There have been disagreements within the UK Indymedia movement for some time. These came to a head on 1 May 2011. As a result, there are now two national projects - Mayday and Be The Media, and conflict between the two groups continues.
We don't intend to go into the details in this article, but you can read about them in the articles Big changes are coming to Indymedia UK (published by Be The Media) and The Attempt to Shutdown UK Indymedia (published by Mayday).
We, the Oxford Collective, have looked into this issue in lot of detail and we take seriously the ongoing dispute and what has happened. We deeply regret the amount of disagreement that has arisen within the UK Indymedia Network.
Oxford Indymedia intend to become a fully autonomous local Indymedia Centre (IMC) and to achieve this intend to go through the 'new global IMC process' as soon as possible.
We plan to adopt a new software system for the management of our site. Until we are able to achieve these aims, Oxford Indymedia will be hosted on the new server managed by members of the Mayday collective. This arrangement is one of technical necessity and should not be read as constituting direct support for the Mayday collective. We will continue to administrate and moderate our site using the logins that we have for the Mir system on this server.
We support both the Be The Media and Mayday projects and would like to see both of them succeed and to work with them in the future.
We invite anybody wishing to get involved in the work of Oxford Indymedia, to come to one of our monthly meetings or get in touch with us via our mailing list.