Riseup Networks Project Areas

1. Alternative infrastructure for secure email
2. Movement mailing lists
3. Tech Collective Incubation Project
4. Seattle Community Colocation Project
5. Website hosting
6. Software Libre

Alternative infrastructure for secure email

There is a problem with email. The U.S. government practices "full pipe monitoring" and association mapping, which gives them the ability to build a detailed map of how our social movements are organized. For more information on email privacy, see our security primer for activists.

We believe it is vital that essential communication infrastructure be controlled by movement organizations and not corporations or the government. For this reason, we provide email service with an unique level of security and privacy. Unlike almost all other email providers, our logs and email headers contain no personally identifiable information. Additionally, all mail is stored on encrypted partitions and transmitted over encrypted connections whenever possible.

Currently, riseup has approximately 15,000 mail users.

Movement mailing lists

As far as we can tell, riseup.net is the largest non-profit list hosting service, outside of public universities. We host over 10,000 mailing lists, supporting over one million subscribers.

Tech Collective Incubation Project

In order to help other technology collectives get established, we provide free servers, bandwidth, and technical support to over a dozen groups around the world.

Seattle Community Colocation Project

Riseup provides very affordable, secure, and reliable server co-location on a sliding scale basis, based on need. We host about 30 servers, including servers from social justice movement organizations in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, and Canada. See seaccp.org for more information.

Website hosting

Riseup has recently developed a secure web hosting environment allowing new web hosting groups to manage their own domains, websites, databases and mail users. In particular, we do not log the IP address of any visitor to any website we host.

Software Libre

Riseup is active in the Free Software movement. Free Software (or Software Libre) is part of a digital commons for all to use.

Riseup's contributions to Software Libre include:

• privacy and security patches: we develop and distribute custom versions of popular system logging, mail transport, webmail, and web hosting tools which enable system administrators to choose exactly what information they want to retain. This protects user's privacy and guards against downtime, headache, and legal costs associated with overeager government attempts to subpoena log files. See dev.riseup.net/privacy
• backupninja: Backupninja is a popular set of tools that provides a centralized way to configure and schedule many different backup utilities. See dev.riseup.net/backupninja
• debian grimoire: Everything that Riseup has ever done is written up in step by step how-to's and posted publicly to our website, in order to help other organizations grapple with complex free software technologies, especially in the grassroots and direct action movements.
• Debian GNU/Linux: Several riseup collective members are active developers of Debian (the only major distribution created by a non-profit). Many people are familiar with Ubuntu, which is a based upon Debian.
• Additional software: We are in active development of "nest" (software to manage help tickets and riseup services) and "crabgrass" (social networking for activists).