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AN ALTERNATIVE MEDIUM ON ALTERNATIVE MEDIA
The “Alternative Media Global Project (AMPG)” is a multilingual, global collaborative Internet site devoted to recording research on and connections with alternative, radical, citizens, Community, independent, militant, autonomous, media throughout the world. This project was launched in october 2007 as an initiative of Benjamin Ferron, RE Davis and Clemencia Rodriguez. The project profits from the support of the OURMedia network.
During the last decades, projects and researches on alternative communication have multiplied. The Alternative Media Global Project seeks to centralize these resources and to make them available to the community of researchers, activist, and actors who work on, with or for alternative media.
The Alternative Media Global Project is built on a Wiki platform. This allows users to carry out modifications without constraint and allows web pages to be created to serve the needs of the users. This allows the users to maximize customability while minimizing technical or geographic accessibility. The AMGP uses Dokuwiki as its base which is an open source program.
This seems to be more on the theory side and less on the practice side of what media praxis embodies. The interaction and practice of empowering the collective to create responsible media seemingly happens in the scholarly analysis at these global conventions. While awareness and education is the necessary first step to responsible media praxis, who’s the collective?
Dear Jennifer,
I think you’re partly right in your comment : this project seeks to be a big and well-structured database on alternative media throughout the world. And as a matter of fact it has been launched by scholarsn (even if all of them are involved in some kind of activism elsewhere). But at the same time, alternative media practionners (journalists, activists, artists, etc.) seem to be very interested in it, if we consider the number of registred persons using the wiki, just a few month after the beginning of the initiative. The AMGP also proposes to link alternative media between each other, making mailing lists by country, region, or affinities. The purpose is not “practical” in that sense that it is not producing “news”, or programs of education, etc., but at the same time we hope it can be a useful tool for the alternative media practionners, in order to get quick and accurate information about other experiences, to have access to a wide range of articles, books, and to understand better where do alternative media come from in the course of history.
Best wishes
Benjamin Ferron
AMGP administrator