Dear MobileActives from around the World. You may have noticed that we have had an inordinate number of funky site issues - slow-loading pages and 406 errors. We have reached the end of the useful life of this site which is three years old and it has gotten creaky.
We are a small organization and this site has, with the exception of a start-up grant from the amazing Surdna Foundation, NEVER received general funding. That is to say, we have funded this site from individual contributions, your donations, and overhead charged on contracts and project grants. Clearly, this is not a very sustainable way to run things as the site and readership has grown to more than 3,000 unique readers a day now.
Here is what we are doing:
We have moved our servers to ensure consistently high bandwidth, are upgrading the core of this Drupal site, replacing the search engine, and doing a usability overhaul. You will see changes over the course of the next months as we are moving content over, getting rid of spaghetti code, and making the site more usable. Please bear with us in that process, understanding that we are working with limited resources!
Here is what you can do:
First of all, stick with us. We like and need you - you are the source and inspiration of all things mobile in social change. Secondly, if you want to help make this site beter, donate. We can use every donation, no matter how small to help defray the costs of running and making this resource better. Please give!
Just to give you an idea what your money will buy: Migration to Drupal 6 and Apache Solr is costing us about $3,000. Hosting is about $500 every month. Staff time (including our amazing interns) to write content, add resources, review tools and how-tos, runs at about $4,000 a month.
As you can see, we are a lean machine but even these moderate costs add up. Please contribute and thanks for all of the support and inspiration you provide!
Warmly,
Katrin, Mark, Becky, Mel, Annie, Kelechi, and Vivian
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