Flavia, Photographer from Italy

The Media Centre at the Athens ESF is a bustling hive of activity enabling activists, professional media and anyone who wishes to communicate the ESF to a wider world to do so. So how does the Media Centre work? Everyone volunteers their experience and expertise to help get things off the ground and running smoothly. Two groups involved in setting up and running the support for the Media Centre are Hellug and AWMN. Each was approached a month before the forum to provide the hardware and internet access through their network.

So why did they get involved with the ESF?

'It's fun, it's what we do, we learn something and it's a challenge!' says Mick Flemm (not his real name!).'It's a huge challenge, we've had up to 120 laptops, the media centre computers connected onto a backup system we weren't sure would work!' Cirrus, who finshed his service in the Greek army just 3 months ago, describes how it's the biggest single project they've been involved with. When asked about problems all eyes go up to heaven with lots of gesticulating and pooh pooh sounds. 'Problems?' he asks, 'we found chaos! We had to cable the entire network and phone lines and only got access to the main server two days ago!' Mick Flemm adds ' we didn't know if the bandwidth and access points we set up would have enough capacity for everyone, if we had enough coverage. Now it's great, OTE has set up their network and we can now do video streaming which we weren't able to do before'.

Initial reports coming in from the ESF in Athens, courtesy of Indymedia Irelands own Paula Geraghty, include photo essays here, here and here; and a description of the media centre.