Hey Runners and Robot Apocalypse: Journey to the End of the Night participants,

The all new Team Sign Up form is in.

This year we are trying out a new system to make it easier for people to donate, for people to rally around teams they like and donate on behalf of those teams. This is our first year trying this, and we are doing it due to overwhelming feedback that this is something people would appreciate. It doesn’t look very web 2.0 right now but it works, and I think it’s a stepping stone for cooler things to happen in the future. With teams having their own pages that they can customize and log their stories and stats.

This race is 100% free. There are no tickets and there never will be. Coming out to play and bringing your friends is all we care about.

We put RAJEN on because we want you, our fans, our friends, our members, the Story Luck kids, and those of you who have no idea who we are to have an adventure. We want you to spend a night creating new stories in the city of Chicago. We think that’s a public good. We put this on every year no matter what. And we will continue to do so until the end of time. We love it.

Every year, people ask, “Why don’t you make the race for charity? You know, like race for the cure, or a fun run. If you charged five dollars, people would totally pay to do this. It has to cost you money to put it on!”

While that sentiment is really super double plus nice, and you’re always very generous with the buckets and hats we pass, and while we know you’d be willing to pop a Lincoln to play, we want to make several things very clear. This race is licensed to us via a creative commons non commercial license. At it’s heart, this race is about free imaginative play. It’s about a group of volunteers getting together in order to give you an amazing experience, without expecting anything in return. RAJEN, and JEN in general is a gift. We take that very seriously.

This race has flourished all over the world due to it’s free and open nature. It’s flourished because there aren’t any gatekeepers. Not even $5 stands between someone and playing this game.

That got us thinking, even though we think of RAJEN as our charity work, it might make sense to use it as a mechanism to help other charities we care about.

We are happy to announce that we will be raising money this year for Common Cause’s campaign to educate people on the importance of net neutrality.

Net neutrality is the idea that your data shouldn’t be throttled artificially. Net neutrality is the idea that all data over the internet should be treated equally and that there shouldn’t be gatekeepers between you and the information you seek, whether that be a small website like Storyluck.org or a big one like CNN.

This year we will be splitting donations equally with Common Cause. Click here to find out more information on how they are educating people on Net Neutrality.

And click here to sign up as a team for RAJEN.

Thank you for being generous with your money and your time.

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