There are a lot of secure messaging apps out there, and more every day. They’re vital and the sector is vibrant, but if you want to help groups and individuals keep their work private from repressive states or any other authoritarian agency of reprisals (e.g. reactionary, violent parents of queer kids), there are a lot of neglected areas that aren’t messaging-based that could use your work.
Eleanor Saitta and her friends rounded up a couple dozen of these that reflect the real needs of NGOs, from ticketing systems to collaborative scheduling to version management for media files.
Ticketing systems, for managing everything from task assignment to emergency reporting so organizations know what’s going wrong, what needs doing, who’s doing it, and who’s checking up on them
Project management and scheduling tools, because knowing what needs doing often isn’t enough if you also don’t know how long it’s going to take and who can work on what
Group password vaults, because while password safes are great for people working alone, they’re not good enough for teams
A Wiki/Etherpad/Word style change tracking mashup, because while every team has documents they need everyone to have access to, some of these are sensitive, and while collaborative editing is critical some of the time, sometimes you also need changes to be examined and approved by humans with real care
Calendaring systems and collaborative scheduling tools, because setting up meetings may be boring, but they’re often quite sensitive and good tools can save a lot of everyone’s time
Contacts databases, because people’s real contact information can be both sensitive and critical for an entire organization to have access to
Location coordination tools, for giving teams ambient awareness of who’s where without revealing that to adversaries
Versioned file management for media files, because a working newsroom needs to keep track of media, but much of that media may be very sensitive before a story comes out
CMS and editing workflow tools, for doing the same work on text-centric documents
Recording logging and proxy/full clip sharing, for doing the same work on video or audio-centric pieces
Collaborative backup, so teams can have accessible off-site backup run by people they can trust directly
Collaborative mind-mapping/white-boarding/presentation building systems, for thinking collectively
Collaborative spreadsheets, because they’re often the best tool to deal with ad hoc problems
Please Stop Writing Secure Messaging Tools
[Eleanor Saitta/Dymaxion]
(via O’Reilly Radar)
(Image: VisiCalc running on an Apple II
, Gortu, PD)
