CMAQ after the summit of the Americas

Since the Summit of the Americas held in April 2001 in Quebec City, the CMAQ has been in a period of transition. As a group we felt that a period of reflection and soul searching was in order. The main items on the agenda were: how the mandate of the CMAQ should change, post-summit, and the need to migrate towards “Open Source” code.

Firstly, we all agreed that outlets such as the CMAQ continue to be absolutely vital, perhaps even more than before April. We also felt that since so much work had already been done it would have been irresponsible to simply abandon the project. One does not plant seeds in the spring, only to walk away in the fall. However, the mandate clearly needed to be expanded in scope beyond the events surrounding the Summit of the Americas 2001.

Probably the most fundamental change has since April has been our transition from “proprietary” to “open source” code. This allows the CMAQ to share its code with other organisations and to participate in the broader open source movement. Between July and February, the tech team has been hard at work adapting the Drupal PHP package to meet our specific needs.

You can now create your own CMAQ account, allowing you to customize the look and content of the site. Furthermore, submissions can now be categorized by theme, thus helping alleviate information overload.

The other big change in the CMAQ has been taking place behind the scenes. Thanks to Quebec City many new faces have joined the Montreal and Quebec City collectives, bringing with them much needed new ideas and new energy. Thanks in large part to them, we now have a permanent office in a community centre in the Parc-Ex region of Montreal, have organised conferences and video screenings and in general are trying to be active members of civil society.

The story does not end here. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, what we do know is that circumstances are constantly changing and we are doing our best to change with them. If you have any ideas, or would like to get involved, or have any comments about the new site (both good and bad) we look forward to hearing from you.

Ceci est un média alternatif de publication ouverte. Le collectif CMAQ, qui gère la validation des contributions sur le Indymedia-Québec, n'endosse aucunement les propos et ne juge pas de la véracité des informations. Ce sont les commentaires des Internautes, comme vous, qui servent à évaluer la qualité de l'information. Nous avons néanmoins une Politique éditoriale , qui essentiellement demande que les contributions portent sur une question d'émancipation et ne proviennent pas de médias commerciaux.

This is an alternative media using open publishing. The CMAQ collective, who validates the posts submitted on the Indymedia-Quebec, does not endorse in any way the opinions and statements and does not judge if the information is correct or true. The quality of the information is evaluated by the comments from Internet surfers, like yourself. We nonetheless have an Editorial Policy , which essentially requires that posts be related to questions of emancipation and does not come from a commercial media.