Open Organizations in Indymedia

• Indymedia Documentation Project A very good example of the use of Wiki for collaborative project management.
  • There's a collection of IRC meetings calls, logs, summaries which are example of how liasons/delegates/participants from global network can tackle issues in online meetings.
  • rough description: Some meetings had over 60 participants. They would split into smaller groups (chat channels) and discuss separate issues. While in progress, some channels would keep summary of discussion in a wiki page, so that summary is always up to date. After given time (30min in some cases) everyone would return their attention to the main channel. Each group would have a person reporting the summary of discussion back to everyone. Simulatanious transaltion of the main channel would happen sometimes too. Couple of times a subdomain was setup where real-time logs of chat rooms were available, so that late comers can catch up with discussions.
  • drawbacks: lack of structure in nodes (local organizations, or working groups) can mean that information will not be reported back to nodes, or will be reported partialy, and disparate parts in nodes can feel that they view wasn't represented (due to lack of coherent positions in local nodes); imporant discussion can, and do, happen in private chats, parallel with the meeting, or even in ad-hoc chat channels where undesired/controversial subjects get discussed. also, in networks with little agreed structure, supernodes1 (people who have large, often invisible, power) tend to avoid meetings if they judge that their views and acts could be scrutinized, since they know that they can put their intentions in practice i.e. make nodes and networks move in the direction they desire, regardless of what will be said or done in "open meetings". they do rely on solidarity of other supernodes to make the whole network, or significant part of it, to act.

[1] The Packet Gang, "[...] in the social movement, decision making often devolves to a surprisingly small number of individuals and groups who make a lot of the running in deciding what happens, where and when. [...] Within political networks, such groups and individuals can be seen as ‘supernodes’, not only routing more than their ‘fair share’ of traffic, but actively determining the ‘content’ that traverses them.", Jamie King, 2004, Mute magazine
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