One of the things that people seem to want out of a new Indymedia CMS is the ability to have an expanded user login system, with multiple levels of permissions and the ability to edit your own content. I’ve been thinking all day about the fact that user logins can visibly tie people to content, and also do so at the database level.
The good things about an expanded login system are obvious – there is a lot more potential for many people to administer the site, less hassle for admins who always end up doing the “can you fix the typo in my article?” requests, etc. However, there are a few problems as well.
First, the act of publishing anonymously on the newswire arguably leads to a collective ethic rather than an individualist one (at least in theory, and on a good day). That is, the newswire is a space where a whole bunch of people can contribute, and it’s not about them as individuals, or even about their online personas. This makes the newswire of a well-maintained and active Indymedia site qualitatively very different from a blog, even a blog contributed to by multiple users. Whereas the Indy wire ideally showcases organized groups of people taking collective action, a blog usually ends up being a “me, me, me, look how great I am” showcase of a bunch of individuals.
Second, there are questions of security. Tying published content (articles, videos, etc) to a user can be considered a good thing if we’re not interested in security – if someone publishes something that’s really of excellent quality, I’d like to be able to conveniently access all of their other stuff. However, if the server gets seized, the foreign key between the content and the user is gonna be there. Although we wouldn’t store email addresses or other identifying info in the system anyway (and there would always be the option of anonymous publishing), it could be a pretty easy job for the cops to figure out who a user is, given a sufficient sample set of articles and enough on-the-street surveillance.
So I was thinking to tie the content to a group instead. Then if there is more than one person operating as part of the group, there is at least some legal deniability (which improves the bigger the group is). I would propose having individual logins, but all the functionality of the site would be keyed on groups rather than individuals. So instead of showing “all articles by UserX” the site would show things like “All articles by london noborders”. Group admins would i guess be in charge of accepting new people into a group. It could be a good way to encourage organization and collaboration between media producers, and it could also help encourage media production by political groups.
