hydrarchist writes

Software (,) Politics and Indymedia
Benjamin Mako Hill mako@debian.org

Introduction and History
In addition to many other milestones in the activist and
anti-globalization communities, the 1999 meeting of the
WTO in Seattle marked the birth of the
Independent Media Center, also known as Indymedia. Within a year,
Indymedia had exploded in size. With slogans like "Be your
own media" and a grass-roots publishing structure to back
them up, Indymedia's attempt to provide a non-corporate and more
democratic alternative to mainstream media struck a chord that
resonated with activist communities across the globe.

For the first year, Indymedia's face on the web was
Active, a web application written by a group
of Australian hackers for the purpose of facilitating independent
media. However, Active was unable to keep up
with the IMC's tremendous growth in size and political diversity.
There were more people interested in reading Indymedia and
interacting on the IMC websites than there was bandwidth and
computer power to support them. Users and media activists demanded
performance, internationalization, flexibility, and features;
Active and its developers were unable to
cater to all of these needs.

The more technically inclined in Indymedia banded together
under the auspices of the Indymedia Tech Collective
(IMC-Tech) and tried to relieve the pressure
on Active's developers. A year after
Seattle, IMC-Tech had installed Active so
many times that they had automated the process so it was as simple
as: "'I'd like an Indymedia site.'

Click Click. 'Here's your
password.'" As people put
Active in a growing number of places and
used it for a growing number of purposes, its shortcomings became
more difficult to ignore. Technical "under-the-hood"
complaints were paired with calls for new features, increased
flexibility and maintainability by less technical
volunteers.

Within six months of Active's

christening in Seattle, IMC-Tech was excitedly discussing
specifications for Active's replacement,
dubbed simply Active 2. In these
discussions, the political, social and technological collided on
the IMC mailing lists. Suggestions for user-moderation, in the
manner made famous by websites like Slashdot
or Kuro5hin were viewed by some to be
analogous to the advocacy of a minor form of fascism--moderation makes some
voices more visible than others and, according to some, institutes
an indefensible hierarchy. It was clear that
Active needed to be replaced but that was more
difficult said than done.

The geeks of IMC-Tech were keenly aware that each
technological design or set of features creates a particular
publishing structure, and, as a result, empowers users to "be
their own media" in an equally particular way. In an
organization constituted by extremely political individuals who
accurately examined the political implications of every technical
decision, Active's minimalist feature set
acted as form of common ground--a least common denominator.
Active 2 was never written.

There's a story, perhaps apocryphal, that describes a point in
Indymedia history when there simultaneously existed three different
and disconnected attempts to rewrite Active

within the IMC Tech community--each attempt kept hidden for fear
of political clashes over functionality or design decisions. True
or not, it seems possible.

It seems possible that the politicization of each technical
decision and long conversations with what appeared to be impossible
resolutions made writing a new piece of software as a group seem
impossible. It seems possible that Indymedia simply encompasses
multifarious political and social ideologies that can only be
represented in multiple pieces of software.

Fast Forward a year and a half. While Active
2 is still little more than a discussion topic on
mailing lists, there are at least eight pieces of software in use
by Independent Media Centers across the globe and countless
slightly modified derivatives. At least five have been written from
scratch for use by IMC tech-activists. Others have been adapted
from existing pieces of software (like the weblog/content
management systems Slash or Drupal) to fit an IMC's needs.
Indymedia's political and social differences and their ideas of
what the most fair publishing structure does or does not contain
have spawned technical divisions in the software it uses.

Learning to Look at IMC Software

Other authors have established the existence and importance of
the connection between the technological (Lessig calls it
code) and the social structures that are
created by and reflected in technological choices. In a case like
Indymedia, this connection is explicit and central.

However, every effective developer knows that if every line of
code and every technical detail must first stand up to political
debate, every piece of software will have a history like
Active 2's--no history beyond the
conceptual. Every effective developer knows that bugs should be
fixed, while features or design decisions should be discussed or
debated. This division is a muddled one.

Indymedia provides the perfect venue for an analysis of this
muddy distinction. Because most IMC-Techs see their work on
Indymedia software as a part of their political and social
activism, they make the political or social motivations behind
technical decisions unusually explicit.

But IMC software is also a useful example in that it lets an
analyst easily isolate the technical choices. Every piece of IMC
software serves the same fundamental function--empower Internet
users to be their own media--and does so by following extremely
similar models. It is difficult for even an educated visitor to
determine which software an IMC is running at first glance.

But the software is not all the same.
Differences can seem subtle but they are intentional, considered,
and extremely important. For some, these "subtle"

differences represent the difference between media that is
democratic and media that is tyrannical or fascist.

For these reasons, an analysis of the points of convergence
and differentiation between different Indymedia software can give
us invaluable insight into the nature of the fuzzy area at the
intersection of the political, societal and technical.

Active's Template and Points of
Convergence

As the first piece of Indymedia software and the application
behind a majority of Media Center websites,
Active provides the template on which all
other Indymedia software has been based.
Active development has included little more
than minor and necessary bug fixes since it was rolled out in
1999. As it stands, it provides the basic functionality common to
all of the major pieces of Indymedia software.

Active's interface design and layout
may be its longest lasting legacy. Its basic design is similar to
the design used effectively by many mainstream media and
information outlets.

The Indymedia front-page consists of a tool bar on the left
with links to documentation, information about Indymedia and the
software, other Indymedia sites, a simple search, and links to
other IMCs. It usually includes a box through which viewers can
subscribe to an email newsletter.

The middle column on the front-page is the most visible and
prominent piece on the website. Consequently, the space is
reserved for "features." For IMCs, features usually
include headlines, images, thematic text, and links to a selection
of representative or exceptional articles of the theme.

In Active, features are produced as
HTML fragments. As a result, the ability to create and manipulate
features requires technical sophistication, familiarity with HTML,
and access to the web server on which
Active is running. It is almost always
necessary to restrict the ability to manipulate features to a
small trusted group--often an editorial collective. As a result of
this structure, features tend to be thematic and include an
aggregation of other content submitted through the more open parts
of the publishing structure.

The left column contains an overview of the
newswire, the feature for which Indymedia is
famous. Visitors to the site are allowed to follow a form-based
submission process that allows them to upload articles, images,
audio, or multimedia, into the newswire. On most Indymedia sites,
articles are published in the newswire automatically and
immediately and are displayed in reverse chronological order. The
newswire lists the article subject (headline) and the date and
time on which it was first posted.

Active's users have the option of
filtering the newswire by media-type (i.e. only images or only
text articles). Whey they click on an item in the newswire, the
article is presented along with comments posted by readers. At the
bottom of each article page is a form where readers can join reply
to the article or comments themselves. This form, like the media
submission form, allows users to specify a name or nickname but
provides no system of authentication or name registration.

Active's Spin-Offs and Points of
Divergence

Even the brief description of Active

above alludes to several of the major points of contention and
areas of divergence among those who have orchestrated
Active's spin-offs.

The way featured articles are implemented acts as an example
that exemplifies a larger debate over issues of selection and
information hierarchy. On Active and most
of its derivatives, features are managed by a small group of
authenticated users. Issues of control and management are
compounded by the fact that the creation of features is often
prohibitively complicated technically. Some feel that by limiting
the ability to write features to a particular group, IMCs are
privileging one set of viewpoints over others and are creating
hierarchies, a form of censorship, and power structures that are
no better than those in the corporate media.

Authentication is another contested topic. Several of
Active's re-writers have seen the lack of
user authentication for comments and article publishing as a
serious barrier to the development of trust within Indymedia.
Others see the anonymity provided by this system as essential to
Indymedia's goals.

Other major issues include internationalization and
localization--features that Active left
largely neglected in its first incarnation. As alluded to in the
discussion of features, the manner and degree to which developers
should simplify Active's interface for less
technically inclined people has provided yet another nexus for
diverging opinions as well. Still more differences are evident
around attitudes toward the importance of maintenance and
updatability as fixing bugs and tracking changes in deployed
copies of Active proved extremely
problematic.

Each Active rewrite has evaluated and
approach each of these problems differently.

Case Studies

While eight pieces of Indymedia software may seem unnecessary,
each piece of software exists because it is slightly different, and
in the minds of its author, at least slightly
better than the available alternatives. Each
piece of software reflects the technical, political, and social
attitudes and opinions of its authors.

An analysis of these applications as a group is interesting
and useful in the context of a larger project to chart the
intersection of software and its social and political implications.
An in-depth discussion of the individual applications sheds light
on the specific political and social points of contention, and the
ways in which they have been handled.

SF-Active

SF-Active began out of a technical
need to migrate Active from a dependence on
one piece of database software (PostgreSQL) to another (MySQL) in
the summer of 2000. By changing Active to
support MySQL, a team of San Fransisco hackers forked [1] Active development and
SF-Active was born. The SF hackers have
taken Active development in new directions
by setting new goals and rewriting almost every piece of the
code.

The SF-Active hackers want to turn
active from a web application used for IMC websites into a set of
classes (one can think of classes as little semi-isolated bundles
of features or functionality) designed to useful for a more
flexible and dynamic type of Indymedia. Their software handles
issues of updatability by sharing programming code among a number
of sites running on one machine.

One of SF-Active's goals was to balance
the need for moderated news queues without prior restraint
censorship. Toward this end, SF-Active

sites each run multiple news wires. All uploaded news is put
directly into an "Other/Breaking News" wire and then
is "promoted" to "Local" and
"Global" news wires by the sites editors.

Control of features is handled by the strong administration
system which makes administration accessible to less-technical
inclined users--but only those that have access to the
administrative section. As a result of this restriction,
SF-Active attempted to approach these
articles, like Active, as
thematic features that are meant to summarize
and reflect on a number of the articles in the newswire.

The SF-Active team has not chosen to
implement functionality similar to user authentication. Entering a
name is free form and unrestricted as in
Active, but they are considering password
authentication in a scheme that they conceive of as a form of
"nick registration." Rather than a form of
authentication or trust building, nick registration's goal is
simply to avoid confusion and allow people to develop reputations.
If someone registers "Joe", only they can post as
"Joe."

Gekked, a long time SF-Active coder,
tried to sum up the SF-Active philosophy
saying that, "SF-Active coders do not
have any psychotic notions about what IMC is and isn't. Our
experience working with collectives from Chile to Palestine to
Iowa tells us that any attempt by engineers to prescribe process
will be counterproductive and mostly just
annoying."

SF-Active has documentation in
English, Spanish and Italian and "almost-finished"

translations from English in Arabic, Turkish, Dutch, and French.
It is being used in a quickly growing number of Indymedia sites
including http://sf.indymedia.org.

Mir

Mir is a java-based system based on a
content management system written by German hackers for the
blog-like nadir.org and then adapted to the German Indymedia site.
Mir hacker Zapata admits that originally, it was "a system
fit for the German IMC way of doing things." The
"German IMC way" reflects a legal environment which
prohibits racist, hateful, and revisionist speech in way that
necessitates prior restraint story moderation in a way that many
IMCs are uncomfortable with.

Over time, Mir has grown and changed. Zapata describes his
own programming philosophy in stating that, "basically I do
not, as a developer, want to dictate how a group should run their
site." While he realizes that this is ultimately
unachievable, this attitude has directed
Mir's development toward this type of
flexibility by emphasizing internationalization, static content,
and a dynamic system of customizable categorization.

Mir supports readers/posters and
authenticated administrators who can write features, and hide,
edit and reclassify postings. While there is currently no method
for rating or user moderation, there are plans to allow for
different levels of administrators (i.e.. one might writes
features, another might edit postings) but this feature remains
unimplemented.

Mir's support for internationalization
is good and getting better while projects to add support for easy
translations of articles in the newswire are advancing quickly. At
the moment, this is handled by a categorization system that is
elegant and flexible in its simplicity. Every article posted to an
IMC running Mir "belongs" to
zero or more categories. Users can sort and group by these
categories and Mir administrators can set
up alternative start pages or news wires for each thematic
categories. Since Mir also categorizes
articles by language and "type" (a type or
administrative category that might include "newswire"

"feature" or "trash")
Mir users can easily separate all content
in by language, issue, or type.

For example, featured articles in Mir
are standard newswire articles with a "feature" type.
While from a programmer perspective they are identical to newswire
articles, they can only be promoted or classed as features by
administrators. In practice, features tend to include a mix of
articles promoted from the newswire and the sort of editorial
"thematic features" used in
Active and it's derivatives.

Mir has been translated from German
into English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Euskera, French,
Swedish, Turkish, Chinese, and there is work on Arabic.
Mir is in action at http://mir.indymedia.de
and a growing number of Indymedia sites.

FreeForm

FreeForm is a project started and
largely maintained by an Ithaca, New York hacker named Arc. Now
just over a year old, the software is nearing a point of
widespread usability. It is written in Python and will soon be
released as a GNU project.[2] Its developers are more explicitly interested in
issues of software freedom and politics than the other Indymedia
projects.

FreeForm is particularly different in
that featured articles all begin on the
newswire and are promoted to feature status. This can be done by
editors, the public through a system of rating and moderation, or
a combination. FreeForm's authors feel that
the more traditional editorial method is unfair and hierarchical,
and see an open system of moderation and rating as a way to
resolve this problem. Arc feels that "politically, a
hierarchal system is never good" and makes this a
fundamental axiom upon which his technical decisions are
made.

Outside of DadaIMC, a non-free application from Baltimore,
FreeForm is the only piece of software to
incorporate user authentication. As Arc puts it, "its all
great being all informal and such, but hard to build up a real
system of trust when everyone is anonymous." Arc, whose
other goals include the creation of a global Indymedia
cryptographic "web of trust," likes the idea of users
being identified as specific individuals
without this information necessarily being connected to a real
names, addresses, IPs, and other traceable information.
FreeForm's goal is to facilitate a greater
degree of trust, accountability, and reputation building within an
Indymedia community.

Finally, FreeForm is different in that
it is the only IMC application that processes all media
content--others simply serve the content as is.
FreeForm will take an uploaded photo, open
it it, look at the resolution, and let the user crop it before
saving it again at several different sizes. For sound,
FreeForm integrates the free streaming
program Icecast2 to process media that can be immediately entered
into a 24/7 IMC Internet radio stream. However, because
FreeForm refuses to touch media and
multimedia formats that are controlled by patents, the software
does not support GIF, MP3, AVI, MPEG, QuickTime or Real Media of
any type. Because it promotes freedom from patented and
proprietary formats, Arc views this as a feature, not a bug. In
terms of multimedia, FreeForm supports Ogg
Theora, a free multimedia compression standard that will hopefully
be fully released by this summer. For media activists dependent
and accustomed to other proprietary standards, this can be small
consolation.

FreeForm has been translated from
English to Spanish and there is ongoing work on a Farsi
translation. Example sites can be seen in IMCs in Rochester and
Ithaca. Like Mir, several non-media and
non-political organizations have expressed interest in some of
FreeForm's functionality.

Other Indymedia Software

By no means are the four pieces of Indymedia software
described in this article the only pieces of software in use by
IMCs. Most notably neglected is a version of the software written
by tech activists in Philadelphia in 2000 that is built on top of
Slash, the software made famous by Slashdot and includes a good
deal of advanced user-moderation and administration features not
found in other Indymedia software. While certainly interesting,
IMC-Slash never caught on and recent talk
suggests that Philadelphia will be moving away from their own
software to one of the options mentioned above.

Also important to note is DadaIMC.
Dada is famous for being easy to install and configure. It is
infamous for being the only major non-free IMC software. It was
written in Baltimore and along with
FreeForm is the only piece of software that
supports user authentication or nick registration.

The Indymedia in Quebec, which has a reputation for doing
things their own way, has written two versions of Indymedia
software. Their current web application if based off the web-log
style content management system Drupal. Their site has a look,
feel, and set of features that are massively different than other
Indymedia solutions. A fair analysis of the political and social
implications of their software in the context of these other
pieces could easily take place in its own article.

Conclusions

With a critical eye toward the technology, we can analyze the
publishing structures created by these differing applications and
their political implications. When we look at these systems
together, we begin to get an idea of the difficult balancing acts
that the programmer-activists in Indymedia struggle with.

Emphasizing a strong and accessible administration structure
creates what some view as an indefensible hierarchy. Deemphasizing
the role of editors eliminates thematic features which readers find
useful. Cutting users' connection to non-free media formats is at
the expense of convenience and access by the majority of
Indymedia's current video and audio producers.

These decisions are rarely a matter of right and wrong. They
are technical decision that create a particular publishing
environment and reflect a particular political ideology. They each
aim to create the "best" possible system for the
production and distribution of grass-roots media. There is a
diversity of political and social ideologies within Indymedia and
there must be a diversity of software to realize them. There will
be no single answer.

And diversity, in terms of ideology and in terms of software,
is a good thing. The ability to fork software and modify it to fit
your differing needs is one reason that Indymedia is so closely
tied to free software--it is essential for software with
participatory aspirations. Zapata has worked heavily on
Mir but is interested in getting involved
with SF-Active development. He says,
"I think it's good to have multiple code bases. It helps
decentralize the software development part of Indymedia and having
competition stimulates me to improve Mir.
Also, our users have real choice, and can compare advantages
between the code bases and choose the one that fits their needs
best."

During the early stages of every new IMC, media activists must
wrestle with the question, "Independent from
whom?" There is clearly no correct
answer. Through the creation of multiple pieces of Indymedia
software with different and explicitly stated political
motivations, the Indymedia movement grants us a meaningful form of
freedom--the independence to choose the socio-technical terms on
which we communicate.

Notes

[1]

The Jargon File describes a fork as "what occurs when
two (or more) versions of a software package's source code are
being developed in parallel which once shared a common code
base, and these multiple versions of the source code have
irreconcilable differences between them."

[2]

GNU is a recursive acronym standing for (G)NU's (N)ot
(U)nix. It is the effort led by Richard Stallman and the Free
Software Foundation to create a totally free operating system.