Using Crabgrass¶
Crabgrass is an internet organising tool, developed and hosted by riseup, that allows a network or distributed group of people to have discussions, store files, and cooperatively write ‘wiki’ pages online.
The first thing you need to use it is an account. If you don’t already have one, go to we.riseup.net and click ‘new acccount’.
Once you have an account, you can join the Climate Caravan group. The web address for the group is: we.riseup.net/climatecaravan
This group is ‘open’ so you should be able to join just be clicking ‘join group’. Later on, this group will be one of many in the Climate Caravan network. Some of those groups will be open, but some will need to stay closed.
Once you’ve joined, you’ll have access to any content added to the group by its members.
On the main page you should see general content that’s relevent to the whole group. There may also ‘committees’ to deal with more specific areas, much like working groups.
As a member of the Climate Caravan group, you’ll be able to see any content posted to any of the committees. If you think the group needs a new committee to deal with an area that’s been overlooked, feel free to set one up yourself.
To add content to the group or any of the committees, click the ‘create page’ button at the top of the menu on the left. You’ll be given the option to create different types of pages. The main ones to consider are ‘Group Discussion’ for general questions or points for consideration, ‘Wiki Page’ for content that will need to be edited or re-drafted, and ‘File’ for any non-textual content that needs sharing.
Using crabgrass helps to streamline discussions, enables cooperative working and prevents huge amounts of traffic appearing on this list. To keep track of information shared within the group, regular summaries of important updates and discussions added to the crabgrass site should be posted to this mailing list. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to give us regular reminders of the existence of the crabbgrass group, and to encourage us to contribute.
Using it takes a little while to get used to, but is fairly straight foward. If you have any questions, just ask.
You might also want to read all about Crabgrass.
