cross-posted in the passbolt publication on Medium
I’ve mentioned in this big internet thing that the co-op is doing a bit of work for passbolt. So first, let me introduce what passbolt is — passbolt is an open source software that does password management for teams. Instead of telling your colleague your password so that they can get stuff done, passbolt allows you to securely share passwords. It isn’t just for people who already know online security. Passbolt is for those of us who use the internet to collaborate, build and learn.
I’m interested in this work for a bunch of reasons, but one of the biggest ones is quite simply this:
I like the team. I’ve gotten to know how they tick over the last couple years. The people at passbolt care about the intellectual conversation of privacy and security in the 21st century. The tension between convenience and security is one that any active digital citizen understands. Many of us take certain steps to protect our privacy. We use things like the EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense, HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger. Some of us contribute to other resources and educational initiatives to teach people about privacy. We are painfully aware each and every time we act in the spirit of convenience, using platforms and tools upon which our data is, indeed, the product.
Passbolt cares about the advancement of this conversation, and so do I. They’re an established start-up, deeply knowledgeable about all the ins and outs of security. They’re building this thing because this tension is part of our digital social fabric. It’s hard to have good privacy and security practices. The people at passbolt are trying to make it easier for people to, at least, do one thing better. I think it’s honorable.
They have other perspectives I find admirable. They want to remove elitism from the privacy discussion. They want to be a diverse and inclusive community. They know unisex t-shirts suck. They want to use humour to help people care. They want to contribute to the overarching ecosystem and community that is open source.
Now these folks have a lot to do, they’re building complicated software. They haven’t had much time to share their perspectives around all this stuff, nor to create a space for others to share theirs. That’s where I come in. I want to create that space. I want to help improve both the user experience of passbolt (the product) and create a safe space for the community to explore the tension between convenience and security.
At the same time, I want people in the current passbolt community to have the support and resources it needs to use and feedback on Passbolt. To that end, we’ve set up a Discourse forum for all passbolt related things.
If you’re having installation trouble, you can come and ask for help.
If you have ideas for improvement, you can detail them here, and you can vote on other people’s ideas.
You can see what the passbolt team is working on in the Coming Soon category.
Passbolt isn’t just about a product, it’s about a mission. We want to make passbolt more accessible and relevant to a wider audience, and we’d like your help. Introduce yourself, tell us whether you’ve ever wrote your password on a post-it and then stuck it to your monitor. Help us find our collective voice in the open source community.
All images in this post are cc-by-nd Bryan Mathers