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400 Yoyos Or The '404' of Death? Indymedia Ireland Fundraising Appeal national |
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feature
 Monday October 17, 2005 06:49 by Indymedia Ireland Editorial Group - Indymedia Ireland
 'A proud boast' sez Wag. '4 years, not a cent on consultants and the thing actually works'
Indymedia Ireland recently completed it's fourth year of uninterrupted service. Over those years 373 features, 16,503 stories, 13,893 images and 115,139 comments have been published on the site. Our traffic has continued to increase and the quality and range of stories published continues to improve. We have done all this on a tiny budget, with no advertising, no employees and complete autonomy from all political organisations. We use an open and transparent method to organise our work. Our editorial collective is made up entirely of volunteers, organised as equals. This has allowed us to remain truly independent and to provide space for all those voices marginalised by the mainstream. From Dublin to Rossport, Clonakilty to Donegal, we give people a voice and a way to be heard. However, the cupboard is now bare. Our bank account is empty and we need to pay a 400 euro hosting bill by the end of the month. We are appealing to our users to put their hand in their pockets and ensure the survival and future viability of open publishing news in Ireland. That means YOU!
Thusfar most of the costs associated with the site have been funded by volunteers putting their hands in their pockets. However, as our traffic grows, so do our hosting costs. Every time a page is downloaded from the site, it costs us money. We would like to expand the services offered and allow bigger pictures, more multimedia and so on. However, in order to provide these things freely to the public, we need help with raising money. Our bank account is empty and we are facing a bill of approximately 400 euro at the end of the month. Therefore we are launching a fundraising appeal to raise this money. We appeal to all users of the site to put their hands in their pockets and help us out. If we can raise sufficent money through donations, we can keep the site open, democratic and independent - and free of advertising. So, if you are a regular user of the site and want it to keep going and keep getting better, please give generously to support the project. Even a small donation will be a great help in paying the bills. If you are a member of an organisation which uses the site to distribute information, advertise events, or comment on current affairs, consider asking your organisation to make a donation. You could even organise a fundraiser in your area for Indymedia. We can help out by providing films, tutorials and materials. Holding an indymedia night is also a good way of putting yourself in touch with others in your area who are supporters of the site and trying to build a local indymedia collective in your area. We are also always looking for more volunteers to help with the running of the site. If you have a reasonable amount of online access and want to get involved, just sign up to the editorial list and join in the discussion. From November onwards we will also be holding regular monthly indymedia meetings in Dublin, on the first Wednesday of every month at 8pm in the EENGO office on Camden street (above the Bounty store and across the road from the Ulster Bank). A Belfast collective is also in the process of formation and will start holding meetings in the near future - watch this space. Unfortunately we have been forced to postpone the Videoactive festival which we were planning for early November. In place of this event, we will hold a film showing and a music evening in Dublin. If you are interested in helping to organise this, please come to our fundraising meeting next Wednesday evening in the EENGO office. Notes
4 ways to help Indymedia
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Comments (27 of 27)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27A tenner - It's not much, but if another 39 people hit that "donate" button or post a cheque for a tenner quickly we can get this awful notice off the homepage for another month at least. :-)
P.S. Indymedia - Please don't do bigger images -- they eat up bandwidth, and rarely add anything to a story that couldn't have been told in (a) a few sentences, or (b) a photo resized down to thumbnail size (like on the Latest News page).
Same goes for audio and video on the IMC network - for most spoken word audio it's okay to use mobile phone quality sound - and it'll save about 90% the bandwidth.
Anyone wanting to tell picture stories needs the increased size.
I think the main rationale for increased sizes of pics is that it will allow photographers to put stuff on here in a form which can be used by print publications.
OK just donated a tenner.
The picture thing would be good except that it sounds like it would push up costs a hell of a lot for the benefit of a very small number of site users - or is the plan to have small standard pictures that can be clicked through to larger print quality ones?
click through thumbnails
I personally think it is important that photographers work is valued and that the machine is friendly and flexible for them to use the way they want to even if it is a subset of the site content.
The plan with pictures is that photographers will be able to upload their original photos without resizing. Oscailt will create a scaled down version of this which will be displayed with articles. If you click on the picture, you will go to the full, high resolution version.
Currently, resizing photos is probably the biggest problem that people face in posting news to the site. If we can offer this service, oscailt will do it all for them. It should also help people who are producing copyleft print publications as they will have easy access to high resolution images.
In terms of costs, I think the main thing will be disk space rather than bandwidth. Since the default view will use a scaled down image, the bandwidth demands shouldn't increase much. However, large image files will require a fair amount of space to store and that's probably the thing that will cost us a fair bit of cash.
On another note, the bill that we are facing will cover us for 6 months of hosting charges. So, give generously and we will not be bothering people again for at least that amount of time and hopefully longer.
...
Clicked on the visa link to make a donation, but got a server error. Anyone else got thisproblem? I realise it may be a firewall issue local to me, be great to know either way.
Other wise Ill send a cheque. Money well spent,
go raibh maith agaibh
S
Yeah, got an error too, but it worked secord time round, click around a bit and it might work :-))
...been trying on and off for last couple of -still getting server error message.
"...been trying on and off for last couple of -still getting server error message."
That's a bit odd, it could well be a firewall issue as I can't replicate the problem at all. Anyway, please keep trying, hopefully it'll resolve itself before too long.
Thanks again to all the generous people out there.
Is there any chance of moving indymedia.ie to a host such as contributions.org.uk or similar that could provide free hosting for non profit organisations. Or even some of it perhaps images stored on separate servers or something. Or are none of the indymedia viewers webdesigners or working in hosting companies that might give the collective a hand out.
Again, what would Jesus do?
Mark.
Thumbnailing the pictures woul diminish the immediacy and the impact of photo essays in the tradition of jd, Paula and Elaine. If we need more money, then so be it.
There is hardly any audio stored on this site. It is almost all at radio.indymedia.org. They should get a contribution from us too when we can afford it.
Mobile-phone quality is crap. People will turn away from the concept of mp3 articles if they are difficult to listen to, or even to hear. Also re mobiles (I still haven't got one): like any multimedia, the raw unedited state is not always the most edifying.
At 128kbps also, community/volunteer radio can use the material - not really possible if quality is low. Just 'cos we're not professional doesn't mean we can't be better - we do want to finish their model once and for all don't we?!?
We should think big if we want to be the alternative.
I hope i can be there Wednesday, but I suspect I'll be busy. Will there be a report online?
Mark: the traffic volume of the site is such that it would be very difficult to find somebody to do it for free. In any case, our costs aren't enormous and we should be able to cover them through very infrequent fundraising drives like this one (keep em coming !). There is also the matter of quality of service. Our current hosting company have provided a very good quality of service, allowing us to have almost constant uptime for 4 years (a couple of glitches aside).
Robbie: I agree with everything you wrote. The plan for picture hosting is to allow oscailt to host large print-quality photos in addition to the current web-friendly versions. P.s. I haven't forgotten about the session on the new oscailt with you, life just got in the way for a while.
Is there an account number and sort code that the money can be lodged to??
This would want to be edited onto to the front page for security reasons, if there is an account that I can transfer funds to.
Click below to find out the Indymedia sort code bank acc no and address for postal donations:
http://www.indymedia.ie/donate.php
Keep up the good work!
Is it not possible to post lower quality photos online (as normal) and ask the photo owner to keep the high quality ones on his/her drive so that he/she can email them to print media if print media want them? I'm not sure that indymedia.ie should have to pay the cost of hosting such big files, especially if not that many print media use photos from indymedia.ie. I've put some photos on indymedia at lowish quality (I hope) but still have the originals at 6million pixels on my own laptop.
Mark
PS Not getting paid until next week and money is tight with the wedding coming up (actually I'm flat broke and credit card is maxed) so I'll paypal indymedia.ie something next Wednesday or Thursday.
how's this going/ have ye raised enough? what about an update?
We're having a meeting tomorrow evening and will be posting an update after that. We will document exactly how much money was raised by this appeal and exactly what it will be spent on and post it to the site. So far the response seems to be very encouraging but we have only got preliminary details.
In the meantime
*takes out cyber collection tray*
rattle, rattle, keep on giving generously folks, rattle rattle. Indymedia needs you.
ah!!!
the sound of truly religious fervour
sure I'll giva ya €20 cos I probably would have spent a lot more than that on stuff to read durin my lunch if I didn't have indymedia
Any news on a proposed video and music night?
It was a real shame about the Videoactive Festival.
...for nowt.
The guilt of years of mouching on Indy assuaged somewhat with my €50 contribution.
Finally a good payment!
20 spuds from japan, I wish I could give more, indymedia is an amazing resource and source of info. Thanks for all the hard work
Hi,
What do people think of an indymedia.ie T-shirt? I would love to have one or two and think this would be a good way to raise money and to raise awareness of Indymedia in general. The existing logo is cool, and with english and gaelge it could be great on t-shirt.
If you need help with it I know several people who could design something and even a t shirt printer (no realtion, incase there is a hint of a Fianna Fail type conflict of interest). Any opinion there Chekov?
Slan,
S
yep, sign me up for one of them t-shirts.