The project plans to Webcast at least one hour of English programming daily during the WTO meeting, more if possible, looped for 24-hour access. (On November 9, tune in at: www.greenpeace.org or www.indymedia.org.) Plans for Arabic programming are also in the works. The origin of the "broadcasts" will be the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, as it is docked in Doha, Qatar during the WTO meeting.

Marcus "Sky" Covell, an IMC-UK journalist and activist, helped set up the collaboration. He describes the project for MediaChannel:
 

The IMC, also known as Indymedia, was founded in Seattle in 1999 to cover the protests at the World Trade Organization Summit. With 80 sites now in more than 50 cities worldwide, the IMC has grown out of proportion to anything its founders had anticipated. This partnership with Greenpeace is the most recent step in the dramatic history of Indymedia and the road it has taken since Seattle.

The IMC is a nascent, experimental phenomenon. It is impossible to calculate how many people are involved, as participation in the volunteer-run group runs the gamut from those who work full-time to keep the infrastructure running, to those who post a single story during a specific event. The IMC has no world headquarters, but if it can be said to be located anywhere, that location is at the convergence of several critical trends: the rebirth of activism, the maturation of the Internet and the crystallization of what participants see as a new evil in the form of out-of-control corporatism.

This project started about two weeks ago, while I was in Italy, following up on the Italian anti-war movement actions and the Genoa IMC/Global Social Forum raid. I was online, chatting with friends, when Gillo Cutrupi from Greenpeace struck up a chat box. What followed that afternoon was a conversation that lead to an offer that Indymedia had to respond to.

It has taken an enormous amount of work with Greenpeace to get Chema Hernandez Gil from Davos IMC onto the Rainbow Warrior and to set up a radio and web broadcast channel so that the movement can have an independent viewpoint of what is going on at the WTO meetings and the concurrent protests.

We now have enough gear to operate an onboard studio, as well as a land remote station. Mini-disks will be the core of our news gathering. The ship has two satellite phones, as well as the usual assortment of mobile phones and antennas. (We also have a full range of broadcast quality video gear including editing decks and satellite transmission equipment that we will be using, but that's a different story for now.) We are expecting a journalist from a major U.S. paper and two journalists from Al- Jazeera TV to travel with the ship from Dubai to Doha.

For the Qatar broadcasts, we hope that others will send us finished programming, and that others will use our programming on their radio station and/or Web sites. A big part of what we want to do is bring WTO protests to the delegates. Not many will listen at first, I assume, but some will. If we have important things to say, more will listen. Another goal is to inform people around the globe of what is happening at the meeting. Hopefully they will use the information to put pressure on their governments.

It has become clear that Third World and developing countries will have a voice and feel empowered at Doha. They were ignored in Seattle but this time, many dynamics of the WTO conference are different. Greenpeace sees Doha as a defining moment for their organization and for the growing anti-war movement they are leading together with Friends of the Earth (FOE) and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). As an activist, I feel that the WTO has run to this corner of the world because they thought they would be safe from protest. But this time the protest will occur inside the conference. This meeting, taking place in the Middle East, has come at a very crucial time. The West and all of its capitalism and theories of globalization will be under a Middle East microscope. I am convinced that world leaders will chose Doha as a global platform not only to address the larger issues of global economic justice but also to speak out on the subject of the war as Ramadan approaches.

This presents several truly amazing scenarios. With most corporate media shut out (or preoccupied in Afghanistan), it will appear that the WTO is running away from criticism and from analysis. The IMC view is that the corporate media that have managed to get access are WTO-friendly press. There would have been no "alternative," "free" or "independent" viewpoint presented . until now.

Who knows what will be decided behind closed doors? Indymedia intends to find out if these doors are closed to the Third World and developing countries.

Greenpeace felt it important to work with Indymedia and to have IMCs carry its message so that it could speak to the anti-globalization movement around the world about its peace and environmental agenda. It was particularly interested if we could broadcast in NYC and on our South American network. We are sorting out these requests and channels are being coordinated.

We are excited by the prospect of the two Al-Jazeera journalists on board the ship. We are hoping to broadcast IMC video of the conference on Al-Jazeera TV so that we can educate Arabs and the Middle East about the anti-globalization movement and also the new anti-war movement. In turn, we are working to expand and assist new IMC's in Beirut and Israel. Both are a first, I think. It is definitely a first for us and truly represents a global step forward for Indymedia in terms of its coverage.

I think what has helped this new relationship with an old NGO like Greenpeace and a young digital media activist news network is the realization that both movements, although not completely merged, have managed to bridge generations and to educate each other.

I hope the IMC network makes the most of this and we make significant progress towards becoming a truly global independent news media network. I have high hopes for great things. Indymedia really does go where no other news agency will go and thus amplifies the voices of the unheard, the dispossessed and the dissenting from all corners of the planet.

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

The Media Channel is a not-for-profit project of OneWorld and The Global Center, and is produced by Globalvision New Media.