Radical Techies: The USSF needs you!

2007-01-08 2-minute read

Dear radical technologists: The social forum needs you! We’re expecting thousands of progressives to converge in Atlanta the end of June for one of the largest gatherings of social justice activists in recent history (for more info: www.ussf2007.org). At the moment, hundreds of workshops have been proposed with depressingly few covering any type of issues related to the Internet.

To wit:

mysql> SELECT count(*) FROM node WHERE type =
'content_ussf_2007_session_propos' AND title REGEXP
'(tech|computer|secure|free software|open source|internet)';

+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|        4 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.06 sec)

mysql>

And none of the four are about the Internet (one is about High Tech companies and pollution, one is about electoral organizing, and one is about media skills). One - which looks excellent, is called “Building Technology Skills; Building Movement: Organizing Technology Community of Practice” and is being organize by the Progressive Technology Project.

Despite the promising title from PTP, we’re way under represented in the program.

Fortunately, the is still over a week left to propose more sesions. At May First/People Link we brainstormed some sessions that we think are particularly important. We’re sending this out to you because we know you’re good and we think any number of you can run them. Please consider - and submit a proposal!!

Proposal Ideas:

Secure and Private email: Learn about how email works, when you should consider using encryption and when you shouldn’t, and find out how you too can share email messages without worrying about being spied on by the man.

Secure Internet Browsing: what does that lock on my browser mean? Come to this session and learn how to surf carefully, understanding how to make concious decisions as you surf about what sites you want to connect to and which sites you want to enter private data on.

Using Free Software: There is a lot of free software you can install on your comptuer today. Learn about what software is available and why it’s important to support.

To submit a proposal - go to:

www.ussf2007.org

See you in Atlanta!!