We invite you to the 11th meeting of Indymedia linksunten from the 18th to the 20th November in Tübingen. We receive lots of contributions from the lively town on the Neckar and we are glad that we can meet at the autonomous Epplehaus. With this meeting, we'd like to get in touch with you in real life and we hope that more people participate in the moderation of linksunten in the future. We would be particularly happy if more women joined the collective. If you cannot come to Tübingen yourself you can send a mail with your criticism, approval or suggestions.
In Tübingen, we'd like to discuss how the moderation evolves and how this development relates to our moderation criteria. Especially the handling of controversial articles is a challenge and we think it is important to reflect our moderation on a regular basis. Furthermore, we want to discuss borderline cases, provocations and our moderation of difficult articles and comment battles and change the moderation criteria if necessary.
There have been many developments around Indy linksunten. Lots of great contributions increased the perception far beyond the left-wing scene. The spectacular claims of responsibility (1|2|3|4|5) for the arson attacks against infrastructure in Berlin filled the discussions abount the coming insurrection with life and provoked thousands of comments. linksunten has been used for leaking documents even before the publication of the internal archive and the strategical program of the fraternities of the “Deutsche Burschenschaft”. The reception, quotes and links in commercial mass media following those leaks consolidated linksunten as a leaking platform and sustainably damaged the reputation of the Burschen. Indymedia linksunten was a tool to mobilise support for countless protests, demonstrations and counter-activities; hundreds of Nazis have been outed. Numerous articles focused on memory work, left-wing history is being made and told on Indymedia linksunten. We are especially glad about solidarity work for our comrades in prison: you behind bars, don't give up hope!
On the technical side we focused on maintaining and updating the software. We installed security updates for our CMS Drupal, introduced secure hashing for the passwords in our database and upgraded the servers to Debian Squeeze. Recently, linksunten.indymedia.org had to fight an increasing spam problem and we installed the Botcha module in addition to the Captcha module. In the course of the hijacking of the domain indymedia.org.uk all CaCert SSL certificates for *.indymedia.org have unfortunately been revoked and so we are forced now to use a self-signed certificate. Thanks to Koumbit we now found a secure solution for the webchat. The administration of the Apache Solr search server has been made much easier by scripts and the uptime has been improved through monitoring – not only for us but also for other left-wing websites. The infrastructure of our live ticker is now more or less trouble-free; there have been four live tickers until mid-2011.
We live in militant and controversial times and this also shows in the comments on linksunten. But while left-wing, grassroots activists are debating their theories of freedom, linksunten preserved its character of a platform for all parts of the movement. From reports about uprisings world-wide to pictures of yesterday's spontaneous demonstration – all of it finds its place. It doesn't matter whether it's a small group fighting against direct discrimination or mass protests are trying to change the whole society. There are still elaborate reports next to calls for action at short notice, regular events next to one-time claims of responsibility. This lively diversity is our motivation and we keep on going with the sun on our backs.
Go on! Be part of it!
IMC linksunten
Communiqué, 5th of November 2011