support a sustainable female:pressure platform!

Update: Because of the great support so far we extend the goal of this fundraiser to make sure that we can cover the operating costs for the next twelve months.

Our aim is to make femalepressure.net sustainable and more user friendly. With this campaign we want to raise additional funds to increase the compensation for the development team of the new female:pressure website and to ensure that the operational costs can be covered in the coming years. The new website will have a much faster search function with search results that can be linked to. It will look much cuter than the old website and be fully responsive for all users: members and external users alike. We will finally have a state of the art handling of passwords and logins as well as profile pages for each network member. Please find more details below, including how we plan to spend your contributions.

here's a first look at the new female:pressure website

background

Founded by Vienna based DJ and musician Electric Indigo in 1998, female:pressure started as the technological answer to an alleged lack of female artists in this field. Initially planned as a mere insight into the status quo, it now also serves an archival purpose with links to works of artists who are no longer active or who are sadly deceased. Over the years, we broadened the focus on women in favour of an explicit inclusion of transgender and non-binary members. We practice an intersectional and anti-racist approach to our work and try to listen to and learn from each other on the female:pressure mailing list.

The project began as a simple HTML list until Viennese media artist and open source expert Andrea Mayr programmed the current public database in 2001. Growing from about 180 listed artists in 19 countries back then, female:pressure is now proud to include over 3150 members in 90 countries [July 2025].

From the beginning, the evolution and maintenance of female:pressure has been based on voluntary work of individual members and on private financing to cover the operating costs, in particular through the founder of the network.

More than 20 years after its implementation, it became increasingly urgent to bring the female:pressure website, database, and generally its infrastructure up to date. In 2021 we were able to finance the first steps in this direction after female:pressure received the Tag Der Clubkultur 2020 award in Berlin. Last year, in 2024, we got additional funding from the Austrian cultural ministry to further help us develop the website. In total, it took us four years and several profound transformations of the dev team as well as a complete conversion of the technical framework to arrive at the point where we are today: We are close to the finish line for the minimal viable version of the new website!

state of things

Marine Drouan, a long term member of the network, suggested first re-designs as early as in 2016 and is responsible for the visual design of the new website. Sandra Dollo implemented and finalized Marine’s design and refined and designed the user interaction elements.

We now have a powerful new database thanks to the founder’s brother Andreas Kirchmayr who not only programmed and designed the new database but also took care of a smooth data migration from the old database. He integrated regular updates of geographic data via geonames.org, and wrote a script for links maintenance so that broken links on the website are minimized. Andreas worked pro bono to support his sister’s nearly lifelong project.

Ulrich Berthold and Mihàly Podobni are the main developers of the code with some help from Electric Indigo who manages the project and is in charge of everything administrative. She also defined the main functionality and the content of the website and has been taking care of the daily maintenance of the database and website [both old and new].

Most of the essential elements of the new website are already in place:

next steps

To launch the new website and go public with it, we still need to fulfill some tasks. we have to:

In addition, later on, we would also like to:

We hope to make female:pressure more sustainable for the future with the admin section of the new website because we then will be able to split the administrative work between more volunteers.

costs

We want to stay independent from megalomaniac tech giants. So, in order to secure the necessary infrastructure for this constantly growing network and to keep it state of the art, we needed our own managed server and chose one from a European provider. We had to migrate the network’s mailing list from a sponsored service that was stopped some years ago to another, paid European provider. We use a private GitHub repository as long as we are in development and have to pay for each seat there. We use some other paid tools that help us organize our work smoothly. Therefore, we now have considerably higher operational costs than 20 years ago. For the period of about one year, most of these costs are covered by the grant we received from the Austrian cultural ministry. Everything beyond this, including, for example, the costs for our SoundCloud Pro account that we need for our podcast series, or the yearly domain costs, is paid by Electric Indigo, the founder and administrator of the website, database, and mailing list.

The approximate yearly costs for developing and maintaining the website are currently € 1300. Once the dev work is done, the yearly costs will drop to around € 700 including SoundCloud Pro, the mailing list provider, and the managed server.

support

With your help we will be able to pay for the development work that still needs to be done. We will also be able to cover some of the costs already incurred, and secure funding for the expenses to come. If we raise € 4000,-, we can cover the minimum due payment for the team, who have already put in many weeks of volunteer work for this project. If we can raise € 8000,- or more, we will be able to not only compensate for the dev work in a more adequate way but we can then also ensure the payment of the operating costs for the next few years.

This is how we plan to spend the raised funds:

€ 3000,- to cover the yet unpaid backend and frontend programming costs.

€ 1000,- to cover additional web and UX/UI design.

€ 2000,- to cover the approximate operating costs of the next three years.

€ 2000,- to pay for the full admin interface that we would like to have.

The team works at a calculated rate of € 200 per working day per person. This is not much for developers and experienced graphic and ux/ui designers but we are all in for the cause. Up to now, we received € 6000 from Tag der Clubkultur 2020 [Berlin] and € 10000 from the Austrian ministry of culture in 2024, and even if we raised € 8000 through this campaign, an equivalent of roughly estimated € 12000 will remain in unpaid personal contributions from the team. These amounts do not include the pro bono work for the new database, geo data implementation, migration from the old database to the new one and implementation of several server and monitoring tools which is worth about € 60000, conservatively calculated.

Please support our work that will benefit a wide community around the globe!