Graphics for IMC Northern

The idea of this is to have summat on our banner to visually answer the question that people from outside the British Isles might ask – Northern What?

Is it too Monty Python?

We can add & remove pixels according to where people are posting news to our site from. I prefer the smudgey version because I think that people generally need to get over their territoriality. Infact I think I’d like it even smudgier.

Definitely like this idea as it is clear what we are talking about and agree a bit of smudgey-ness is needed.

As you point out it has a lot of potential for development in the future as hopefully ‘groups’ become more established in different parts of ‘Northern England’. It fits well into how imc-London have developed in terms of ‘groups’ having both Neighbourhood tags and what can loosely be described as ‘theme’ tags,
e.g. imc_London: Noborders:
Neighbourhoods: Whitechapel, Brixton, London etc.
Tags: Social_Struggles, repression, free spaces, etc.

lol this is hilarious. I really like it! I think that in general people are more hostile than we realise to the whole Northern/Northern England thing. I had a long, let’s say “heated” conversation with Mara a few days ago, which thankfully ended amicably but was frustrating because I couldn’t seem to get my point across that we are so opposed to borders in general and being sen as a subsidiary of mother england, with all the negative stuff that carries. She made lots of good points though which I will bring up at the meeting. Mainly she thinks we are creating a lot of confusion by not being consistent in how we sign off letters etc.

I believe there is pretty much no chance of us getting the url we wanted, northern.indymedia.org, so we need to start thinking about what alternatives there are. ne.indymedia.org, northernengland.indymedia.org etc. Also, we need to start consistently signing off all correspondence as IMC Northern England instead of IMC Northern. I know this sucks, I hate it but if we are to get global support to be a new IMC then this might be a hoop we have to jump through.

Personally, I feel that being known locally, to our users, as northern indymedia is something entirely different as that will not be an official title in any respect, just a friendly name people can refer to us with if they wish. This won’t be on any official contact stuff so could be a good compromise we can potentially reach, which clarifies our location to the world whilst also giving us an informal “no borders” face to our friends we outreach to.

But that said, I love these maps, it’s definately a good shade of Python!

Sorry this is off-subject.
In terms of a name, maybe we can use this opportunity to include in our name something that signifies our wandering/travelling/No-Fixed-abode attitude. The following are very poor but may spur someone to find a solution:

net.indymedia.org: Northern England Travellers(NET)
new.indymedia.org: Northern England Wanderers(NEW)
nenofixa.indymedia.org: Northern England No-Fixed-Abode(NENoFixA)
The rest were even worse!

Oh, well even I think they are poor but you have to try.

Northern England Organised People In Kollectivised Early Years Situation to reflect the newness of the project, Giving a clue as to our origins through the Kollectives, the fact that we are an organised collection of people who are united in a common goal and giving credence to the point at which we chose our name being at the birth of our project. So, neopikeys.indymedia.org anyone?

:-)

or Nek?
I think the situation is a little daft, unless I misunderstood that Indymedia doesn’t revolve around how you sign off letters!

That flowchart is brilliant.

I can think of things to add which would probably just make it too complicated and less effective, so, really, I think it’s basically there.

Added some from the “grim oop north” series (seems to have slightly duplicated – will investigate tmrw).