Inforiot is a website that provides 'alternative dates and news from Brandenburg' that's what their slogan is promising. On december 3rd in 2001 this independent media project went online, not knowing how sucessfull their project will become. Being frustrated from constant neglection by the mainstream media, Inforiot started their own news.

"I wasn't very much involved before, but surfing the available websites from active groups against neofascism and racism in my area I found that even though they were doing really good and important things, their website just looked terrible! So I offered them to collaboratively develop a totally new site." Marcus, a 18 year student, remembers how he got involved in the project. He - like many others by now - joined Robert and Andreas that had already developed the idea and design for Inforiot. Marcus wrote the code for the site by himself. Today he can hardly believe their site was visted by 100.000 people within the first year of existence. By now up to 500 people visit Inforiot every day to inform themselves or to discuss about recent events.

Robert and Andreas have been active against racism and neofascism for years already before they started inforiot. They didn't know much about internet before, but they saw the chance of a new networking tool, that could help them keeping in touch with other acitivst groups from Berlin and Brandenburg and most importantly to share information s on racist and fascist attacks. Before inforiot, one of the biggest problems in acting against neonazis was for them, that they felt refused and neglected by the mainstream media. "If there has been a neofascist attack, most of the times we didn't have a chance to even know about it, because the local media as well as the regional media just didn't cover it. And if they did, they would just talk about youth violence!" . Robert remembers how much time they were always spending gathering all the informations and redistributing them to other activist groups from other parts in Brandenburg so that they at least know what is going on.

But inforiot is much more than just a collection of local and regional news, produced by mainstream media and independent media. It's also a collection and descriptions including contact information of all different youth groups and youth projects from all over Brandenburg, that are also engaged against racism and neofascim. It's the only place where young people can find out where to go, if they want to meet people who are also striving for a world with no racism and who are opposing neonazis. Inforiot is introducing 17 different youth and cultural centers from all over Brandenburg and 31 different youth groups that are active against racism and neofascism. They are also presenting several dates for concerts and conferences that take place in Brandenburg.

But the success of inforiot seems to be the news collection in the first place. Stefanie, a frequent user puts it that way: "Before I always had to visit two different sites and go through three different newspapers to find what's going on in Brandenburg with racism and neofascism. But Inforiot just puts is all together. They're not really trying to make a better news production they are just offering a wide collection of what is already there." Especially when incidents are happening Inforiot seems to be the only reliable place for people to get the up to date information, to discuss and also to find a collection of what all other newspapers were publishing about it. One latest example for the importance of Inforiot was the murder case last November in Potzlow, a small village in northern Brandenburg, where a 16-year old was brutally murdered by neonazis for wearing hip-hop pants. Inforiot was the only source offering so many up to date information about the case. But they also wrote about the reaction of the people living there ,who tried to express their sadness and anger about that murder. It was also a place for people to come and discuss, to recall and remind that engagement against racism and neofascim is still very important.

The secret of Inforiots sucess seems to be their focus of bringing together, what has sucessfully been developed so far. There have been many web publishing projects so far, but none of them really managed to be so widespread and complete and at the same time open for participation to everybody who wants it. There is an editing team, but there are many more people involved and active in shaping the site. But even though so many people are involved already, inforiot stays open: everybody can feel free to contribute. As Robert puts it: "Many people think they don't have anything say. But when they see, that what they experience is important to us, they actually start getting involved, because obviously they do care about all this racist violence."

Read the full interview with Inforiot.