Minutes/notes from STLIMC 10/14/07 General Meeting

St. Louis IMC Reboot Meeting
10-14-07, 7pm @ CAMP

Next Meeting
11/11/07 (Armistice Day!)
7pm, @ CAMP (3026 Cherokee St.)

Present: Ben, Digger, Keith (one of the smallest meetings so far)

General Discussion
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Question about what to do with features with poor-quality media, e.g. poorly audible speech. Should we feature stories poor media quality, or just put on newswire?

Animation or comics on IMC? Ask Jelly Bean and other local animators if they would be interested in committing one comic a month, or at least syndicate with local comics already publishing online or elsewhere.

Print up flyers soon with short statement about mission, maybe with udpated version of the brick logo.

Email Adam Kokesh, Ian Lavalle, Tina Richards about their features stories.

Question about press credentials? As discussed by Scottie in prior meetings, STLIMC really needs to have a simple process in place so that active IMCistas can speak on behalf other group with the group's consent. STLIMC occassionally had problems in the past with folks "appointing" themselves IMC correspondents without quite getting the group's consent.

Ben explained how the draft review space on the website for editorial features can be extended to other groups (e.g. the Greens, Universal African People's Org) to provide them a simple web resource for publishing stories online, and to further open access to the stlimc.org site. These groups could get a side-bar on the made page, similar to the newswire and the editors' blog column.

Ben also explained how the open nature of Indymedia, while novel when started in 1999, is now quite common place in things like blogs, Wikipedia, Digg, Kuro5hin. The indymedia movement as a whole is struggling to catch up with modern web technologies, especially multi-media content and large-scale collaborative tools similar to Wikipedia. St. Louis IMC should be careful not to think of itself as the "only" independent media form in town.

Everyone expressed desire to see more coverage on arts, cultural, & music events in IMC. It can distract from Indymedia's mission to be an open medium when so much of its content is overtly political.

Archiving the old stie
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THe new site at reboot.stlimc.org is *functional* (features, newswire, blogs, calendar), although there are still some bugs. An announcement has been put on the old site at stlimc.org that it will soon be archived.

Ben suggested letting the new and old sites stay online for a couple days to make sure no snafus arise, and only then change domain names (e.g. reboot.stlimc.org to stlimc.org).

Ongoing features
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Tina Richards, and Adam Kokesh/Ian Lavallee stories published.

Keith offered to add more copy to the 911 story to better explain context/background.

Digger working on a Reggie Clemons story.

Ben to do brief write-up of the Jane Guskin talk @ CAMP last weekend. Please note Cherokee Hispanic newspaper Red Lainta is also interested in our write-up of this event.