Please note that this is a historic document and that most of the information below is no longer current.
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)