March

riseup users stories

Last month we asked you to send in stories about your group and Riseup, and we got some extremely sweet emails. Here is one from Galhoverde:

I’m part of a group that organizes the distribution of organic food directly from its producers – small family groups and other small groups – to the community. The idea is to make contact with small producers, get to know and listen to them, to their demands, their difficulties towards us – the consumers – and the other way round. We talk to the producers about our doubts and difficulties, and about completely eliminating the supermarkets whose main purpose is having a great quantity of products always, independent of the time and way the food is grown and cultivated: everything in the name of profit.

The people in the community of our group, which we call ‘trocas verdes’(green exchanges, literally) often have yahoo, hotmail and gmail accounts, and sometimes can’t understand what’s the problem. But working with the land and the anti-pesticide idea, they get to know a little more of the alienation involved in supporting these kinds of emails.

In fact, it’s the same idea: the corporate servers operate like the pesticides. In Portuguese we use the term ‘agro-toxic’, and I suggest that the corporate servers are ‘techno-toxic’. People are understanding and changing their mail accounts to Riseup, since it is the same as our local idea: supporting and participating in activist and small organization for a self-sustained and conscious new practice.

If you have your own Riseup story, please send it to pigeon@riseup.net. Thanks!

email update

For three days in February, email was out for approximately half of our mail users. Yikes! Luckily, catastrophes like this do not happen very often for riseup. While some of you might think we were dining at fancy restaurants, taking long bubble baths, and sipping champagne, we wanted to let you know that was not the case. We kicked into hyper-riseup mode to fix the problem, and worked to the edge of exhaustion, pulled all nighters, and even developed some hand cramps. In early March, we had another outage, but we used lessons learned from the first outage to respond to the second one differently in order to get everyone’s mail up and running faster.

We wanted to let you know we take it really seriously when something like this happens, and understand how crucial mail and lists are to people’s lives. We know you all rely on us to do the work that you do, and we love that work, and we will always work hard to fix problems when they come up.

mail clients make life better

How do you check your riseup email account? If you have regular access to the same computer, we recommend you try out a mail client such as Thunderbird. (And we don’t just like it because it has “bird” in the name.) Checking your mail with a web browser, through https://mail.riseup.net, can be convenient, but offers less features than a mail client.

Also, you can use both: use a mail client at home and webmail at the library, cooperative-owned cafe, or other places you might check email. For more information, check out http://help.riseup.net/mail/mail-clients. While you’re there, you can look around for some other hints!)

seeking ruby on rails volunteers

Last month we put this call out, and it was successful, (thanks!) but we want more, more, more, crabgrass revolution!

The revolution will not be hosted by myspace! Riseup is steadily building Crabgrass, our very own open source, not for profit, social organizing platform. Crabgrass is designed for group and network organizing, and tailored to the needs of the global justice movement.

There’s an excellent crew of developers (some from riseup, some not) actively working on this project. If you are a ruby on rails developer, html / css or ajax coder and are interested in getting into the development mix contact starling@riseup.net

thank you!

Every newsletter, Riseup reminds users that we exist entirely on your contributions. Right now, we’d like to take a moment to THANK YOU for donating. Because we prioritize the security and privacy of you, our users, we do not keep a database of donors. This means riseup users don’t receive a thank you note, a small token of appreciation, or even cool stickers in exchange for your contribution, as you might if you donated to the non-profit industrial complex.

Additionally, your contribution goes directly to the running of riseup. We like to spend our limited human resources and money working hard to keep our servers running, rather than sending thank-you notes. So know that if you contribute, the money is maintaining a user-supported communications infrastructure for social justice. And we are full of thanks, even if we don’t say it often.

For more information about sustaining Riseup, please go to:

http://riseup.net/donate