Open source technology provides the coding framework of Indymedia. This is useful for a number of reasons — firstly, open source code is free and predominately ‘copyleft’295 meaning that it may
be distributed where ever and to whom ever, as long it is a not for profit venture. Secondly, as mentioned earlier, the structure of Indymedia is nodal rather than hierarchical, with each site being funded and facilitated at a local level, as it is important that the functional framework is not cost prohibitive. Thirdly, seeing that Indymedia promotes an approach that encourages the sharing rather than owning of information it would be a huge ethical mistake to utilise a corporate structure to create and maintain the websites.296 In juxtaposition, social networking and media sharing websites
like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace are worth millions, because of the strategic an targeted use of advertising. In a recent article, Steven Hobson defined the difference between Social Media and social media and argues that whilst one, ‘Social Media’, offers power and openness to communities and individuals; the other, ‘social media’ is the realm of marketers and gurus attempting to convince the user that by buying the right tools they then have access to this great cultural change. He comments that:
294 Indymedia Principles of unityhttps://indymedia.org.au/principlesofunity (accessed 3 March 2004).
295 Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all modified and extended
versions of the program to be free as well.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ (accessed 02 May 2007).
296 Open source coding allows for a large degree of accessibility, including metadata and alt text descriptions for
Social Media — that’s with a capital ‘S’ and a capital ‘M’ — is a belief that through the use of technology and real openness we could see incredible changes in our society. Social Media allows us to create powerful individual voices that can’t be dismissed the same way that they use to be in the past; and it is with those voices that change will come
about...Social Media is the glue; or conversation pathways, that brings together all these communities and gives them a larger platform to speak from. This is the power of Social Media in its purest form and it does have the power to facilitate great social change...Then we have social media — that’s with a small ‘s’ and a small ‘m’ — which is the realm of marketers, self-named gurus and self-important mavens who would have you believe that by using the right tools you can be a part of this great change they are trying to sell you. 297
The open source technology behind Indymedia was created in Australia by a group of self-professed IMC geeks known as the ‘cat@lyst collective.’ They created an open publishing format known as
active software. Their site www.cat.org.au discusses the software and its applications as well as
promoting other sites that utilise the open source code called ‘active’. The acronym c.a.t. stands for ‘community activist technology’ and the slogan on the front door of the cat@lyst site states that c.a.t is “Low tech grass roots net access for real people. Pedestrians, public transport and pushbikes on the information super hypeway.”298 The first website that was created using active publicised the
July 18 anti-globalisation protests in Sydney and S11 in Melbourne in 1999.299 Bruns attributes
Sydney based web developer Matthew Arnison as largely responsible for providing the technology base for what was to become Indymedia.300 Back in 1998, Arnison was a member of cat@lyst and
had traveled to the US in 1999, where he met with some of the activists organizing the protests in Seattle.301
This open source code is also responsible for www.active.org.au series of sites based in a range of Australian centres, including Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney and Wollongong. This was the original software used by Indymedia, but more recently, other open
297 Steven Hodson, ‘Social Media vs. social media — there is a difference’ WinExtra
http://www.winextra.com/index.php/2009/03/21/social-media-vs-social-media-there-is-a-difference/ (accessed 14 April 2009).
298Cat@lyst | Community Access technology www.cat.org.au (accessed 11 December 2002).
299Although there are many references to this web site via other media and activist sites, the actual web site has now
been decommissioned http://www.j18.org/ (accessed 11 December 2002).
300Bruns, A., Gatewatching,p. 14.
301Rebecca Martin, ‘Protesting in the 21st century’ Catapult http://www.abc.net.au/catapult/stories/s1259653.htm
source programs have been adopted by individual IMC sites.
In essence, the formation of any arm or node of Indymedia depends on the local community. Anyone can instigate this process and now there are plans for the formation of a Canberra Indymedia. What is required in the first instance is community support in the form of letters and emails to the global site. From this point, a core team of people needs to work as the organising committee, with two of these people having defined roles — one as a tech support person and the other as the co-ordinator/administrator. Once this has been established, the group then submits this information to the global Indymedia site for approval. This process has only been implemented in the since late 2002 because of the burgeoning demand for communities to set up Indymedia websites.302