August

Infrastructure work: August 16 - 20!

The riseup birds are going to be moving some things around in the nest during the week of August 16th - August 20th. What does that mean for you? It means that all of riseup’s services are going to have interruptions, including mail, lists, crabgrass. We will try to keep the interruptions as short as possible, but please don’t panic if something is not working! We will work hard to get everything working again quickly.

Help Tickets

Do you speak a language other than Portuguese or English? Have you posted a help ticket, and not received a response? Well, first of all, sorry. Really, truly, sorry. Our desire to provide world-wide access to our services does not keep pace with our small collective’s linguistic abilities, and thus we have not been providing adequate tech support to many languages that our users speak. This feels terrible, and we’d like to find people in all languages to answer help tickets, and definitely have that as a long term goal, but it is probably something that won’t happen so quickly.

One way to help is if folks can try to answer each others' help tickets. All riseup mail users can log into our account management system, from the “Change my settings” link on our mail page. From there, you can click on “Help Tickets” on the left, and see public help tickets. You can click the “show filter” link to select languages you know, and answer help questions from others. By sharing knowledge, we can spread the work and answer questions more quickly!

Also, if you’re able to find someone in your community who could translate your question into (preferably) English, which we have the most tech support in, we’ll answer that more quickly, but we know that’s not a great solution. And we know you’re doing marvelous and important work, so, sorry.

News from the Collective

We are meeting for our second ever Riseup retreat this month. It’s extra fun for us because we are a geographically scattered lot, and rarely get to communicate outside of internet chats and conference calls with bad audio. We’ll be putting our heads together for lots of meetings, as well as building some hardware, eating bagels, going night swimming, and doing some long-term visioning. At our first retreat, two collective members fell madly in love. We’re hoping this one will be at least that epic. Stay tuned for announcements about what new projects and schemes we’ll be taking on in the near future.

Fundraising

Servers cost money. Bandwidth costs money. Stipends cost money. Corporate email and lists are free not because they don’t cost money, but because they data mine all users as much as they possibly can in order to sell this information to others. Yuck. Since you’re using Riseup you probably hate this as much as we do. If you can send in a donation this month to help cover some of our costs, we’d mightily appreciate it. Thanks.