Independent Media Center - Overview

Overview

The first Indymedia project was started in late November 1999 to report on protests against the WTO meeting that took place in Seattle, Washington, and to act as an alternative media source. This followed a successful experiment in June that year, reporting the events of the Carnival Against Capitalism in London, UK. The Media team there used software and unmediated reports from protest participants. The open publishing script was first developed by video activists in Sydney, Australia. "Even more importantly, a group of hackers in Sydney, Australia, had written a special piece of software for live updating of the webpage devoted to their local J18 event. Six months later, this “Active Software” would be used in the American city of Seattle, as the foundation of the Indymedia project – a multiperspectival instrument of political information and dialogue for the twenty-first century"

After Seattle the idea and network spread rapidly. By 2002, there were 89 Indymedia websites covering 31 countries (and the Palestinian territories), growing to over 150 by January 2006, not all of them currently active. Indymedia websites publish in a number of languages, including English, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, French, Russian, Arabic and Hebrew.

IMC collectives distribute print, audio, photo, and video media, but are most well known for their open publishing newswires, sites where anyone with internet access can publish news from their own perspective. The content of an IMC is determined by its participants, both the users who post content, and members of the local Indymedia collective who administer the site. While Indymedias worldwide are run autonomously and differ according to the concerns of their users, they share a commitment to provide copyleft content. The general rule is that content on Indymedia sites can be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes.