The People's Media Center (PMC) -- in acknowledgment and celebration of the critical and valuable role people-produced media has played in advancing our movements and creating another world -- will break new ground in growing alliances, supporting our host city, and building relationships to further our efforts and deepen the connections between art, culture, media, and transformation. Understanding that WE (as activists, artists, community organizers, media makers) are the change agents we have been waiting for... the PMC has created these living principles to address and challenge hierarchy within our movement. Recognizing that individuals and organizations with differing abilities, purposes, and resources are all welcome within this space, we are all committed to overturning institutional imbalances which can lead to division and impair the quality and quantity of stories being generated and shared before, during, and after the USSF. For us, institutional imbalances means that many voices have been traditionally denied access to media outlets, and media-making resources that guarantee that access, as a result of oppression and exploitation. Therefore, we accept the responsibility to ensure that those who have been denied such access based upon race, class, sex, age, creed, ability, criminal history, sexual orientation, and immigrant status will be prioritized.
1. Accessible Space: The PMC will be accessible, welcoming, and secure for all attendees, audiences, and communities in and around Detroit and beyond through Detroit Expanded. It will be accessible to all people with a diversity of languages, skills, resources, and abilities.
2. Production Environment: The PMC will encourage all Social Forum attendees to document the USSF using TV, radio, online video, blogging, print productions, photography, mobile blogging, podcasts, websites, databases, and/or any other creative form(s) of expression and information sharing.
3. Learning Environment: The PMC will provide an easily-accessible and welcoming space for Social Forum attendees of divergent backgrounds to learn and teach media production. The PMC will facilitate resource and skill sharing.
4. Meeting Space: The PMC will be a space for networks, organizations, crews, and ad-hoc groups to meet and plan, produce, recruit, and collaborate.
5. Community Resource: PMC equipment, organizing principles, and volunteer energy will be left in Detroit for local media justice organizations.
6. Collective Use: As co-users of, and co-creators within, the PMC, we collectively acknowledge that we are all experts at our own experiences and will all share in this environment of radical living and learning.
The People's Media Center will build strategies for our movement in these areas:
1. Alternative Media: Reach out to alternative media organizations and networks to create autonomous "spaces" that are run by participating organizations, groups, and accountable individuals who can provide the necessary means to produce media and teach media production, as well as prominently publish their work through this process.
2. Community Facilitation: Create a working group of diverse backgrounds and perspectives to facilitate an organic schedule of trainings, workshops, and meetings. Foster communication on disagreements and concerns when necessary. Engage in restorative problem-solving as requested.
3. Praxis and Pedagogy: Individuals and Organizations will share the environment by assuming responsibilities to teach and work as well as learn, offering our abilities and resources as part of this dynamic, grassroots media-making exchange.
4. Media Politics: List these principles and others prominently, recruiting both political and non-political organizations, while encouraging multiple perspectives and furthering the conversation in our communities about the role of people-produced media in creating another world.