Building on the success of the BASICS project, Internews launched SUSTAIN, a project with the goal to make critical open source safety tools more stable, secure, and user friendly by investing in improved sustainability for six critical tool teams who are at particular risk due to lack of strategic planning, capacity, and reliable resources.
The Internews Open Source Sustainability Symposium, held in February 2024 in Brussels, Belgium
To accomplish this, SUSTAIN is working towards two objectives:
- Improve the long-term sustainability of open source digital safety tools through the development of customized, multi-year Sustainability Action Plans in conjunction with Code for Science & Society.
- In collaboration with the Guardian Project, support tool teams to strengthen their capacity to understand and respond to the needs of vulnerable users through the implementation of Clean Insights.
Internews is proud to collaborate with the following free and open source tool teams:
Bayanat: an open-source software for processing and analyzing digital evidence, to help hold human rights violators accountable. Bayanat enables safe data preservation, analysis, and sharing. SJAC has used it to analyze over 300,000 videos, linking data to specific human rights violations or investigations.
Save by Open Archive: Save protects internet freedom by leveraging a suite of privacy-enhancing technologies to safeguard your media and identity in the event of internet shutdowns, surveillance, device confiscations, content takedowns, limited bandwidth, and data loss.
Tella: a tool designed for activists, journalists, and human rights defenders that provides a safer and easier way to document human rights violations and collect data, even in challenging environments, ensuring protection from physical and digital threats, data tampering or censorship, and aiding in producing high-quality documentation for research, advocacy, or transitional justice.
Onion Share: an open-source tool that lets you securely and anonymously share files, host websites, and chat with friends using the Tor network.
Mailvelope: a browser add-on that you can use in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox to securely encrypt your emails with PGP using webmail providers.
OpenWisp: a multi-tool for managing computer networks. It helps set up new network nodes, create secure connections, and customize configurations easily. It supports different types of Wi-Fi security and can deploy any configuration supported by OpenWRT, an operating system for embedded devices. It also allows monitoring of network performance, handling user access in public Wi-Fi hotspots, updating firmware, sending alerts about important network events, and visualizing the network structure. It’s particularly handy for complex networks like mesh or VPN networks.
Sustainability Guide
To support the sustainability efforts of other Free/Libre and Open Source Software tools, Internews has created this guide to collect available resources and share lessons learned during the course of this project. The Sustainability Guide is currently undergoing revisions, so please send any feedback you may have to Marc Shaffer, Program Officer for Internet Freedom and Resilience, at [email protected].
Blog Posts
Podcasts
The Digital Dada Podcast focuses on discussions around Online Violence and Digital Security. Today, online violence is generally unnoticed by the mainstream media. One explanation for this is because society has yet to acknowledge that internet violence is “real” violence The fact that it takes place on an internet platform does not make it any less real. Most victims of online abuse are reluctant to disclose the matter, which is aggravated by the victim shaming that occurs.
Join in and listen to our conversations!
Hosted by Cecilia Mwende Maundu