2008 Christmas Newsletter

GreenNet has had its collective hands very full as we’ve hurtled through 2008 –
Edited highlights from this year include…

• launch of the new GreenNet website
• new deals to beat the credit crunch blues
• more websites, more features, more content making a difference
• supporting 100 women’s rights workers get into ICTs in Cape Town
• low powered computing for everyone – GN’s 8 watt (and very cute) PCs going for a song

If you’d like more information on any of our services or the stories featured in this newsletter, just drop us a line at info@gn.apc.org.
As usual, the office will be closed during the holiday period from 25th December to 5th January, although the technical team will be monitoring the system daily. If you have any urgent problems, please call us on +44 (0)20 7065 0942 and leave a message on our answer phone or email support. We will try to help you as far as possible. Make sure you include any error messages that you are getting and your email address.

Please do also remember to unplug your computers periodically (don’t leave them on standby!) and enjoy a peaceful, happy and healthy holiday time.

Featured services

Integrated, ethical (and beautiful!) design

Ever have the feeling that your organisation’s website, pamphlets, business cards and books have started going off at different speeds and directions? With help from the Wave graphic design workers’ co-op in Hastings, GreenNet can now help you pull things back together again. Wave have been working on design projects with non-profit organisations since 1987 and we’re very excited to be working collaboratively on GreenNet member projects now. The Wave-GreenNet combo means that you’ll have all your design bases covered when you start a web project with us – from logos to leaflets to web page layouts. By working together we’ll guide you through developing a comprehensive project plan that includes a logical project structure and creative concept for all your work.

Filestores – the next big thing

“Filestores” provide a secure, searchable and structured place for all your organisation’s sharable documents. If your organisation has people working from home, or in other remote locations, a filestore gives them the same networked access to the office as everyone else has – from anywhere that’s got an internet connection. GreenNet’s careful backup management also gives you the peace of mind that nothing’s ever lost.

You can choose to access your file store through your ordinary file manager on the desktop, or via a web interface. Either way uploading, editing and downloading files couldn’t be simpler. And with a set-up cost of just £350 + vat it’s a bit of bargain too.

Virtual server hosting – good performance, good space and good value

With filestores growing fast, we’ve revamped our virtual server hosting and now have a range of options to suit different sizes of organisations. Prices start at just £20 + vat per month for a 10 GB virtual server, rising to just £85 + vat per month for 150 GBs.

Credit Crunch Websites

Explore your creativity with a home-made website. If you’re short of cash, confident with a mouse, and willing to try your hand at something new, we can set you up with a blank website ready to roll for just £250 + vat. We’ll guide you through getting started and give you a hand if you get stuck along the way.

Aleutia E2

GreenNet is committed to developing and offering greener computing options for our users and the general public. Computers left on through the day/night are a large chunk of the carbon emissions in many office and homes. GreenNet’s tiny, robust and super low-power computer the Aleutia E2 is about to get an upgrade with improved specifications to give you a better user experience.

The sealed unit will still have the option of no-moving parts (using a CF card) as well as a full hard drive version running either Windows XP or the free, Open Source and extremely popular alternative called Ubuntu (we run most of our office PCs on it!). It will still use less than 10% of the power that you’d expect to draw from a regular desktop computer. We are also hoping to launch a green server using a fraction of the power as most but still as powerful but more efficient. For more information visit the GreenNet site or if you have any questions give us a call

Fiscals and fiduciaries

Feed the birds, twopence a bag – but don’t start a run on the bank! We’ve had quite enough of those already this year.

And don’t forget that GreenNetters fancy a spot of merry-making as well at the festive season, even if that means putting a silly red Santa hat on top of the computer monitor and settling down to a jolly bit of data importing. So do please pay your bills on time – and help us keep the wolf from the door.

We’ve done our best to help out over here – passing on the taxman’s miserly VAT reduction and a new special offer for signing up a friend. It’s the least we can do for our lovely loyal GreenNet members. A Merry Christmas to you all! Now where did I put that piggy-bank…?
Spread the word

GreenNet relies almost entirely on word of mouth within the green and progressive community for advertising its ISP and web hosting services. While we like the good things that people say about us in any case, if you are an existing GreenNet member you can now claim an additional 3 months’ free membership if someone signs up on your recommendation to a GreenNet Home/Activist or hosting package. Just ask them to mention your name and address or your billing id when they apply.

We’ve extended this scheme until 30 April 2009, and will think about it again on May Day. See http://www.gn.apc.org/services/recommendation-discounts for additional terms.

Support News

Now is the time of year when many GreenNet subscribers can deservedly leave their work email alone, and spend a few weeks with friends and family. So we get many requests to set up auto-responder “Out of Office” messages, to let enquirers know when the holiday is over and they can expect their message to be attended to.

GreenNet auto-replies are not sent in response to suspicious incoming email, and a maximum of one per day per address is sent. If you need to set one up on your GreenNet mailbox, you can control the auto-reply feature yourself by logging into the SquirrelMail webmail system. For instructions, please see: http://www.gn.apc.org/support/setting-out-office-auto-.... Don’t forget to turn it off when you come back!

In the last newsletter we mentioned that suspicious emails in your mailbox such as spam-like messages and “phishing” (including any messages pretending to come from GreenNet and asking for your password) may now be marked with “?spam” in the subject. For most GreenNet members, this was activated on 12 December. The most clear-cut spam we block or discard altogether. If we do get it wrong, you can send the misclassified message to us – if you are a Thunderbird or Outlook Express user it is easy to forward the message as an attachment to the appropriate address (‘spam’ or ‘notspam’). See http://www.gn.apc.org/support/how-forward-email-attach... Older versions of Microsoft Outlook unfortunately have difficulty forwarding an intact message, but you can still send it to our normal support address, support@gn.apc.org.

A reminder that if you are still receiving a lot of spam or “delivery failed” bounce messages, it might be coming through a trustworthy web site or domain that you have with a host other than GreenNet. For information please see http://www.gn.apc.org/support/how-avoid-email-spam

Finally, if you have a .uk domain name with GreenNet as your registrar, we should remind you that you have a separate agreement with Nominet UK, the .uk domain registry. For terms and conditions, please see http://www.nominet.org.uk/go/terms

The best way to contact us over the holiday period is email. If you can’t email, please leave a message on our main support number (020 7065 0942). We’re back from 5 January.

2008 Projects

We are proud to announce another year’s bumper crop of great new web projects, driven by open source technologies, planned collaboratively with our members, built by GreenNet web developers – and populated by you!

GreenNet’s new website

Liz started experimenting with a new look for GreenNet using Drupal back in 2005. As she got more into Drupal, so did the others – soon everyone was working on cool sites with Drupal. And the GN project got left behind. When 2007 turned into 2008 and we found ourselves writing in the 3rd Christmas newletter running, that we’d be launching a new website in the new year, we all agreed that the delay was enough already. We argued noisily about structure for a while, reorganised the original hierarchy, then chucked that out and opted for the disorganised logic of tagging. And once we got into that tagging thing, we went Drupal module crazy. It was a bit like the way that musicians used synthesisers in the 80s. Mimo was installing new modules faster than the microwave could heat up his Tescos lasagnes.
So after all those months of making like a tortoise in the slow lane, we went for a sprint finish – masses of work by Mimo and Liz – ruthless standards of coding, colouring and layout. And now we’ve got a site that’s as stretchy as you need, we’re cross browser, W3C and semantically valid, and we’ve got rounded corners. There’s space to read, links that work, content that’s up to date, and although Sarka’s original design never made it through, we have kept her lovely logo.

Faanweb home pageFAAN

The FAAN project brings together partners from across Europe that are involved with local, sustainable small scale producer retailers. The project needed a public website and a community networking area for its partners, which provided alternate language content and multiple access levels for the different types of users.

The project has a neat navigation that guides users through a well-tagged resource-rich site.

London Tai Chi

The London school of Tai Chi have had a static website with GreenNet for donkey’s years and decided it was time to move on. With a very limited budget, they opted to customise the site themselves. We did a basic Drupal installation for them, spent a couple of hours training them in how to manage the site and the result is a well structured and presented website that does the School proud.

PWYP home page graphicPublish What You Pay

Publish What You Pay (PWYP) is an international coalition that holds governments accountable for income from extractive industries. They wanted a site that would serve up their resources in a simple and organised way with an updated look and feel. We worked with PWYP to devise a simple navigation that rationalised their content into 5 main sections, including an interactive map of members across the world. We partnered with Wave for the design element of the project. Their design is based on clean, well structured xhtml code in a non-table based layout and using cascading style sheets (CSS) for all the presentational information. This improves the site’s chances in search engine content rankings and also makes pages quicker to download, much more accessible to all users and easier to update.

Right to Education home pageActionAid’s Right to Education project

The Right to Education Project came to GreenNet with an already-made complex tables-based design mock-up and just 3 weeks to build a website and content management system for their content. We used Drupal to create the initial site structure, and then carefully rebuilt the design minus the original tables. While the technical development work was going on, we trained the R2E project workers on how to use the system and they worked on getting their hundreds of documents into the site.

Communication Point

Communication Point needed a website which could better present their voluntary sector communication consultancy services. Working with a modest budget we set up a robust and simple site that could accommodate all their content and would be ready for more bells-and-whistles development in the future. CP meanwhile took care of the graphic design.

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS)

The CLTS project at the Institute of Development Studies has spent the last years in a corner of the Livelihoods Connect website. With the project’s increased reach and reputation has grown,

GreenNet partnered with Wave for the design element of the project. They created a custom page design using CLTS’s images, and made sure that the site meets required accessibility standards.

FTX logoFeminist Tech Exchange

This year GreenNet also got involved in an exciting new initiative called the Feminist Tech Exchange(FTX). In November, one hundred women’s rights activists from all over the world came together in Cape Town to exchange skills and experiences around their use of technology. There were five main areas of training: Digital Storytelling, Social Networking, Wireless and Mobile networking, Video and Audio production. In the process we explored the relationship between feminism and technology, how feminist values inform and affect our use of online tools. The event was organised in partnership with the Association for Women’s Rights in Development(AWID) and the APC Women’s Networking Support Programme (WNSP) and took place just before the 11th AWID Forum, where the FTX participants were able to practice their new skills by blogging, making video and audio recordings and other content to bring the forum to a wider audience.

Looking ahead…

With many GreenNet members facing tough times during 2009, we’d like to invite you to contact us if you have anything you’d like to discuss in terms of development needs or payment plans that could make things easier. And of course if you have suggestions for things you’d like us to be doing more of, or differently do let us know.
And finally thanks to all of you for your continuing support!

With warm wishes for 2009 from all of us in the GreenNet Collective