Absolutely! We all feel constrained by what we may think of as a skill we do not possess. If only we could do that extra thing we would be so much more effective in promoting the cause! Well, there will be another contact who has the completely opposite skill set to you.

We need to be working more closely together. One of you may be a dab hand at writing press releases, but the idea of organising a veggie social do fills the other with the heebie-jeebi es. In that case, don't organise veggie meals out - leave that to someone else, but smarten up or even draft another contact's press releases.

The Internet is a wonderful help for working together across a wide area, and ActiVeg aims to make the most of this. Some activists and groups have more familiarity and better access to the Internet than others. They can help show others how simple and useful it can be, with practical advice, and even training sessions.

We also all need moral support from time to time, someone to share our experiences with and boost our sense of purpose.

The idea of setting up ActiVeg sprung up through meeting other active vegans at rare events and really enjoying their company and sharing ideas and plans, but finding it difficult to network remotely, with no real means of communicating as a group.

ActiVeg sits is a Local Veggie Web site. It's simple, straightforward and quick to update, so Contacts can suggest and contribute with things they want added.

This is where network Contacts can form supportive bonds between eachother.

Contacts can feel isolated sometimes. This is a difficult situation be in. Just having the direct support of one other person can make such a difference to the effectiveness and moral of a Local Contact. The Buddying system is an informal way to bring Contacts together to jointly work on projects. On the other hand, some people like working alone. ActiVeg will aim to satisfy the needs of the needy without imposing.

Who you buddy with will be down to mutual agreement.

The infrastructure for the ActiVeg Buddying System is being built now! Meanwhile,do tell your Contacts Coordiantor if you are interested in this Protected email address. However, you can already get in touch with another Contact to see if they'd like to share support and plans with you. And do use the Forum to share information and inspiration with all Local Contacts.

Add it to the forum and I'll put it in FAQ.

If you think a current FAQ answer is wrong, that can also be discussed in the forum.

Tell us as soon as possible.

Please use our events suggestion form . It's also worth posting it all round the Internet on vegan & veggie forums and noticeboards, and telling the main vegan and veggie charities and campaigning organisations.

If you represent a vegan and veggie charity or campaigning organisation, or are just great at making big events known about, then we could give you an administrative login to this site so you can directly post events and tell the thousands of visitors to this site each month about what's happening. Contact us.

Please Contact Us and also tell the Vegan Society Protected email address, marking your email for the attention of the editor. The magazine comes out 4 times a year.

Please Contact Us so we can give it a mention here, and also tell the Vegan Society Protected email address.

This is a temporary problem with our service provider while we sort out where to keep the authentication certificate. Your system thinks this may mean we are pretending to be something we are not. We are in fact activeg - a bunch of vegans trying to make the world a better place for people, other animals and the planet.

If you wish to trust us and register anyway, press the 'proceed anyway', or similar, link in the box that has been thrown up complaining. That's what we're doing.

Simply change your website, and your registered contact details here on ActiVeg by logging in.

If your site admin has gone walkies and you want to take over, then contact us.

If your local site just seems a bit unresponsive, out of date, or whatever, do try to contact the site owner through that site. If they prove unresponsive then contact us.

The inter-active map shows all the ActiVeg Network's active sites made by local people who want to share what they know, and sometimes run veggie, vegan and campaigning groups too.

These are simply done by people who've requested to have a free ActiVeg site for veggie and animal altruistic purposes. You could do it too.

The Internet can get more familiar after a while and has fabulous resources on it. Click on the links on this website for starters!

You can also be a member of all the great veggie and animal-caring charities and organiations in the UK who can keep you up to date, and there are independent magazines ranging from the inspiring Off the Hoof to Cook Vegetarian.

The ActiVeg website is built on Local Veggie Web. As such it very easy to update even for those without technical skills, although there is still some learning to be done. If you would like to be active in keeping the site's content fresh just contact Stephen for a site login and say how you think you can help.

I expect the area of most activity on the site will be the writing of "articles" such as the Help for Contacts ones.

For most users adding ideas to the forum is by far the most productive way to proceed. It allows for ideas to be discussed before any work is started.

Some ideas are non-trivial and require extra modules to be created for LVW, such as the buddying system and the Contacts skills database and unless you are a MySQL and Perl programmer with time to kill these are best left to Stephen - but design feedback via the forum is essential to getting things right.

Events must be:

• ones we've found out about, so tell us if you know of more that fit ActiVeg criteria!
• in strong relation to veganism/vegentarianism and/or animals at the hands of humans
• peaceful and legal, and avoid promoting anything that is not
• positive and constructive

Events must be one of:

• bigger than normal local events, i.e. not the usual meet-up kind of thing, but when some extra effort has gone in, especially if they involve making a wider public aware and/or involve more than one organisation or group
• regional or national
• international

If any food at events will include non-veggie stuff it needs to be stated and there must be a strong presence of vegan and veggie food.

Suggest any events that fit these basic criteria, or just add them if you are an ActiVeg administrator.

Event contacts

Events require a named contact organiser, or at least the name of a group, and whoever's details are given must be told or have asked for them to be put there. Email addresses input using the special email address fields or button will be spam protected, but those simply included in description fields not using the email button will not be, so please never do this.

This website will be particularly useful to those without regular Internet access.

You can access the site and forum from anywhere, like the library, your friend's house or wherever. Because notices and information will now be posted on the website and forum, not by email, you won't get your email inbox so clogged up. It will all be saved on the website so you won't need your own computer to save anything to.