For several years, San Francisco IMC has had all kinds of problems and organizational setbacks. Our problems have come from law enforcement, from server colocation facilities, from corporate legal departments, from within our own organization, and from people abusing IMC process for their own benefit (and attacking us in the process). Part of the problem is that SF-IMC does a lot of work for the global Indymedia network at large. Many of us are also involved in Linefeed and SFCCP and we maintain & support Indymedia's in Argentina, Turkey, Chile, Houston, and on and on.

This year, in particular, was hard for us. Just as we were internally ready to launch a whole new SF-IMC that we believe would revolutionize the way IMC's are used, there was an enormous server crisis. It was announced that ahimsa was going to stop hosting IMC sites. And it was announced that CCCP, where many IMC's were hosted, was also powering off. It fell on a small group of people to solve this crisis. To our credit, we founded a new non-profit, set up a new colocation facility, and now things are back to running smoothly for all the IMC's that were at risk. All of them, that is, except for San Francisco Indymedia. We were always that last ones to receive attention because we were working to help other IMC's first.

SF-IMC has been down since then. And we can't wait any longer. At the same time, we are excited about the imc-cms project that we helped initiate at Techmeet 2006 in Sao Paulo. We have decided that we will help ourselves while helping the network at large with our Save San Francisco IMC campaign. We are offering ourselves up as an experimental prototype for one of the final candidates for the new IMC CMS -- CakePHP. So, during November and December of 2007, we're going to help evaluate CakePHP by building a version for SF-IMC and at least getting our site back online. This gives us the ability to have our articles available, to get people involved locally, to start working as an IMC again, while at the same time moving along the imc-cms project.

And we are looking for people to help Save San Francisco IMC! You don't need to be from here to help! A lot of the work can be done remotely. We are making this announcement at the final meeting of Techmeet 2007. We have sacrificed our own local IMC in order to help keep the global network alive and now we're asking for a little something back :) Plans are underway and we'd love to have you involved. To get involved, e-mail Matt from linefront.org or #Tom Hastings on irc.indymedia.org and we'll get you involved.