T- can you tell me a little bit about how you got involved with the imc?

G- when I lived out in the midwest, I did computer stuff out there and when it started to come online I would post to it. Then when I moved to the west coast there was an ad on another bulletin board- a community bulletin board- requesting tech volunteer for getting the S.F. one started. So I responded to it, I was the only one to respond to it, so, I got involved

T- so where you the only tech at the san Francisco group at the beginning?

G- there was another one, espe, but he was kind of missing in action at the time, so for a while I was yeah.

T- we only have one person who does the real tech stuff here, it is hard.

G- yeah, I think it is stupid that so much imc stuff requires tech skills, there is so much emphasis placed on participating in the imc it revolving around having tech skills. There should be more ways that people who don't have tech skills could do shit.

T- well, we have a lot of involved people and none of us have tech skills. Personally I would like to see more, skill share type classes on doing basic tech stuff. Especially maintaing stuff. That would be helpful to us. We just got someone in who offered to do classes like that but we haven't done them yet. I am looking forward to that.

The thing I am really interested to follow up on is this idea I got from an interview with jay I did a while ago, one of the things he said that I found really interesting and that I want to try to improve my understanding is he made a comment that the actual code that runs imcs, not just the open publishing part, but the actual code, reflects this belief in democracy. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that?

G-I think the way people look at open source free software stuff as a democratic, alternative, uh, it is just ah, I think that is probably what he was talking about. Because it is kind of a phenomenon outside of the independent media center, and that is what everyone talks about. And basically it is because, in like the eighties, you had all these people funded by the military and corporations and stuff to build Unix, which is a superior operating system. And like, as it became more profitable and stuff, and restrictions on them became tighter, and they we really like 60's left over hippie type people and academics and stuff, so within their community they were really loose about sharing information and sharing source code to programs, sharing math algorithms that they were working on. But then in the eighties, when computers became more profitable, companies started to put restrictions on academics of the licensing and copyright, because they didn't want information to be shared, because, they are trying to take it to market first. and so- sharing information doesn't help profit models or whatever. So anyways, this guy named richard stallman started to just rewrite Unix all on his own to provide like a free alternative. So he wrote it all and he had this license called a gpl, and it just meant that the source code was available to anyone who wanted to use it, and if you used the source code, ever, you also had to use the same license. So it was like viral every time someone used it, the wealth of public software would grow and grow. So he started doing that and it kept growing and growing, and then linux came along, and linux is a completely free implementation of Unix. And so- the way that those groups are organized are just experiments in ways of organizing people and most of them involve like, the dichotomy is that in an open source community you have cooperation instead of competition and you have mutual aid instead of people trying to fight with each other and sharing of information, information has like no restrictions on it and stuff like that and so, it is kind of an anarchist way of doing things. And not only is it an anarchist way of doing things, but it is better than the corporate way of doing things, like linux really does compete with Microsoft, and in some areas, it out competes Microsoft, which is like a billion dollar, a trillion dollar company, with trillions of dollars in software development. And these folks who organize themselves cooperatively can get way more work done, because they are spread out, there is tens of thousands of programmers. So yeah, maybe that is what he was talking about.

T- so because imcs run free software, open source software, it is related to this larger movement that is why you think so?

G- yeah, I think so, and so, active is also open source, and I think it has a gpl license.

T-yeah, I saw that on the source forge page

G- yeah, so imc in general uses a bunch of open source to run its operations like Unix and apache the database and stuff is all open source. Which really does contribute because we have extraordinary circumstances to like field-test the software.

T- right

G- so if the software survives….

T- was active written just for imc? Or was it around before imcs?

G- the real person who has the history is andy from australia, but um, I think that they wrote it, for something they were doing in australia, and then when the seattle imc wanted to do their thing, they sort of talked to them and since then, it has really just been an imc software project. But anyone could use it for whatever they want.

T- I saw there was also an imc version of what slashdot uses?

G- yeah yeah

T- do any sites use that or does every site use active?

G- no, we want it to be more decentralized because the problem is only a handful of people really only know a given software distribution, and then all the work falls on them, and so right now, they are probably only five or six different imc softwares that people use, like san Francisco has its own thing..

T- right, yeah, I have noticed that san Francisco is much different.

G-yeah, so like it is more decentralized, for instance, at san Francisco, we host south Africa imc and Uruguay imc, and Houston, well Houston and Arizona aren't example because you guys still use the old software, but anyways, it is more decentralized so we can, work on the code and we know a lot about it and so we administer these five sites, and ideally that is how it would be in all the imcs so that not one person was dealing with like thirty sites or something like that.

T- so Houston is on san Francisco's server?

G- uh huh

t- I didn't know that. I wanted to ask some things about servers, so just tell me what ever you are comfortable telling me, especially in light of the FBI stuff I stated to think about how I have know idea where servers are, I know what sites are on the server we are on, but I didn't know it was one the same one with san Francisco, I thought san Francisco was on one by itself,

G- well, that actually is true, so like in san Francisco, we have two servers, on is a donation from a company, and we have our site on that one, but, he doesn't allow us to put any other boxes on there, so it is kind of a shaky thing, but then there is a separate like tech anarchist collective type thing that is in san Francisco that collectively runs a server that provides web services for free to organizations and so Houston indymedia and Arizona indymedia are two of them. So that is on a separate box, but it is located in san Francisco, with a lot of the same people but, it's just not technically, whatever…

T- it is not actually on the same box as S.F.

G- exactly, and even the way that went off was shady, like, not shady, but just because the only reason that happened really was during Quebec the website was so fucked up so they put it on that server so that it would be okay for the ftaa protests, the san Francisco one, which is not the one that S.F. imc is one, which is called black cat, so after that, somehow, we don't even really know how, someone like stefani or someone, moved Arizona and Houston to the box, and really don't know,

T- and you were like, oh look, two more imcs!

G- yeah, and really none of us are really that experienced with the active version like the real active, because we don't really run it or use it so, that is why it is problematic,

t- so for SF, the one that is in a business, how does it happen that if the FBI was to come and serve some kind of we want the box warrant, how do you, are any of them at like a corporate ISP,

g- one of them is kind of cool, the one that the S.F. site is one, is a business, but really it is this small business, really it is this crazy Berkeley Unix sys admin who is like fifty years old and he is just old, and he has always lived in Berkeley, and he is always doing sys admin stuff and so he has a business and he gives it to us, and he is pretty cool, like he used to be an activist and stuff, but I am not sure how he would respond to an FBI order, but the other one is at a huge cooperation which defiantly would give up the box if the FBI served them with a warrant.

T- I have been wondering about that kind of stuff, like how do we know that there aren't sniffer boxes on our servers, there is really know way we can know that kind of stuff.

G- really I think that we should just assume that there are.

T- we have been talking about trying to set up a local box as part of that call the get local imcs on local boxes and I was asking what it would take to do that and it was made clear to me that we would most likely end of with a box in a corporate ISP

G- yeah, almost defiantly, there is really no way around that. There is no noncorporate bandwidth, ever, anywhere, but the hope for people is in wireless internet because if you had wireless internet that was really widespread, you could run servers that would not travel over corporate cables or whatever, they would just travel through the air. That's the solution, but it won't be here for like five more years.

T- what about the main global site, is it at a corporate place too?

G- yeah, it is at a cooperate place, but I guess they are left leaning or something like that and so they are totally aware of what imc is and when the FBI served us with an order in April, they were really cool about letting imc decide what to do about it. They could have stepped in and said, 'it is our ISP, it is our company, we are just going to give up the box because that is our right to.' But they didn't. so that is kind of cool. But, ultimately being realistic, we really couldn't expect them, and I don't think they would, mount a huge legal defense, because of the out of pocket expenses to them. We would get donated legal help but they wouldn't. it just wouldn't be fair for them to spend like 100,000 dollars when they could have just given up the damn box. Yeah, so it's a problem.

T- what is the software that the san Francisco site runs?

g- it is just like active, well the way it worked is that, right before Los Angeles, the democratic national convention protests there, for what ever reason, they had a requirement to use a different data base, so people were hacking on it, and changed it around, and when we were doing the san Francisco site, we were having the same problem, and this was like two weeks after the dnc and so we just used that one, and since then we have just been separate from the normal path of development. We have just been developing it on our own, it is similar to active, but it has just been forked off of the normal development.

t- there are less people working on that one? What do I call it?

g- S.F. active I guess, yeah, right know there are. Because we have to use this thing called cvs, so as soon as we have our code in cvs, we have a pretty healthy tech collective here, not that many people are working on code development though because it is too disorganized.

t- how does being in the cvs system help out?

g- It keeps track of all the changes that people submit, It keeps version information, so that at anytime you could go back and see what the code looked like on a particular day, so that if a change was truly messed up you could always roll back to a previous version, and it would be like you had never done anything.

t- I was reading a little bit about it and it seemed to me kind of like a librarian, you could like check out this section of code and leave a note saying, I am working on this, don't change anything or something.

g- yeah, that is exactly what it is like, it is called a repository.

t- so the other active is in there, do most people use that system?

g- yeah, if you are going to work on active you have to use it. Yeah, you have to use cvs, it is way worth it. That is how almost all open source projects are managed, is through that software.

t- to stay on the democracy tip, what is your perspective on the imcs, and the idea that they are offering a model of democracy, would you even use that term.

g- well, internally as far as internal code development goes, I think open source stuff is like beautiful, because it is like anarchy in action, because it just is, there are no leaders or anything, you have someone who is a facilitator, everyone has different roles, but there is no real hierarchy and everyone contributes and shares and through that process you can build something, the exact same thing that a corporation is trying to build with zero money spent and it is of superior quality that what they offer. But on the other hand, the reason that is able to happen is that it is programmers who are basically funded by their jobs, they get more money than they are worth so they have more leisure time to do something like that.

t- there must be trade offs, having everyone work for free means no one get paid to do the programming

g- there are two main groups of people who do this, university students, who don't have to have a job or whatever so they sit around programming all day, and then established people in corporate computer jobs who get paid so much money that they don't have to work or whatever.

t- so what category do you fall into?

g- I don't fall into either of those categories (laughs) that is why I don't produce that much code, I do, but not as much as other projects do. But within that vacuum it just goes to show that another world is possible, we really can organize things in a mutual aid way where everyone benefits and it is generally equal. But again it is kind of not real world because it is mostly white male programmers who are rich and that is why they are able to do it.

T- are there other downfalls, or are there other motivations for people to do it?

G- the one downfall that always comes back, is like, Microsoft is consumer driven so a lot of their effort is put into making things look nice and be easy to use. Where as open source is driven by the needs of the programmers who really don't care about things like user interface or whatever and that is always a recurring theme, I mean that it is hard to motivate the tech people towards what the greater collective wants because they pretty much just want to do what they want to do you know, so that is a down fall that seems irreconcilable.

t- what about having a few people doing a lot of work that they are not getting paid for? That seems like a down fall because they are overworked and can only do it in spare time

g-yeah, I see that as the fundamental problem of why you cant do what you want why living in capitalism fucking tells you what to do because people just don't have leisure time and it applies to tech. For example if you want to do food not bombs or something it becomes a stressful thing because you still have to work and that is really what makes it not sustainable you know. People have to go back to their jobs everyday. That is where you have to put most of your energy.

t- yeah, I have heard from a few people that were heavily involved with imc at the beginning and ended up way in debt from putting all their energy and time in at the imc and not working.

g- yeah, its true, it is a real problem, but that is always the problem with everything, that is why it is not sustainable, I guess if someone figures out the answer to that then we win or something.

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