This is because vital but small tools may float under the public radar, while well-established tools occupy an oversized space. Unlike traditional market analyses, the BASICS Market Analysis assumes that readily available user data and market trends are at least partially inaccurate. To ensure that the tools BASICS will support are relevant and useful, the team conducted a market analysis to identify the most well-known and commonly used tools among at-risk communities. BASICS is improving the sustainability of critical open source privacy and security tools by building ties between tool teams and the communities they serve and identifying privacy-conscious methods to track tool usage and prioritize development needs. Internews’ BASICS project (Building Analytical and Support Infrastructure for Critical Security tools) takes these two problems in the open source internet freedom community – sustainability challenges and lack of diversity – and combines them in order to solve both. With most open source tools run on a volunteer basis, the privilege of having both the time and resources to contribute to open source projects is largely found in Western and high-income white communities. In a 2017 survey of open source community members, Github – the world’s largest repository for open source code – found that 95% of respondents were male. Moreover, the community maintaining these tools is plagued by the same diversity problem found in the wider tech industry. However, much of the most widely used and popular open source software is surprisingly fragile and under resourced. In regions facing censorship and internet shutdowns, open source tools provide an essential service by enabling information sharing and privacy protection. Human rights defenders and other vulnerable groups rely on independently developed open source security tools to provide safe and free software to protect themselves and their communities.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |