About www.inmediahk.net

Hong Kong In-media is a new alternative media initiative generated from a post-July-1st demonstration evaluation meeting in July 2004. It was a brainstorming meeting among a group of intellectuals and activists from the civil society on the future development of participatory democracy and citizen movement in Hong Kong. After the discussion the group saw a strong need for local movement to develop a critical and communicative public sphere which actively bring in border-crossing perspective. And a focus group was formed to draft the proposal of the development of a popular alternative media initiative in the internet; the group was later transformed into the editorial team for the implementation of www.inmediahk.net .

The "IN" in "IN-mediaHK" stands for "independent" and "involved". Hong Kong In-media aims at facilitating a development of a participatory democratic society:

• A. by providing a "public sphere" independent from government, political parties and big corporations;

• B. by engaging with grassroots, non-governmental organizations, intellectuals, activists and public in the framing of social political and cultural agenda;

• C. by promoting social concern, developing humanistic knowledge and providing diverse information (of the locals, Chinese speaking and the inter-nationals societies) for the formation of a progressive and border-crossing perspectives and a critical atmosphere for individual and collective social praxis;

• D. by networking with progressive and self-reflexive intellectuals and activists in the Chinese speaking world.

Working team and organization structure

The organization is composed of

1. an editorial team (10 active members) which is in responsible for daily operation of the website and organizational work;

2. a list of networking members (around 30) who are active members of the civil society, cultural groups and academic institutions;

3. columnists and citizen reporters (280+) who contribute to the content of the website;

4. registered members (1,560+) who participate on the website and subscribe to the newsletters;

5. monthly donators who donate small sum of money to the website on monthly base (starting from december 2005); the editorial team will report on the work progress and financial situation on seasonal base.

Work progress

• Publication work

As the concept of citizen journalism and alternative media are very new to Hong Kong. We put up the first edition of our interactive media in Oct 2004 to test people’s response and orientation for our platform, also to get initial data of who are our potential community members.

Up till now, we have accumulated more than 1,550 register users and 280 columnist-citizen reporters. Most of them were high school and university students, local NGO / PO activists, teachers, social workers and bloggers who write in Chinese. In Nov 2005, we had an average of 4,000 number of visits per day with 90,000 page view and 150,000 hits per day (even though the website is blocked by Mainland Fire-wall since May 2005).

In June 2005 we re-categorized the columns in the coming months into eight major concerns: 1. local social-political and economic issue (local citizen reporting and agenda setting); 2. current news and social debates (engaging with mainstream agenda); 3. culture, arts and cultural politics (including gender and sexuality issues); 4. education and thoughts; 5. border crossing (China-Taiwan-HK, international social movement, peace and human rights issues); 6. media (new media and media critique); 7. environment and green consumption; 8. individual reflections.

Now the editors and our columnists have opened more than 130 columns in all kinds of social, political and cultural issues. Around half of the articles are editorial selection from alternative news sources, including mainland and overseas alternative news agencies, individual bloggers, NGO news digest, etc. We hope that by doing so, we can create an alternative frame of reference in understanding current issues. The other half of the articles are written by our columnists and citizen reporters.

• Local networking

In the past few months, we have cooperative project with a number of cultural and educational groups:

July 2004: organize a seminar on "alternative media and the core value of Hong Kong life" with the Cattle College

Nov 2004: organize a seminar on "alternative media and the democratization of Hong Kong" with Bookfest 2004.

Jan-March 2005: mutual support between I-city festival 2005 and in-media

Jun-July 2005: cooperation among People Coalition for July 1 Rally, People Radio Hong Kong (internet radio), In-media and Ming Pao (a mainstream newspapers) on a reflection report series for the development of People Coalition.

Oct 2005: a seminar on "the positioning of citizen reporters" with the Cattle College

• New media and social transformation: conference and workshop

The conference is to be hold in December 2005 when the WTO ministerial meeting happens in HK. We expect many independent media will gather in Hong Kong to report on the WTO related events. We would like to seize this international occasion to organize a series of discussion for independent media groups from all over the world to share their experience in using new media for engaging with the society, and to explore potentials for border-crossing cooperation.

Future development

• Citizen reporter and media DIY training for local NGOs and schools;
• Campaign for freedom of speech, freedom of press and free access to informations;
• Creating a common platform for non-english speaking independent media;
• Promoting culture of sharing, such as the practice of creative commons, wikipedia;
• Exploring new means of social movement and transformation in the era of information society