4th in Strasbourg, against the Nazi rallies on May 1st in Hanover, Mainz, Siegen and Ulm and against the Anti-Islam-Conference on May 8th and 9th in Cologne. We gained lots of experience and improved the infrastructure constantly and with this article we want to give an overview over technical aspects and the use of the ticker.
State of affairs
Since several years the possibility to access tickers with mobile phones exists, but until now it hasn't been used widely. Partly it's technical inhibitions – who has actually ever surfed with a mobile phone? Another reason are widely spread prejudices, especially regarding costs. For repressive authorities it's rather more difficult to monitor who's accessing the ticker than to keep only phone calls and SMS under surveillance – for this they can use mobile IMSI-catchers that read-out the numbers of SIM-card and phone.
Costs of use
Contrary to popular belief, it's much cheaper to surf the internet with a mobile phone rather than make calls or write SMS – as long as one uses a rate that charges according to transferred data and not according to time. A general rule of hingegangen.mobi says: „Calling the infoline once for a minute is as expensive as checking the ticker ten times.“ Besides that, info phones are frequently busy, can be easily blocked and their operation is much more time-comsuming than spreading information over the ticker.
Technical aspects of use
It's possible to surf the internet with almost all mobile phones, including really old ones you wouldn't expect it. Sometimes it simply works by trying it out, otherwise there are manuals about how to use the internet to be found in the internet for pretty much every model and mobile phone service provider. Best thing is to sit down well before the event and try it out. And use the bookmarking function, it can be really frustrating to type the URL repeatedly.
Technics for everybody
Different phones can connect to the Internet in different ways. Often the term WAP is being used, but it's a rather diffuse term. Besides the ordinary HTML-version of the ticker for ordinary surfing we provide different mobile versions. Really old phones only can read WML, slightly newer ones XHTML-MP and fairly new ones RSS. For each event we provide unique URLs, but there are also standard-URLs for the latest ticker news:
Long live international solidarity
We try to translate the information on Indymedia linksunten into several languages, if possible. For international major events like the NATO summit in Strasbourg the ticker was translated to German, French, English, Dutch and partly to Spanish. But also for events in Germany we try to provide at least an English translation. For this we're always glad to receive support, feel free to get in touch in advance of announced tickers to help translating.
We'd like to give non-German speaking activists and people abroad the possibility to observe live what's happening and we want to document the development of the protests in detail. The ticker archive and links to versions of the ticker can be found in the „content“ menu on the left side of each page. Mobile phones should recognize the language automatically, but by including the language code in the URL directly after the domain you can choose a language manually. The english version of the ticker for example would be: http://linksunten.indymedia.org/en/ticker
Do it yourself
The tickers to different events beyond our region show clealy that „from the movements for the movement“ isn't just an empty phrase for us. All the tickers until now have been made in cooperation with activists on the ground, sometimes the linksunten ifnrastructure has been used almost entirely autonomously. We responded to wishes and develop the site constantly to meet existing needs. Also in future linksunten won't get to a halt if the site continues to be used as intensively as now. If you'd like to make a live-ticker for a larger event in your town, get in touch!