What is 'Open Publishing'?

Open publishing means that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find the stories they want. Readers can see editorial decisions being made by others. They can see how to get involved and help make editorial decisions. If they can think of a better way for the software to help shape editorial decisions, they can copy the software because it is free and change it and start their own site. If they want to redistribute the news, they can, preferably on an open publishing site. (full text)

Other interesting examples of similar ideas are: www.active.org.au, www.kuro5hin.org, www.slashdot.org, www.cmaq.net.

Important contact points if you want your own open publishing site are Creative Commons and the Indymedia Dev Wiki.

How many restrictions will be imposed on what I publish?

Material uploaded to the Newswire is not pre-filtered or edited. Everything gets published on the site. The editing or filtering process happens after stories are published to the site, not before. Articles may be "hidden", after they have been uploaded, according to the published editorial policy of the local IMC group. An article may only be hidden after it has been posted on the newswire, not before. The articles will not be actually deleted from the newswire, but will be "hidden" on another page. This will enable people to read them if they wish to, and read the reasons why they were hidden in the first place. This keeps the process as transparent as possible.

The only exception to this is in extreme circumstances such as a spam flood or ongoing abuse of the site and its participants, we may technically block a spammer from publishing for a short period of time.

The process for reaching a consensus decision to do this can be found in our Editorial Policy. If you want to be involved in this discussion join our main list and have your say.

How has the technology developed?

The software used by Indymedia was first developed by 'Community Activist Technology' (CAT) in Sydney, Australia. The software we currently use is called DadaIMC. Most new IMC's are using sf-active, DadaImc or Mir.