May First Movement Technology is a diverse organization. Our values and membership benefits reflect our goal of uniting all progressive and social justice activists. In that context, our members expect some things from each other and our staff.
Expectations
What members can expect of our organization and staff:
- Our organization will upgrade, maintain and expand all equipment and commonly shared software based on members’ needs and our capability.
- Our organization will assure that all our networks and systems are functional and that, in the case of an outage or problem, our staff will prioritize repairs, fixes and substitutions when necessary.
- Our staff will provide full, responsive and respectful technical support via our support email
support at mayfirst dot org. - Our Board of Directors will communicate with the entire membership regularly and openly on organization issues and developments and report any emergency situations, their status and what we’re doing about them to the entire membership when an emergency arises.
- Our organization will protect your data by fiercely resisting un-authorized attempts by others to access it (including legal and non-legal strategies) and by running nightly backups.
What our organization and staff expects of our members:
- As members, we respect the boundaries of taste, decency and respect for all peoples in the content of web sites and other communications.
- Members pay our dues in a timely fashion as one of our key ways of supporting our organization (see dues payment and coverage policy below).
- May First sends membership notices by email, including technical, billing and political organizing messages. Members are responsible for keeping their email contact information up to date and ensuring that May First email is properly channeled to the appropriate people.
- Members support each others work when and however we can given our own programs, strategies, goals and resources.
- Members treat our staff with respect and sensitivity to the enormous amount of work they contribute to our organization.
- Members participate in the growth of our organization by encouraging other people they know to join.
- Members assume responsibility for maintaining, upgrading, fixing and modifying the software and web sites specific to their membership.
- With the exception of political satire, members refrain from using our collective infrastructure for fraudulent activity or impersonating others.
If you have questions, comments or, sure, disagreements after reading this, please feel free to let us know by writing info at mayfirst dot org.
Dues Payment payment policy
When it comes to dues, May First prioritizes communication. Please let us know if you are not able to pay your dues and we can work out a plan. If the dues are too high, May First’s board has a Resource Usage Committee designed to address these needs.
May First sends payment reminders by email starting 2 weeks prior to your payment due date and will send at least 4 past due reminders.
May First offers a generous 2 month grace period for members behind on their dues, during which time your hosting services will remain fully functional.
After two months, May First will disable your hosting services. If you reach out to us to establish a line of communication, we will re-enable your services as we figure out a payment plan.
If we do not hear from you for 3 months after disabling your membership, we will cancel your account and remove your data (you can review our privacy policy for more information).
Hosting policy
May First members are entitled to host as many web sites, email addresses, database etc. as they would like provided they stay under their designated disk space allowance.
However, as a democratic membership organization, we need all organizations and individuals using our resources to be members in their own right. If members host other organizations’ or individuals’ resources under their own membership it undermines our democratic model and prevents us from collecting the resources we need to build and maintain our infrastructure.
Our policy is flexible. For example, individual members are welcome to host other family member’s sites and web developers should feel free to host staging sites from clients under their memberships.
However, we ask all members to consider how best to support the organization when making these decisions.
Administrative contact responsibility and password reset policy
May First follows a policy of granting final access and control of your membership through the registered administrative email contacts. Members can list multiple administrative contacts all of which must be equally trusted to have final control over the membership.
Members are responsible for maintaining current and accurate administrative contact information, including ensuring that administrative email addresses are properly managed and accessible by authorized personnel within their organization. May First will direct all communications related to dues payment to the administrative contacts.
In addition, administrative contacts are responsible for maintaining a list of technical contact emails. Technical contacts receive all password reset requests for all users including control panel admin accounts, disk space alerts, and direct communications from May First support staff regarding technical issues with the membership websites, emails and other technical resources.
Please note: If administrative email contacts are using email addresses that are under the control of their listed technical contacts then technical contacts must be equally trusted to have final access and control of your membership.
Members must ensure that both the administrative and technical contact email addresses:
- Are current and actively monitored by the appropriate personnel authorized to make account decisions;
- Are updated promptly when organizational changes occur.
Please review our explanation of the roles and recommended practices for maintaining both administrative and technical contacts (link TBD).
Third-Party Access Considerations
In some cases, members delegate control panel and/or server access to web developers or technical consultants. Members are responsible for ensuring that account delegation does not lead to loss off control of administrative contact email addresses. Please review our recommended practices for delegating account access (link TBD).
Organizational Disputes
May First membership is a political relationship governed by our membership agreement and bylaws. May First does not mediate internal organizational disputes regarding control or ownership. In cases where multiple parties claim authority over the membership, May First will honor requests from any of the established administrative contacts in the order received.
Appeals Process
Members who have lost access to their registered administrative email address or believe they have legitimate claim to administrative control over a membership may submit a written appeal to members at mayfirst dot org.
Committee Review:
- Resource Usage Team evaluation of the appeal within 30 days;
- Coordination Committee review of resolution or in cases Resource Usage Team could not determine a final response.
Note: Appeals will not be used to resolve internal organizational control disputes.
Domain Ownership Clarification
May First does not control aspects of organizational identity such as domain ownership. Members retain responsibility for their domain registration and ownership records. Changes in domain contact information or ownership must be managed directly with domain registrars according to their policies and ICANN requirements.
Bulk Email policy
Rationale
Sending bulk email is critical to most mass organizing campaigns. To support this form of organizing we allow members to send nearly unlimited bulk messages.
To increase the effectiveness of this tactic, our bulk email policy is designed around the principle of consent: nobody should have to receive email messages they do not want. Applying this principle to our bulk sending practices has the added benefit of ensuring our mail relay servers have good sending reputations from major email providers, which allows our messages to land in inboxes, rather than being caught in spam filters. Our mail servers are a collective resource that can be damaged for everyone if just one sender abuses them.
General Definitions and Expectations
A bulk message is defined as an identical (or nearly identical) message delivered to more than 50 recipients, excluding transactional email messages (such as donation receipts or confirmation of signing up for an event). Anyone regularly sending bulk email must use software that:
- ensures bounced addresses are automatically removed
- provides a link in every outgoing message allowing the recipient to automatically unsubscribe themself
Additionally, members sending bulk messages must:
- only subscribe addresses that have consented to being added to the list
- ensure no more than 20% of messages sent result in a bounce
- maintain a complaint ratio of less than 1 complaint per 10,000 messages sent
- ensure any subscriber that complains or requests removal is promptly removed and not re-subscribed.
Lastly, any web form that triggers an email upon submission must take measures to prevent submission by robots.
Note: All members with hosting benefits are free to use our shared Mailman server that provides bulk email sending functionality while providing all the technical requirements outlined above.
Sending Limits
- Mail accounts can send up to 2,000 messages per day by default
- Anyone who wants to send more can increase their daily limit via the control panel up to 15,000 per day
- If you want to send more than 15,000 messages per day you have to either:
- Use a mailman list (up to 50,000 subscribers) or
- Use a dedicated VPS (limits imposed on a case-by-case basis)
- Web sites (e.g. WordPress, Drupal, etc) hosted on our servers that send email must be configured with a valid mailbox login and password and are subject to the limits described above. Web sites not properly configured to send email will be limited to just 20 messages per day.
- Mail accounts may not be used to relay mail from external servers managing multiple users or email lists.