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Greetings and welcome to the aaa-web mailing list!
The idea for this list was hatched by several people around the US who
were interested in using electronic mail as a tool to facilitate
communication among anarchists and anti-authoritarian activists.
Most of the addresses on this list were submitted at the Sunday night
meeting at the Philadelphia anarchist gathering (some people gave
electronic addresses, some postal address, some both -- this list will
be sent in my next message). A few others are people who expressed
interest who either could not attend the conference or had to leave
before the Sunday meeting.
The name aaa-web was agreed on by those who got together at lunch on
Monday. `aaa' is for anarchist and anti-authoritarian activists (or
some variant of that). `web' indicates that we are non-hierarchical,
decentralized, and want to extend out to reach activists by many means
(and also distinguished between us and the several other uses of
`aaa').
The list has been set up on a machine at the Free Software Foundation.
The FSF is a group of programmers, begun by an anarchist, who write
and provide software free of charge. They believe info and computer
access should be open and freely available, and they provide accounts
and host mailing lists as their space permits. FSF is located at a
computer lab at MIT. The address for the aaa-web is:
aaa-web@moomix.com
As part of their philosophy of access, FSF maintains an open system,
without encryptation, security software, etc. Right now, there is a
list of e-mail addresses only (no names or postal addresses) residing
in the FSF mail aliases file, which is readable by others who have FSF
accounts. The list is currently not encrypted in any way, but people
who know how can use encryptation to send personal messages to other
list members. Can someone who knows how to use PGP (``Pretty Good
Privacy'') send a message with some instructions?
This list is a mail echo, which means that when you send a message to
aaa-web@moomix.com, it is sent back out to everyone on the list.
You can also send messages to any individual address in the e-mail
list, which will be sent out every week or so. (I will send the
current complete list, including postal addresses, in my next
message....after that I'm thinking of sending just the e-mail address
list on a weekly basis, plus maybe the changes and additions to the
postal addresses).
To use the echo, just send mail to aaa-web@moomix.com. Using a
UNIX mailer, you can use a command called `mail'... just type `mail
aaa-web@moomix.com'. Once you are in the mail program, you can
use commands to save your messages (s), delete them (d), display your
list of messages (h) and quit the program (q). If you are concerned
about security or space, you will probably want to print out your
messages or save them on a diskette rather than leaving them lying
around on your system's hard drive.
Unfortunately, I don't know much about using mail from a non-UNIX
system, so hopefully someone else can fill that in!
If you have any questions, additions or changes to the list, please
send me mail at liz@moomix.com. Jan Brittenson, who works at the
FSF, can also add people, make changes and answer technical questions
about using the list (mail to bson@moomix.com). Both of us can be
reached at aaa-web-request@moomix.com (the advantage of the
request address is that it is not tied to an individual, and could
remain the same when the list changes sites).
We can also set up an automatic archiver, which would save copies of
all the messages sent to aaa-web. The disadvantages in terms of
security are obvious. The advantage is that it would be nice to have
older posts available for people new to the aaa-web list and to mail
to people who do not have electronic access. Another option is that
an individual or group could volunteer to maintain an archive manually
on their own system and send it out to people who request it.
There was considerable discussion at the Sunday meeting about who we
want to tell about this list. The consensus seemed to be that we
wanted to start small, with people who were at the meeting and
personal acquaintances that had expressed interest. We agreed not to
announce the aaa-web address to larger lists like anarchy-list or
Usenet newsgroups. One suggestion was that when you want to add a new
person, you could send the list an introduction telling a little about
them, so people can get to know each other better and build more of a
community.
We also discussed the possibility of creating another larger list for
things like large documents, electronic copies of zines, news stories,
and other things we'd like to send out more broadly. Discussion will
continue on this list about how to go forward from here, and Baklava
in Chicago has agreed to send out the list and info to people with
postal addresses. Each local group or individual with e-mail access
is encouraged to create method for passing e-mail messages to people
who don't have access in the way that best suits their local needs
and desires.
Well, that's it for now....I'm sure I've left something out, so
please anyone please feel free to jump in and start the discussion!
-Liz
(liz@moomix.com)