Monday 8 October 2012

Cryptoparty Handbook

 
UPDATE: https://www.cryptoparty.in/documentation/handbook 
I am thrilled about this initiative and the book is going to be great.

Aims

IMHO the first aim of this book should be to aid comprehension of
these tools and how to use them for as many people as possible.

Collaboration

I see the book as having many revisions (probably through rounds of collaboration and calls for contributions via twitter and on the wiki practically) but to a group of programmers this would look more like Git commits. We can just accept that git is not the perfect platform for non programmers but commit to accepting all contributions and trying to work them into the book. So we can push the issues system / bug tracker for this https://github.com/cryptoparty/handbook/issues and I like also the properties of forking and branching as one author may choose to go away and rework substantial portions of the book and then request a review which we can do as a team. Again, git is perfect for this because well as hashing to preserve data integrity it is also a great way to make sure there are no malicious edits that have crept in without being noticed.
 

Distribution

I have started seeding a torrent: https://cryptoparty.org/wiki/CryptoPartyHandbook#Torrent
 

Here is an idea for viral distribution of the ebook: https://occupywiki.org.uk/wiki/Projects/DiffusionEbooks

If we use this approach we can then distribute the printing costs and supporting the movement can be a simple act of printing out 5 booklets or maybe even just individual chapters for reading on the train or something and dropping them off somewhere or putting them in a cafe or some
other interesting alternative meetup spaces (for me that is London
hackspace for sure). Maybe people can even just print out individual chapters? 
 

Virality

I think this level of virality and outreach is really what we need to
keep growing and getting our message and this good information to more
people. It is also nice to be able to give something to people that
attend the parties something to take away in order to help them learn
from home. 
Added to which, git might just be the most non hierarchical and most advanced
collaboration platform that we all have so I think that we should
 give it a shot and we can always switch to another platform if it doesn't work out.

Github

UPDATE: I posted more thoughts about the use of GIT on the Liberation Tech Mailing List
https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2012-October/005172.html

 

I am pleased to say that the book can now be found here: https://github.com/cryptoparty/handbook/