reclaiming indymedia ireland

Indymedia globally began using “Active” whose benefits included quicky and easy adoption by new IMC groups. But the software was never updated despite various pojects to do so. The founder of the open source movement and GNU project Richard Stallman saw his ideology championed in time by most new software systems developed globally for IMC use. These included MIR and Ithaca but by far the most important and widely spread was and is IMCDada. This was indeed the first system used by the Indymedia Ireland group. In 2005 DADA suffered serious cracks and about that time the Irish system Oscailt began to be recognised beyond Ireland for its attractive appearance, functionality and robustness. Oscailt was and is developed by Chekov and Terence (and two others to be introduced soon in the “behind indymedia ireland” category.) Oscailt was taken up to replace DADA by a few collectives whose own political & horizontal backgrounds and problems with server security and intelligence service monitoring will also be explored in this category. Not all the sites which sought to adopt OScailt won affiliation to the global Indymedia network. Oscailt did not keep many of its better facilities to contributors and the most recent changes further placed Indymedia Ireland in a commercial media  hinterland by limiting contributer options on embedded videos to commercially maintained third party sites. It is very important to note that a key reason why Indymedia Ireland has failed to be a democratic organisation and can not become one is the role Oscailt development has played in ensuring the same quartet of individuals on the technical development list have remained the same supposed volunteers with editorial privilege and the same supposed  impartial volunteers who have taken the positions of moderatorship.