[imc-uk-emergency] the full lowdown on open publishing!

Thu May 15 02:39:33 BST 2003

hi all, 

marion mentioned me in her response to sb/ab's very worthwile read
(i like specially the extensive reply to chuck0 on infoshop!). i v
much agree that there's a danger in adopting a model and sticking
to it out of habit but i hope we can all see that mir site as a
learning-to-know-thing - and properly sort stuff when we have a
face2face meeting in sheffield (chris proposed one on a sat in july).
i hope that such a meetin, if done so quickly after the launch will
bring everybody being enthusiastic about what's new, and won't get
people stuck in ideas of what's there - and people will be more
clear about what they talk abbout coz they actually have used it
for a few weeks.

anyway:

ionnek wrote on 15/5/03 12:51 am 
>Andi's pragmatic point of view in favour of moderation afterwards

that's coz we had a london meetin (minutes not online yet but soon
to come). anyhow, i actually had sent a mail to process and
network on tue eve ~9pm and it still hasn't shown up. sb/ab report
the same and on irc today chris was saying a mail he sent to
uk-tech on _monday a'noon_ only made it to the lists today (with 2
1/2 days delay!). well mail slow, twiki down: looks like nothin
worx at the moment properly, ridiculous...

so i re-send that mail to emergency so that me point of pragmatics
is online before we start irc'ing tomorrow. gosh am i selfimportant
or not? how sad...

cheers a

--------------------------------------------------------------------
(sent tue 13/3 9pm)

hi all,

here my two cents on the open publishing models, and as well some
ideas on workload and statistics.

just up front my main thought: if we were enough people to sustain
it, i personally would prefer the 'german model' as it is easier
to discourage spammers, fascists and nutters and makes sure the
newswire is much more clean and consistent. politically i'd prefer
it, as i'm not a supporter of 'free speech' which i think is a
liberal ladida idea. i'd rather build a media which is openly
biased, and gives a platform for _progressive_ change, not for
fascists or racists (proponents of _reactionary_ change); and
neither giving apce to liberals (proponents of the status quo).

in the 'german open publishing model', articles only appear on the
front page when they are 'promoted' by an imc admin; still they
appear straight away in the 'open wire' one click away. but i
prefer to talk about it not as 'german model' but as a model with
'moderation beforehand'. that is because i think the fundamental
difference between the 'german model' and other open publishing
sites is moderation and the term 'german' merely distracts.

nearly all IMC's practice what i'd call 'moderation afterwards':
any upload is straight away visible in the front newswire, and
afterwards things are looked at and moderated. there's various
examples of ways to do this if you look at the dutch, paris, the
present uk, and sydney IMC's. but i'll skip the debate about the
different options of the models with 'moderation afterwards' as
that's too much for this already long mail i think. i'll restrict
myself to a pragmatic, not a political argument: workload.

thus here some statistic for number crunchers like me: below is a
list of the average daily and monthly postings to imc-uk since the
start of using active (23/07/00). as most people will know, no ip
numbers are logged on stallman (the active server on which we run)
since the seattle IMC was visited by the fbi on 21 april 2001, see
http://www.indymedia.org/fbi/ . please note that this means as
well that no information whatsoever is held on people who upload
to imc-uk, except of course what they chose to provide in their
uploads which is for everybody to see. consequently no reliable
statistics in classical web traffic terms like 'hits', 'unique
user sessions' or 'referrals' can be made. the only way to get an
idea of the traffic is to count the number of uploads in the wire:

23/07/00 |	posts | /mth |	p/day | specific events
---------+--------+------+--------+-----------------
01/08/00 |	    5 |	   5 |        |
01/09/00 |	  179 |	 174 |   5.61 |
01/10/00 |	  441 |	 262 |   8.73 |
01/11/00 |	  718 |	 277 |   8.93 |
01/12/00 |	  976 |	 258 |   8.60 |
01/01/01 |	 1168 |	 192 |   6.19 |
01/02/01 |	 1507 |	 339 |  10.93 |
01/03/01 |	 2031 |	 524 |  18.71 |
01/04/01 |	 2650 |	 619 |  19.96 |
01/05/01 |	 3481 |	 831 |  27.70 | 
01/06/01 |	 5654 |	2173 |  72.43 | mayday 01
01/07/01 |	 6577 |	 923 |  30.76 |
01/08/01 |	 8617 |	2040 |  65.80 | genoa 19-22/07
01/09/01 |	10521 |	1904 |  61.41 |
01/10/01 |	12859 |	2338 |  77.93 |
01/11/01 |	15123 |	2264 |  73.03 |
01/12/01 |	17456 |	2333 |  77.76 |
01/01/02 |	19535 |	2079 |  67.06 |
01/02/02 |	21509 |	1974 |  63.67 |
01/03/02 |	23842 |	2333 |  83.32 |
01/04/02 |	26481 |	2639 |  85.12 |
01/05/02 |	29732 |	3251 | 108.36 | mayday 02
01/06/02 |	32793 |	3061 |  98.74 |
01/07/02 |	35065 |	2272 |  75.73 |
01/08/02 |	37281 |	2216 |  71.48 |
01/09/02 |	39890 |	2609 |  84.16 |
01/10/02 |	42610 |	2720 |  90.66 |
01/11/02 |	45127 |	2517 |  81.19 |
01/12/02 |	47971 |	2844 |  94.80 |
01/01/03 |	49766 |	1795 |  57.90 |
01/02/03 |	52318 |	2552 |  82.32 |
01/03/03 |	55553 |	3235 | 111.55 |
01/04/03 |	60752 |	5199 | 167.70 | iraq war start 19/03
01/05/03 |	65877 |	5125 | 170.83 |
13/05/03 |	68049 |	2172 | 167.07 | mayday 03, LDF trolls

you will notice that the average daily uploads have _doubled_
since the start of the iraq war and mayday. they stand at
unprecedented heights - we now have consistently more than 160
posts a day (just down from 200 a day in the week after mayday).
the numbers have as well increased through trolling on ISM posts
by reactionaries like the 'little green footballers', and during
the easter school holidays by a guy called ram commenting on every
single report (even though the ram spam stopped after school had
started again ;) with both ram and the trolls it should be noted
that they have mainly posted _comments_ and not _articles_, thus
more diluting the quality of the debate underneath some reports,
than increasing the number of reports uploaded into the wire. it
is arguable that adapting the german model will keep trolls and
the likes of ram out, but it still begs the question if the front
newswire will be updated often enough...

i see the argument that _promoting_ an article is more motivating
than _hiding_ one, but i don't believe enthusiasm alone does help
here. after the enthusiasm of the weeks after the lancaster
meeting, the newswire cleaning was again down to the usual people
who happen to be online a lot - at least judging on what people
report back to the features list (which in my opinion any imcista
admin should do to keep the hiding process transparent). the great
gain on the admin side helping out has been noel from lancaster
who evidently has helped out a lot - check for his posts on the
features list. maybe others have helped as well but there's not
much evidence of that on the list...

well, maybe in a few months time we are with so many collectives 
and people donating their time that we can reliably run a 'german' 
model - but until i see that i won't support to adapt it.

i will link this and other recent mails talking about OP to the
UkMirTimeline twiki, but docs.indy is still down. anyway check
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/UkMirTimeline - on there
older mails to open posting have been collected already since a
few weeks - and that has been made public not only in vince's call
for the network irc on monday last week but as well before btw...

anyhow, cheers andi