Tech Volunteers hack-day ideas

This page is for people to outline the ideas they want to pursue during our upcoming hack-day.

Your idea or project here

Please edit this page to add your own ideas or improve information about those listed already.

Requirements and dependencies

  • Tell us what you need.

How does this project advance ORG's goals?

Blocked

Earlier this year, ORG's tech-volunteers community relaunched the Blocked project, taking it to a whole new level. But we want to go further still:

Requirements and dependencies

  • Our development environment needs rebuilding and separating from the live infrastructure.
  • We need put the modx front-end code under revision control and make it available to be hacked on.

How does this project advance ORG's goals?

  • It's a great ongoing source of press stories for our campaign against web censorship
  • It establishes the reputation of our technical volunteers as a force for building digital-rights tools
  • It helps website owners detect and oppose restrictions on their freedom of expression

Error 451

Error 451 is "A New HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles" or "an additional Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) status code for use when resource access is denied due to legal demands." being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

ORG is campaigning for its adoption.

There's information on the website detailing how to get involved.

Requirements and dependencies

None?

How does this project advance ORG's goals?

When people visit a page that's blocked for legal reasons, it can be hard to work out why that page isn't accessible. ORG believes that court orders censoring websites should be transparent so that informed debate can take place about the merits of such orders. Widespread adoption of a HTTP status code distinguishing between a technical error and a legal obstruction would aid this goal.

Self-hosted tech-volunteers infrastructure

Some in the community feel ORG should avoid using third-party services where possible. Some also feel ORG should do more to facilitate anonymous contributions from and communication within the community.

The following third-party services are currently used by the community:

  • Github
  • Waffle.io

The following services are maintained by ORG staff (i.e. Lee) and are used by the community (among others):

  • tech-volunteers mailing list at lists.openrightsgroup.org
  • Mediawiki instance at wiki.openrightsgroup.org

The following services have been set up, and are maintained, by the tech-volunteers community:

  • Mumble server at dev.openrightsgroup.org
  • ModX development server on the dev-censor-1 VPS

The following services have been suggested by the community:

  • TRAC instance for bugs, code, etc.
  • Anonymous editing of wiki.openrightsgroup.org via a single account with credentials shared on the tech-volunteers mailing list.
  • Anonymous posting to the tech-volunteers mailing list
  • Pseudonymised mailing-list archives
  • Encrypted mailing list

Requirements and dependencies

  • Hosting infrastructure would be required.
  • We may need to pay for the time of a good systems administrator to make sure routine and exceptional maintenance tasks are handled promptly.

How does this project advance ORG's goals?

  1. The technical community could publish what it learns thereby lowering the barrier to self-hosting for partner organisations and others
  2. Sufficiently mature services backed by robust systems administration could be offered to partner organisations as an alternative to cloud services
  3. Having our own infrastructure available may help facilitate future technical projects

Open Badges

Give recognition to community contributors using open badges.

We already have one "badge": the founding 1000 widget.

Requirements and dependencies

None?

How does this project advance ORG's goals?

Encourages and rewards participation in our technical community, leading to greater engagement, more and better projects coming to fruition, and more fun being had by more people :)

Campaign Events

The initial idea for this was to build a tool where people type in their postcode on ORG's site, and then we bring up which events are happening in their region. It's now expanded into a general campaign-events aggregator and calendar tool though :)

http://campaignevents.co.uk/

This project has a backlog here: https://waffle.io/openrightsgroup/events-issues

The software for this is already well developed, as it is an Open Source product that has been used for succesful projects before. The founder / lead developer will be at the hack-day and we may do some coding this weekend - maybe some widgets to reuse the open data?

But mainly we can discuss this project, the software and the ideas that have feed its development, and principally ways to get other stakeholders involved!

Requirements and dependencies

There are test servers already if you just want to play with the app - try http://demomasterss.openacalendar.org/

If you want to install the software youself the Open Source project is here - http://ican.openacalendar.org/

How does this project advance ORG's goals?

  • We want to help people engage with others, form relationships and communities, and perhaps join together into local groups that campaign on our issues in their local area.
  • We want events on our issues to reach the widest possible audience

Digital credentials of politicians search on org.org

Tool that accepts postcodes and then filters 'they work for you' to bring up voting record of local politicians on digital only issues. Or ORG stories relevant to your local MP.

Requirements and dependencies

None?

How does this project advance ORG's goals?

With the general election only six months hence, ORG wants to help voters understand the digital-rights credentials of candidates, and encourage them to vote for candidates with good track records or positions on our issues.

Tech-volunteers community visibility

The community could do with its own static webpages, or a separate wiki, on which to host information about our projects, how to get involved, the rules and norms of our group, etc.

Requirements and dependencies

  • We need somewhere to host the site
  • A domain or a subdomain of org.org

How does this project advance ORG's goals?

Fostering and developing our tech-volunteers community will help us build more and better projects to fight for digital rights

Data Protection Subject Request tool

Tech_Volunteers_hack-day_data_request_notes

Requirements and dependencies

How does this project advance ORG's goals?

Helps people to assert their privacy rights.

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