Process: Language Barriers and Consensus
by Jeremy David Stolen Wednesday May 30, 2001 at 02:19 PM
fellowtraveler@riseup.net

Some questions about Language Barriers and Process in the IMC Print Team

Well, we've put out seven issues of the weekly PDF so far, and it seems as though a lot of people have been pleased with the general quality of the content and presentation. The issues have been distributed in South and North America and Europe. People are learning new skills (layout, editing, etc.) I believe we should all be proud of the work we've done so far.

Still, we have some issues to work out, foremost among them Process and Language.

LANGUAGE:
Almost all the discussion that takes place on this list and in our IRC meetings is in English. This leaves a lot of people out. This means we miss out on important stories going on, especially in the Global South. There has been talk of establishing a Latin American PDF, too. Perhaps that's the best solution. If so, I hope there will be overlapping membership between the two working groups. Speaking as a resident of the Imperial North (specifically the U.S.), I would like to help educate people here about issues and events in the Global South (and in impoverished Northern neighborhoods), and that is a big part of my own interest in the weekly PDF project.

I hope we can figure out how to work better across language barriers. Does anyone have any ideas?

PROCESS:
Many Indymedia activists, myself included, are great believers in the Consensus decision-making process. We feel that the only way to resist corporate/nationalist/etc. power is through creating non-hierarchecal, non-authoritarian, non-elitist organizations. These ideals emerge from many different sources, including the Quakers and Anarchism.

"Process" is at the heart of Consensus. Processes separate work from personalities. With effective processes, no one group of people are stuck with all the work (or can take all the glory). A Process lays out ways to accomplish a task, and roles for people to play, and different people can step in or out as they have time and energy. With the weekly PDF, once we have some processes established, it won't matter so much *who* is involved, as long as everything is happening.

So far, we have no "official" process(es) for creating the weekly PDF. So far, we have a few methods that we've been trying out, and adjusting as necessary. The process, in other words, is still wide open. If someone asks, "how do we do [blank]?", an honest answer is, "*So far* we've been *trying* this. But that can change."

It is up to us as a group to decide how set-in-stone we want our processes to be. There are several propositions and resolutions that have floated through this listserve, and which have been posted to print.indymedia. I don't know how we will decide which ones to adopt, or how we will decide whether to adopt them. I suppose that will be an ongoing process.

What do folks think? What ideas do people have? We are doing well so far; let's find ways to keep that up.

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