0. Status of the document

This document is an informal social agreement between Indymedia Belarus Collective and users of the resource. This document is not of a legal character.

The document describes principles of work of the Indymedia Belarus resource and social obligations voluntarily undertaken by the members of Indymedia Belarus Collective within the limits of work on the project. The document is approved, revised and supplemented by voting of the members of Indymedia Belarus Collective.

The current policy version 1.0 (revision 2005-05-11) includes only formal corrections applied for the previous revision 2005-03-03 of policy v.1.0 approved by Indymedia Belarus Collective. Any further corrections that change the substance of the policy require additional discussion and voting by Indymedia Belarus Collective.

This is English translation of the original version in Russian language.

1. Preamble

Indymedia is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage and up-to-time information channel that is open for collaboration with all users. Indymedia Belarus is one of more than a hundred Independent Media Centers functioning all over the world and united into the international initiative of Indymedia.

Objectives of Indymedia Belarus

1. To create information space for support of Belarusian libertarian activists and open interaction between them.
2. To supply society with free and up-to-time information that is not distorted by state, commercial or political censorship.
3. To provide possibility for everyone to take part in spreading news and analytic information as well as for its open discussion.

Indymedia Belarus cannot be a body of any political party.

Our main principles are openness and non-discrimination. We invite everyone who is ready to follow these principles to participate in the project.

2. Content publishing

Indymedia Belarus accumulates content that is provided by both members of the Indymedia Belarus Collective and any user of the resource. For these needs Indymedia Belarus provides an open publishing engine with possibility of commentaries.

Note:

Indymedia Belarus Collective aims at the most complete verification of posted news. At the same time our principle position is as follows: the main criterion of reliability of any information is its open discussion. The value of any information depends most of all on its critical comprehension and results of its public discussion.

For navigation convenience pieces of content that are close in their subject matter can be connected with each other, thus being grouped by topics (“focuses”). In addition to a general newswire, sorted out in the chronological order, the resource provides possibility to view the latest news in such groups. Presence of any message in the group of “hot” news is determined only by the fact of its connection to any general topic and cannot be treated as conferment of a higher “rate” to it.

Indymedia Belarus strongly and in any form objects to political or other ideological censorship.

However, Indymedia Belarus Collective has to delete or hide from viewing in the group of general news line a certain kind of messages to provide efficient resistance to pressure of state bodies and other authoritarian institutions.

The list of such cases is strictly determined and is supplied in chapter 5.

3. Mission and functions of the Indymedia Belarus Collective

In addition to participation in news presentation along with general users, participants of Indymedia Belarus Collective voluntarily undertake a range of technical functions:

1. Technical support of the resource and work on its further development
2. Watch over the resource’s content, efficient suppression of informational provocations
3. Participation in voting of Indymedia Belarus Collective on issues of tactics and strategy of the development of Indymedia Belarus.

The Collective undertakes to keep direct contact and discussion with users on issues of the resource’s work in one of the following ways:

• Recurrent meetings and seminars on a wide range of questions with free access and timely announcement on the web site of Indymedia Belarus
• Support of a discussion mailing list with free subscription.

4. How to join the Collective

The Collective is open for new participants. Joining the Collective is performed voluntarily and implies the following:

• a) Obligation to take part in work on the support and development of Indymedia Belarus on a voluntary basis
• b) Franchise in all questions that require voting of the Collective

Any participant has a right not to follow Collective’s decision with which he or she doesn’t agree, but a participant has no right for active resistance against implementation of such decision.

Any participant has a right to start team voting for revoking any team decision.

Any participant has a right for unimpeded leaving of the Collective that means shifting off undertaken obligations and franchise. Any former participant has a right to re-join the Collective on common grounds.

For starting voting on joining of a new member, a candidate should:

• a) Contact any member of the Collective by e-mail or in person
• b) Inform about his or her motivation, real abilities for participation in work of the Collective and wish to join it

Since this moment and until decision making a candidate has a right to access Collective’s discussion about his or her participation and a right to send his or her comments on the discussion to all participants of the Collective.

5. Policy of content moderation in special cases

Here and later “moderator” means a Collective member who takes duty on supervising integrity of the resource content and preventing provocations.

In special cases described below some pieces of news can be hidden from viewing in a general news line or completely deleted from the database.

5.1 Hiding from the newswire

While hidden from a general news line, a message can be viewed by any user when the web interface option “show hidden items” is on.

The following messages are hidden from a general news line:

1. Ones of a destabilizing character, i.e. those that include incorrect information about events and actions.
2. Ones falsely presented on behalf of known activists.

5.2 Complete deletion from the database

When completely deleting news from the database, a moderator must inform the Collective about a taken decision and provide grounds of necessity of complete deletion.

For preventing provocations the following messages are deleted:

1. Threats of death and physical violence.
2. Information whose fact of publication can be a direct and main cause of armed conflicts with human victims.

For preventing flood, the following messages can be deleted:

1. Messages whose principal content is abuse, unleashing of national discord and racial hostility, gender, race or sexual discrimination.
2. Commercial advertising
3. Commercial pornography

Note:

There are many other web resources that provide hosting for the mentioned kinds of content. Complete disappearance of such resources is one of the global objectives of Indymedia Belarus.

Indymedia Belarus is eager to provide its resource for any information that is not of the kind determined above.

For preserving integrity of the content the following messages can be deleted:

1. Duplicate messages
2. Empty, broken or not-readable messages

5.3 Content moderation

In the case if a message contains private information about any person published without his or her permission, regardless of a source for getting these data, a moderator has a right to delete this information from the text of a message.

But for all that a moderator must leave a comment about his or her action.

6. Content usage

Indymedia Belarus encourages free reprinting, citing and spreading in any other way the content of the resource. Content can be re-distributed according to GNU General Public License, GNU Free Documentation License, or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike by your choice. Publishing content on the Indymedia Belarus resource implies that the author of a message accepts these terms.