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Thank you. Can you hear me OK?
OK.
OK. So thanks for having me here today.
Again, my name is Michael Brennan.
I work for an
organization called Second Muse.
And the title of my talk today is called
Building Internet
Freedom
Tools for real people.
Now I've spoken at Congress
a few times before, but about more
specific topic based on my
authorship recognition research on how
authorship recognition can be
an important issue for privacy and
security. And I did my academic research
around that.
And now that I am done with academia,
I decided to take.
I wanted to take kind of some of the work
that I was doing there and start looking
at how it can be applied more broadly.
How can we build more effective
tools that can be used by individuals
all around the world trying to
circumvent
censorship surveillance, communicate
safely, communicate anonymously?
So I want to start by telling a little
story,
and that's about my time last December
in Burma. I had the really
amazing privilege, and I
and I consider it a privilege,
and I thank
the folks that brought me there to go to
Burma with an organization called Radio
Free Asia.
Radio Free
Asia is a nonprofit based in the United
States that promotes free press
and free speech in countries
in
Asia, where those things are not
necessarily a given right.
And in our time there, I was
there with a number of technologists and
diplomats and other folks.
We tried to spend
some time understanding the state of
information and communication technology
infrastructure throughout the country.
The state of censorship in the country.
The state of access to the
internet and
give you a sense. And now the country.
Burma is changing a lot right now, and
this was a year ago. So I'm not going to
suggest that everything is the same now
as it was a year ago.
But for the purpose of this story, I
think
you can get a good sense of what
all this stuff was by looking at this
photo.
This is a photo
of a giant mural in the Information
Ministry of the Burmese government.
I don't want to try and take away
from it by trying to explain it too much.
But yet upon teleport, which is the
building in the background, is a state
owned telecom.
And you can see the
mixture of emotions and craziness.
I think that goes on just and this is
a giant mural that goes on a huge
wall in the information ministry.
So here are some facts about Burma
in December of 2012.
Number one, if you wanted a SIM card
for your phone to access a mobile data
plan, you needed an official ID.
You need the two passport photos,
and you had to fill out a whole bunch of
paperwork
and submit it to the government to
get approved by a plan.
Oh, and the plan cost
$250, which is multiple times
the monthly income of your average
Burmese family.
If you wanted to access the Internet and
Internet Cafe, the rules
around that included
the cafe had
to record the identities of all users,
and it takes screenshots of every screen,
every five minutes.
And it restricted access
to political websites.
And finally, a law that
was still on the books, though perhaps
not being enforced at this time, was
that sending or receiving material
over the internet that the government
found offensive was
punishable by long jail terms?
And we actually met
an activist blogger who spent four
served four years of a 20 year jail term
for receiving an email with a cartoon
that offended the government, receiving
an email not sending.
So all this in
a place where at the same time,
access to technology
was increasing dramatically and very,
very, very fast.
This is a small town outside
of the capital, Naypyitaw.
It's a market,
and we were walking around the market and
found folks all over the place that had
smartphones, basic smartphones like this
one to access the internet.
So what we were asking people
the whole time we were there is when
we go back to the United States, what
message do you want us to convey?
What do you want us to tell
people back in those states?
What do you want us tell politicians
companies things like that?
And we thought because of all of these
crazy things,
there's there's probably going to be some
important things people want to come
back. But you know what?
The most common response we got was
when will the Myanmar language, which is
the language of Burma, be available in
Microsoft Office?
That was the most common thing we heard.
And personally, I never I never
would have thought that would have been
the number one request.
Never would have thought it.
And perhaps that's due to my
own personal bias
or my own lack of experience.
But since I went there, I've been
sharing the story with a lot of folks,
especially folks in the technology
community and people building
anti-censorship
tools and circumvention tools.
And they're they're surprised.
They were surprised, much
like I was.
And that made me think.
If a response like this is so
surprising.
What does that mean for how
we approach and understand the needs of
users around the world when we're trying
to
build tools to help them, right?
It really made me think a lot about that.
And by the way, if you want to know more
about our trip there, you can go to this
link
and read the full report.
So what I want to talk about today
is a project that we're doing called
a user focused approach to guiding
the development and impact
of internet freedom tools.
I want to share briefly a little bit more
about who the Open Technology Fund is,
which is a radio free Asia program
funding this work.
Talk a little bit more about second, use
my organization and why we're involved.
I want to explain our
process and share some of the emerging
learnings because I'm going to say this
multiple times.
We are in the early stages of this
project. This is not a finished project.
This is a this is a progress talk
and I want to invite you to participate
because
the main reason I'm here
talking to all of you today is because we
want to
solicit more feedback from others
about what we're learning so far and
how
we can do something that is meaningful
and impactful to the space and additive
to it, rather
than is yet another burden or another
point of view that's just thrown in the
mix.
So how are internet freedom tools
developed? There's a couple of approaches
I want to talk about,
and one approaches this.
I'm a developer and I see a technical
threat
to privacy or security.
I'm going to develop a tool to address
this threat, and others
who have the same threat can then adopt
this tool and use it as well.
Now, this is not
this approach is not wrong.
I think this is a common approach.
I think there's good reasons for
it.
But I do think oftentimes it can be
incomplete.
Here's another approach.
I'm a developer or I'm a designer,
and I've studied and assessed the privacy
and security needs over user community.
I've built a tool for the
community which addresses those
needs. Specifically, I will
examine other communities and translate
this tool if they
have similar privacy and security needs.
Now that sounds nice.
This is kind of maybe the other end of
the spectrum, but that doesn't sound very
realistic to me that every time
we're going to build a tool, we're going
to do this big, comprehensive study and
understand everything that's going on and
then design a tool for that.
But I think there's value to both
approaches, and what
I want to
know is, are we that we can resolve these
approaches?
Is there a way that we can resolve the
technical approach
with the human centered approach
and kind
of bring them both to bear in
this space?
What we're finding is that so this this
this approach of looking at kind of both
sides of the coin is something that's
seen a lot of
success in all kinds of industries, in
all other sectors. But what we're finding
in this space is that
if you are a developer, you are a
designer of tools and you want to embrace
more user centric approaches
to developing your tool.
There's not a whole lot of support out
there for you.
There's nothing out there that we've been
able
to find that says this is how you apply
a human centered
design approach
to building an internet freedom tool
toward building a privacy tool.
And we want to remedy this, hopefully by
building some of that support so that
more of that can be ingested into the
development process of many tools.
So before I go any further, I've already
used a bunch of phrases that
I want to define
formally before we go forward.
And I'm
defining these. Not to say that these are
the definitions, but that these are
the definitions we've chosen to use
for this
work so that when I'm talking about these
things, you know that what I mean by
them.
So the first
term is internet freedom to what I've
thrown this around a bunch.
The definition of the internet
freedom tool actually defined by the
funder of this work, the Open
Technology Fund, are technologies
that circumvent
repressive censorship and
surveillance or increase communication,
access and safety.
Now there's many tools that fit this
bill, whether you consider
them an internet freedom to or not.
For the purposes of this work,
if they fit, the bill will consider them
as
an internet freedom tool
that might be Tor.
It might be otbr,
might be read, phone or
cryptoquant or p-gp.
When we talk about user communities,
that can mean a lot of things in this
work. We mean it as a group
of
users or potential users
of internet freedom
tools that can be defined by
geography, culture,
share experiences or a shared set of
challenges.
And then also be throwing
around a couple of terms, a bunch which
I'll go into more detail about later.
And one of
those is ethnography
and non-free is the study of culture and
human motivation through
qualitative research.
Now, the difference between qualitative
research and quantitative research very
generally is that qualitative research
is essentially more subjective,
which has a bunch of benefits and
also some drawbacks.
With subjective research, you can really
get
some amazingly deep insights.
But you also run the risk of bias and a
lot of ways.
And then all ethnography
is captured
under a broad umbrella of something
called human centered design.
And human centered design is really the
belief that if you take an empathy
based approach to understanding the
motivations and the goals
of people, you
can do a better job of understanding
their needs.
So,
so, so
through this project, what we're trying
to do
is number one, understand the
internet freedom tool development
process, understand the context
under which users
employ those tools
and understand how the needs of
users can better inform the creation
and deployment of
these tools.
And we really want to do two basic things
to this number one, we want to create
a create a framework of some sort
that will increase the ability of
developers to
make better tools that address the needs
of users more explicitly.
And number two, we want to find more
intersections between developers, users,
funders and intermediaries so they can
collaborate and work together in
creating more robust
tools and talk about why that's
important in the minute.
So there's a few major
steps to this, and I'm going to go
through these in stock.
First of all, we're conducting a really
thorough landscape analysis
of the whole
space, trying to understand
what's going on in the space, what the
needs are.
Essentially take our arms and first
before we act.
We're going to develop
a research based approach grounded in
ethnography and human centered design.
So taking
what we've learned, applying it to
developing the research questions that we
want
to find out so we can assess the needs of
users, conduct an actual
on the ground
study with real users or potential
users with a clear threat model,
understand their needs and
then take what we've
learned and create some sort of draft
pilot framework
that gives that kind of
lends support to that approach I was
talking about before that says here are
some things that you can do as a
developer.
Now, note that I asked for an asterisk
next framework.
I think framework. I mean, a lot of
things. And honestly, at this point, you
know, we're taking the output of this
work is going to be a framework that we
say here, here's something that's helpful
to you. Hopefully, as a designer or a
developer of tools,
I don't want to presuppose what that will
be yet.
Sure, it might be a report.
It also might be a series of instruments
and tools. It also might be a ton
of surveys and step by step analyzes for
how to take the results of those surveys
and turn them into actionable milestones
in your development roadmap.
We're still figuring that out.
We're going to be working on this project
through the spring, and I want your
feedback on what will be valuable to you
once I've talked a bit more about
everything we're doing here.
So before we go back into
kind of what what this project's all
about, who are these organizations?
Well, first, the Open
Technology Fund, which is we are really
thankful, is funding this work.
The Open
Technology Fund exists to
advance the research, development and
implementation of Internet Freedom Tools.
It's a program.
That is part of Radio Free Asia, which I
described earlier.
And they've done a lot of really amazing
work. They've funded a lot of great stuff
in the space projects like Tor, Global
Leaks, Whisper Systems,
I mean, you name it, they've been
involved in some way.
And they're really pushing the envelope.
I think in this space in terms of a
funder in this space by
funding,
let's say, riskier projects because I
think funding is a big challenge in the
space and they're they're there to try
and start up some new ideas
that maybe haven't got the attention yet.
And secondly, the
second, this is my organization.
So. And secondly, as we
work to improve the world through
technology and collaboration, what
does this actually mean?
Well, I work with a group called the Open
Innovation Group, and we design
and execute
programs that source innovative thinking
all around the world to solve complex
social challenges.
One of the programs that we've run for a
number of years. Some of you may know
it's a program called
Random Acts of Kindness.
And this is an earlier
project that we did for a while.
Really say, Hey, maybe we can get a
bunch of developers and technologists
around the world to decide for themselves
what's important in their communities
and build something relevant to them?
Now, since then, we've done a lot of
other projects. We ran NASA's
International Space Apps Challenge, which
looked at how you can apply open
innovation towards space exploration.
And then we ran a project called the
Central America Domestic Violence
Hackathon, where we worked with
non-profits and NGOs
throughout Central America.
We said, Let's look at the space of
problems within domestic violence in
Central America.
Let's identify a subset of those problems
that could potentially be solved by
technology.
And let's build and convene communities
of technologists to
prototype solutions to some of those
problems. And then ultimately, let's
incubate for really, really good ideas
into
lasting projects that could actually be
implemented and used in the real world.
Now I can give a whole talk about that.
I won't.
But I want to say that this was an
interesting one because unlike the first
two projects, the privacy
and security implications for doing open
innovation in the face of domestic
violence start to become really clear.
And we realized,
Wow, you can't just have
people innovating on this.
You have to actually give
people a way to do it safely,
securely, freely, openly.
So really, what we
realized is we believe that, you
know, free speech and free communication
is a fundamental ingredient of open
innovation.
If you're going to come up with innovative
ideas, you're
often going to be disrupting the
established order. And that established
order has a reason to try and shut down
your way of coming up
with those new ideas.
So how can we help empower open
innovation, especially through
technology? And we believe that
by
supporting the research and development
of more effective tools that enable
people to access freely
and communicate freely?
So that's really what led into this
project.
And I just want to give a shout out to my
team I'm on.
They're not here today, but
I couldn't do this without them.
So my background, I have a patient
computer science.
I did my research on privacy and
security.
But to do this work properly, we need a
diversity of backgrounds
and
Katie Metzger off on the top right.
She has a social science background and
has really applied a lot of that work to
social impact and socially sustainable
businesses.
Roxann Stafford, on the bottom left, has
a deep background in design thinking
taught at Stanford for a bit about that
and has
done a lot of ethnographic work and
Shetland recently joined second.
Views are really happy about that.
He just came over here from Nassau, where
he was heading up their open innovation
program.
So the four of us been working on this
project a lot. I want
to give you their faces too, because
we want to talk to more people.
And so now maybe you know who they are
when they come and say, Hey, can you talk
to me for a minute
about what you're doing?
OK, so back to the project,
I'm going to talk about the three
phases of our work. We're in the middle
of the first phase right now.
The first phase is the landscape
analysis. Then we're going to do an on
the ground research study in a place
called Dharamsala in India, which I'll
get you in a minute and then we're
actually going to figure out the best way
to output
all this stuff.
So as I said before, before
we do anything by saying, Oh,
this is what can be done in this space to
build more effective internet freedom
tools, we have to take our own medicine.
We have to look at this space and say,
Where are people in this space?
Where are developers at where our funders
that were our intermediaries and users
at?
Can we understand the landscape of the
space before we start deciding how to act
within it?
And that's why we've been spending a lot
of time doing over the past couple of
months. Our main mechanism for doing
this is through interviewing
experts representing
a diversity of roles in the space, and
we've interviewed
about 20 people at this point and
20 people doesn't sound like a
lot. I assure you, when you're doing
comprehensive interviews, it is.
It takes a lot of prep and a lot of posts
work out of every single interview to
make sure you're coming up with an
approach for that person that makes sense
and you're making the most of your time
with them and then distilling all the
learning and comparing that learning to
the other folks who you've been
interviewing.
So, so what are these interviews look
like?
Well, these are just a few exam
questions. We actually have this giant
template that
we custom tailor to every, every person.
But here are some different questions
that we might ask either everyone or
developers we're going to.
Eaters or users,
by the way, I've been through intermediaries
around a lot. I just wanted to find that
really quickly.
In this context, an intermediary would be
an individual
or group or an organization that acts as
a middle person between users on the
ground and developers of tools.
So that could be a research institution.
It could be an activist
group.
It could be a training organization.
So and it could even be a funder.
So you might ask a developer,
you know, how are you identifying the
needs of your own users and how do they
currently
affected them a process because we want
to know the state of
things right now.
We don't want to come in with assumptions
about how people are
already doing this, and we've already
found a wide range of some people take
feedback in these different ways.
Some people don't
intermarried or intermediaries might ask
one user when you're working with users
to identify
tools that are most effective to them and
they have a threat model that they're
working with.
Do you validate that threat?
And if so, how?
And for users, you might even ask very
simple questions around, you know.
Walk us through something that you're
doing today?
Or what are the concerns that come to the
top of your mind when you're using the
internet? Because that might tell you a
lot about their current state of
education and understanding about what
they're trying to do.
So what are we learning?
And this is kind of
the main points I want I want to bring up
here.
We're in this landscape analysis phase.
We've done a really broad review.
What are some of the things that were
coming out of this?
Now some of these might be obvious, I
think some of them less so.
So the first one that
came up are personas are underused.
Well, my first question who here
in the software development context,
who here knows things that feels like
they have a good understanding of what a
persona is and how it's
used.
OK, so there's a bunch of hands up, but
it's actually only about
a third of the room, maybe
a little more than that.
So for those who
aren't familiar personas, personas are
basically an archetype of a user and
a stereotypical
user among a certain group.
So you might have a persona for
a journalist
and you might look at that persona.
And when you're designing tools, you
think about that persona, which defines
the motivations, the education level, the
threats, the concerns, the daily
activities of an individual
who is a
journalist.
Now what we heard from folks is that
generally
using personas to develop internet
freedom tools, people are nervous of
that because, you know, there's
a big debate on the acceptable
level of granularity of personas.
How can you say that all
journalists are the same
and design a tool based on an archetype
of a journalist?
When the threatening threats are they
that
they have are very different in all
different parts of the world.
But what we found and we've heard from a
lot of people is that actually
this space can afford some more
generalization regarding the creation
and use of personas
that actually maybe being
overly concerned about not having
granular enough personas
prevents a systematic approach towards
design defining tools that can be used by
a wide
range of people in a group
of personas not meant to define a tool to
say this, only
this version of this person can use it.
It's meant to give you a baseline.
Essentially, here's a baseline of
concerns that you're going to want to hit
upon when you're designing a tool for use
of this group.
Another thing which probably is not
surprising a lot of folks, but the
internet freedom space
of
tool developers lacks a lot of
definition.
The interviews we've talked to have
pointed a lot to a lack of cohesion in
the space as a
barrier to collaboration,
but that there
is a desire for collaboration.
And these are just the quotes from pulled
straight from the interviews of things
that
different people have said.
People called it
nascent, splintered, non-existent,
undefined.
And while they sound like they have a
negative connotation, generally the
people saying it were not.
They weren't slamming the space.
They're saying there's there's
more things that we can be doing and more
collaboration that we could be doing in
order to build more robust and more
effective tools.
Another thing that came up a lot about
this and this maybe ties
a little bit more into the previous slide
is that when we've been talking
to developers and we've asked that
multiple developers this question, we
say, Who do you design your tools for?
Who do you think of when you're designing
your tool?
They often say, Well, I think of myself.
And that's not to point blame on
developers at all. I think what it
actually points to is
a lack of support and resources for
knowing who to develop
for, right?
If someone doesn't have a
good understanding of the different types
of users out there, it's very natural
to design for yourself.
It's actually something we all do every
day.
So our question is how can we help
bring more resources so that you don't
feel like you only have to design for
yourself? But you can have a good
understanding of other users.
Training of end users
in Internet Freedom
Tools is an important part of this of
of the development of tools.
It's important because that's where a lot
of developers and experts get
on hand, you know, hands
on experience watching people use their
tools.
But we've heard from multiple
trainers is that the effectiveness
of these trainings is not always clear
because
it's not measured thoroughly
and the the anecdotal
evidence is not always clear.
We actually saw this for ourselves.
It was a really interesting experience.
My colleague Katie, who I mentioned
earlier, went to an event where
a bunch of. So there were a bunch of
journalists from
Palestine that were invited to the US
a few months ago, and
she went to her to an event where a bunch
of trainers and developers
of tools hung out with
these, with these journalists for for a
few hours.
And these journalists talked
about all sorts of things like, you know,
I'm afraid of, want to go over the border
that people are going to take my laptop
and take the data off of it.
I know this story
is about people getting thrown in jail
for liking Facebook
posts, all
these serious concerns about privacy and
security. And then for the next few
hours, they worked with these trainers
and developers
to look
at a suite of different tools and how
those tools could affect and help them
and where they are.
And and there came a certain
point in this
training where despite
the trainers best efforts, and I think
that these trainers knew a lot about what
they're doing, and I really have a lot of
respect
to them. But despite their best efforts,
you can tell that the
journals that were there were starting to
get really visibly frustrated.
They were they were overwhelmed.
Frankly, they were overwhelmed
by all the things that they didn't
know were problems. I mean, these are
folks
coming in that, you know,
didn't even have
a like were expressing concern about
people stealing information off the
computer, but didn't even have a like a
screen lock password on their computer.
Right. So when they're presented with all
this stuff, they got really overwhelmed.
And at the end of this training
event, at the end of this meeting, they
went around the room into the 10 journals
the room, they said.
The final question is
worded after learning everything we have
here today. What are your biggest
security concerns?
And despite everything they said earlier,
despite everything that's been talked
about all day, eight of the 10
journalists said, You know,
actually, I don't really have any really
major security concerns.
And that was
really interesting and really
informative.
Write about these folks came in
with
these clear things that were going on,
and after going through the whole process
of learning about everything that could
go wrong and everything they could do to
address it.
They said this is too much.
Another warning we got.
We've talked a number of funders.
This is a space that is
reliant
on the funding of a number of foundations
and organizations.
And there's not a lot of funding to go
around.
But funders do want to fund.
We've heard that over and over again.
They want to get involved in the space
they want.
They want to give you their money and
say, do good things to help us with the
people that we serve around the world.
But they're currently treading carefully.
And the reason why they're treading
carefully is that they don't have
the certainty that they want before
making an investment.
So here's an actual quote from a funder
that we talk to.
The elephant in the room is how well
are on the ground activists going to
use privacy or circumvention
tools? They won't do it well unless they
are trained or born digital activists.
This is an illuminating quote
for us and something we heard echoed,
though not as concisely from other folks,
that there's skepticism
about the effectiveness of people on the
ground being able to effectively use
these tools.
And I think what's implicit in the
sentence is they're saying they won't do
it well
unless they're trained or born digital
activists and there. And the implicit
statement in there that we've heard is
that most folks are not those
things.
It's important. Remember that funders are
mission driven, and
to them, it's not clear yet what tools
will help them achieve that mission.
And another thing that we heard a lot is
a communication between quote unquote
techies or techies and
non-technical funders is a challenge.
So the I think that's improving.
There've been a lot of
events that have been going on,
especially this year trying to bring
together funders in the space with
developers,
but it's got quite a ways to go.
And a couple more that I want to talk
about. One, this is a really amazing
thing that came up when thinking about
usability.
Is there a difference between use of a
tool and usefulness of a tool?
So when you're examining
usability, they're actually maybe there
is a really important difference there
and maybe we
don't think about both sides of the coin.
This is a quote from
someone, a developer that we talked to or
a researcher that we talked to.
This person said for many
uses that top of mind when thinking about
usability
that the user click in the right place.
Do they enter their password?
Perhaps a better understanding of
usefulness.
And with the usefulness, the questions
might come up not
to the person clicking the right place,
but is this tool relevant
to their daily
activities?
Does it help them achieve their mission?
This is really combining looking
at use and usefulness
separately or bringing them both under
the umbrella of usability
is a way of having a more holistic
approach to usability.
And it's actually also ties into
something else that we heard from a
number of folks, which
is the idea of a
relevant tool versus an appropriate
tool.
The argument being that that we
heard from this person we talked to was
another person who's been involved in
this in the space for a very long time
said that when you go to a user and say
this tool is appropriate for you, you
should
use this tool.
You're baking in a lot of assumptions
into what their realities are every day,
assumptions that you don't necessarily
can't necessarily back up.
But if you go to that person and say,
from what
I understand, here are a series of tools
that are relevant to you.
Now let's work together to find the one
that's most effective for you.
You're coming of this assumption that you
can have a more effective approach.
Again, I want to stress these are all
emergent learnings, and if any of you
have strong opinions about them one way
or the other, I really want to hear from
you. The reason why I'm sharing
all this stuff here is not to say these
are the
answers. This is what we've learned,
period, and say.
This is what we've heard so far and we
have a
long way to go.
But this is now an opportunity
to kind of try and share some of those
ideas a little more broadly.
And then finally, this is, I think,
probably the most important one the value
to developers.
If we're going to propose more
support to a user centric approach that
developers can can
use, it has to complement
the work of developers, not just create
more work for them. And we heard this
from a lot of folks, and I think it's a
really important point.
People say, Look, I don't have a lot of
money, I don't have a lot
of time and I know a lot of resources.
I'm working really hard on making
something that addresses a really
important threat,
and I don't need another box to check.
And I think that's completely valid
and really important point
in the end. If going through all
this
understanding of how you can better serve
the needs of users, we're just coming up
with a list of boxes that's not going
to help anybody.
So we want to make sure that whatever
we're learning and how we translate this
into
outcomes and outputs, it's
something that is valuable to developers
and designers of tools.
So they say, yes, I want to implement
this more. I see how this will be a value
to me and my tool.
So again, those are just a few of the
learnings that we've kind
of come up with so far.
Now we're going through another series of
deeper interviews to prepare for our next
phase, which is there on the ground
research.
So as I mentioned, we're going to be
spending a couple of weeks.
Our entire team is defending a couple of
weeks at the end of March in a place
called Dharamsala
in northern India.
Dharamsala is where the Tibetan
government
in exile currently is based,
the central Tibetan Administration.
So they're based there and they run the
daily affairs of Tibetan government.
The Dalai Lama is based there.
This is a variety of activists and
journalists and other other people based
there.
And we're going there to employ
some different ethnographic methodologies
to Dharamsala India
and
examine both the results of what we
find in terms of the
needs of the users and potential users
on the ground, and also the effectiveness
of the
approaches that we're trying to see if
they can work well in
this space.
So why are we going to Dharamsala to do
this? Well, like I said, we want to spend
time
with users, real users or potential
users or what
have you.
And this is this
whole project was a pilot study, knowing
the best of our knowledge and all the
research. No one has
done this yet in this space.
So we want to go and test some of the
stuff out on the ground.
We're only going to go to one place
because this is the pilot.
We know that we're not going to create
a robust outcome based on one place.
We know that. But can we pick a place
that gives us a good stepping stone?
And we chose Dharamsala because
no one, there's a range of user groups
there. There are journalists there.
There are even developers that are often
there. There are activist groups there.
There's the central Tibetan
administration, which is based there.
Number two, there's a known threat model.
The main
surveillance threat for people
in Dharamsala is the Chinese government
now.
I attended India's surveillance state
talk yesterday. So maybe there are some
other adversaries to consider there,
but
there is at least one known clear threat
model
that's validated and
essentially
verified.
And I think it's, well, tread ground.
We're going to go to one place and spend
time there. We want to get as quickly as
possible to
working with users trying to identify and
understand their needs.
We don't want to have to find out that
we've wasted a lot of our time on the
ground trying to handle the logistical
constraints and the relationship
building that you need to do an effective
study.
A lot of tools have spent developers
there.
A lot of trainers have spent time on the
ground there. I'm sure a lot of people on
this conference, maybe people in this
room have spent time there.
So that makes it a viable place to do
this work.
And finally,
there's a really important interest here
from Radio Free Asia.
Radio Free Asia again is funding this
work through the Open Technology Fund.
And if we're going to do
a study in one place, at the very least
out of all this work, at the very least,
what we're doing is doing our own deeper
needs assessment of the people in the
place where this the space
and organizations of space have decided
they want to serve people.
So even if in the
end we don't translate things to a more
broad set of recommendations
that people can use all over the
place, at the very, very
least, we're going to be understanding
more about Dharamshala and what the needs
of individuals are there, and that will
be translated and given over to everyone
that tries to build tools for users that
are based
there.
So what does it mean to
take a human
centered design approach on the ground?
So I'm saying we're going there for a few
weeks. What are we actually going to be
doing?
Well, as I said, ethnography is a study
of culture and human motivation
through a qualitative process.
It really ethnography compliments
usability studies, compliments different
things by giving you the why behind
people's actions and following the path
of identifying that why?
Why someone does something can
lead to innovative thinking and
innovative solutions.
So there are a lot
of different ethnographic methods that
can be applied, and these are just
a few examples. So we're going to be
testing a number of these out.
One is interviews, which I talked a
little about before, but I'm actually
going to go into more detail on how you
do those on the ground.
Another one is shadowing what is
shadowing. It's very
simple. Actually, you
spend an entire day with someone.
You walk around with them
the whole day and you watch them and how
they go about their daily activities.
You know, one example, I think this is
purely hypothetical example that's that's
come up as you
know, if you're if you're designing a
tool for someone, right, for someone to
use on their on their on their on their
desktop,
what you decide to do and how you design
the interface for
that tool and even how you
design different components of it might
vary a lot, depending on whether
or not that user is the only person using
that computer or whether they share it
with only their family or whether they're
using it an internet cafe right
now, that's a pretty basic thing that you
might be able to identify
on your own, but there are nuances to
those approaches that can really
come out when you're spending quality
time on the ground with someone
understanding what they're
doing.
Experience sharing just might
mean doing something as simple as giving
someone or.
It's also called a camera study
actually of different things, so our
camera study is something people do a lot
where you actually give someone a
recording device, some sort and say,
go and record your day, go and
go and spend your day without us around
and record the elements of it and then
come back and we'll go through it
together.
Now, in this context, now that's a
very, very, very common use of
ethnographic approaches.
In this context, they may not be possible
at all.
It depends entirely
on the situation on the ground, what the
threat scenario is, as to whether or not
you can give someone a recording
device and ask them to record what's
going on in their day to day
activities
in a way that doesn't put them at risk.
And this is part of our approach is to
understand what methodologies might work
and might not work in the context of
building better in freedom tools,
experience sharing.
Get a bunch of people around and say
instead
of them sharing their stories of you have
them share their stories with each other
and observe that solution
analysis, get people together and
actually walk through the solutions that
have been presented to them
and co-design.
Get people together and actually help
them work with them to design solutions
that are effective for them.
Now, in both solution analysis and
co-design does not suggest that
it is not to suggest that if
you get a bunch of users in the room and
co-design a problem, co-design a solution
with them, they're going to come up with
the right answer.
And actually, this is an important
concept that's throughout the entire
thing.
It's not the act of talking to a user and
then telling you what they think that
allows you to know what you do with your
tool. It's experiencing
it, spending time with the user and
hearing what they say combined with what
they do and how they act and how they do
and who they talk to and and what they're
what physical cues they give that allow
you to interpret what their needs are.
I'm sure many people will develop tools
in this room have had this experience
and user comes to them and says, Why
doesn't this tool do X, Y and Z?
I want those features.
And then you go and build those features
and you give it back
to the user and then never use them.
Right?
That's common because users often
don't know what they want, and it's not
due to any fault of their own.
It's because it's
hard to know what's needed.
It's hard to know what, what you want.
And if you spend time with them and look
at
more than just what they're telling you,
you start to really can pull out some of
some more interesting answers about what
is needed for them.
And this is
something again that's been applied in
many
different places, in many
different industries.
So what might an interview
look like?
You know, you're interviewing people on
the ground.
One important thing is what one
important thing is you want to ask why
when someone does something, you want to
ask why they're doing that thing and then
you want to ask them again and they won't
ask them again when you ask why?
Multiple times you
can really get to the core of a reasoning
behind something.
You want to encourage stories and you
want to look for inconsistencies.
So it's not just about asking questions
about you hear something interesting.
You say, Wait, tell me a story about the
time that that happened.
And through the stories, you can start to
pull out really interesting tidbits of
information that can be a much more
informative than the original point that
was being made.
And inconsistencies in nonverbal cues
can tell you a lot about
what that person is really thinking or
doing or what they really need.
And finally, and this is true with all
this, you want to ask questions
neutrally.
You don't want to bring your bias into
the approach of asking questions of
people and trying to assess their needs.
You want to approach it as neutrally
as
possible in a as unbiased
of a form as possible.
So now, once
we finish on the ground study in the end
of
March.
Now what do we do?
Well, at that point we're
having a lot of processing, do a lot of
analysis to do and we want to understand
and is still the meaning of what we do
out of it
and come up with a few things.
Number one, of course, a series of action
will take away. It's for developers of
Internet Freedom tools that are targeting
user communities in Dharamsala.
Number two, best practices on
applying these different methodologies
in general. Now it's going to
be hard to generalize based
on one place.
But if you qualified and not qualified
enough, I think it will
give us a good starting point.
And finally, instruments that can
actually be employed by developers and
what I mean by instruments.
I think
I mentioned this earlier, but it could be
something as simple as here's a survey
that you should give to people in your
target user communities,
and
here's what you do based on the responses
that
you get.
So I'm running a bit low on time, and
it's I want to skip to the end here.
I'm going to come back to this, these
links in a second,
but really, I have questions for all of
you which is
based on what you've heard here today.
How how might this affect your work?
What's relevant to you?
What's not relevant to you?
A lot of you represent people who design,
develop, create
and use these tools.
Do you have stories like the ones that I
shared earlier or the one I'm about
to share?
Do you think all this is,
you know, could be useful
in some way or not useful in some way?
I'd really like to hear from you.
There's a form
that you can go to, at least I Ieft
dash feedback.
You can go there and fill that out.
You can also send me email directly.
If you don't want to fill out the form,
it is a Google form.
You can send me an encrypted mail.
That's fine.
There's information about that on that
page, so I would really love to hear
from you either now or
outside. Afterwards, I'll be around.
So before I know I just want to finish,
I want to go back to Burma for a second
and close out with another story.
This is mo to Aung MOTU.
When we were in Burma, we spent a week
there.
MOTU is a reporter and a stringer for
Radio Free Asia
that spent
his entire time there,
helping us get our get get the job done.
He was an amazing person, a really
inspiring person, and he worked
really hard for Radio Free Asia.
Unfortunately, MOTU passed
away recently.
He was in a motorcycle accident in Burma.
And I'm really sad that I
didn't get to see him.
I did not get to see him after I left
Burma,
and I was hoping to see him some
time in the states or elsewhere in the
world.
But I'm bringing a mo to
because Moe too.
He worked really hard.
This is his desk, a radio free Asia in
Rangoon, in Burma.
He often slept
behind that desk right there.
He would sleep there multiple days a
week. He worked incredibly long hours.
He covered
a lot of ethnic
violence that was going on in different
parts of Burma. He took his job very
seriously and did it very, very well.
When I think of users of Internet Freedom
tools, I think about you because he was
operating in a country that while
now it's a little warmer to him for a
long time, what he was doing
that was illegal.
This is his laptop.
It was using an unpatched
version of Windows and was also full of
malware.
If someone like Mozilla,
who's doing really important work around
the world
is is
in a state where he is
not using or was not using tools
that effectively protected him.
I ultimately feel like that myself
as a technologist and part of this
community. That's that's not his failing.
That's part of my failing.
And I want to make sure that we're
building better
tools to serve folks like you because
while much is not around anymore, I know
that there are many folks like to around
the world doing this work and
not being protected in the way that they
thought they should be.
So that's really at the forefront of my
mind when I'm doing this work.
I hope this is helpful in some sense.
And then really, I think
I've got 15 minutes left.
I'd really love
to answer any questions that you might
have. I'd really love to hear your
feedback and talk to anyone also
afterwards. So thanks very much for
taking time to listen.
Thank you very much for your talk.
I think it's a very interesting and
important topic, especially
since I'm a psychologist and can
understand this aspect of usability.
If there are questions, please line up at
the microphones you first.
First, thank you very much for your for
your very interesting speech.
I think the mental city shown can
can be used everywhere in the world at
home as well to build good applications.
And as I
had experience to support people
in other countries and other cultures,
these at them at the local
ethnological part of your speech
was very interesting for me because
sometimes you see that the people that
the people do not think
the same about freedom that you think
and relationship to your family, to
your two women,
to minority, to children, to everyone,
to free free speech and free mind.
And so my question to you was,
how did you how difficult
was it? Was it for you to implement,
to work your work when you saw
that there were big differences to the
things that you have in mind about
these topics?
I think it's a great question.
So the question, I believe, was, you
know, not everyone has the same
opinions of you about
freedom or communication or access
to technology and all these kinds of
things.
So so how do how do we do
this work when there are, there are those
differences.
I think this comes back to a principle I
talked about earlier, which is not
only you're asking questions, you're
truly you're asking them without bias.
You want to do the best you can to come
into any situation and study any
group of individuals or work with any
group of individuals
based on where they are at,
not where you are at.
You have to start with where they are at
and work with them about what they need.
So if ultimately what's identified
is that they need something that is
different from what you think they need
and it doesn't matter where you think it
matters, what, what they need and what
you've pulled out of that analysis.
So you know, the short answer
is you have to eat.
You have to you have to leave your own
biases and your own opinions out the door
when you go in. It's not easy to do
because it's your own opinions and biases
that got you to that door in the first
place.
But you have to try.
Thank you.
Thanks for a talk. I think you pointed to
some very important points, especially
concerning privacy and security, because
we all know that those problems cannot be
solved individually.
There needs to be widespread acceptance
of those tools to
solve the problems we're facing all over
the world right now. So thanks for a
work, but I think that's a little
problematic assumption in what you
presented in a process
that is trying to solve this problem
by building vegetables alone,
which in a in a sense assumes
that
you do all this work, which is great
work, which is important work, and then
you build a better tool and then
usability, which is a real important
requirement, not only pragmatic but a
political requirement as far as I'm
concerned, will solve this.
But I don't think that any
tool has an intrinsic
use or intrinsic value built into
it, and any data can be used
in different ways, which makes hacking
in the first place a puzzle in the first
place. But that's not what I'm talking
about. I'm talking about whether you
think, whether you should
think that there needs to be
a process of training
of social and political activity
based maybe on your research that
accompanies that technical
and tool development aspect of
your work?
Yeah, that's a great point, and I
completely agree. So the point and the
question was, you know,
tool
alone aren't going to solve the problems
that we
face in the world. It's not just
about building better tools.
That's not that's
not the solution.
And you know,
is there something else that should be
done? Or maybe that's even more important
than building more effective tools?
Is that right?
The sight of the fact that, OK?
And you're absolutely right.
Tools aren't going to solve things.
I think that you
know what we're doing here is trying to
bite off piece of the problem.
And the piece we're trying to bite off is
in
the context of tools.
How can they be built more effectively?
Perhaps the more important things, and I
would actually probably argue the more
important things are larger scale
social and political changes that keep
people safer, not
ultimately tools, even even if
you look within the space of internet
freedom tools. We're focusing on a bit of
that, which is the development of tools.
Some of the things I pointed out and some
of the things that we're uncovering all
kinds of other gaps within the
space of
how users interact safe on the internet,
or even how developers interact with each
other or funders interact with each
other, all these different things.
This is not a puzzle that has a magic
bullet.
And and I hope that will make a
meaningful contribution to a piece of
this puzzle.
But I fully agree that that it's
only a piece of the puzzle
and that there are many other pieces that
need
to be solved.
Thank you.
Yeah. First of all, thank you for
this interesting presentation.
From my point of view, I
would consider it as a key
role. And also, this project
might be considered as a key project
for solving the problems of
citizens in
countries which
are under pressure, where the
governmental authorities do not respect
fundamental rights of individuals
and by resuming
the presentations during the last
space.
From my personal point of view, I would
consider there are four main
topics from my point of view,
which I would consider as necessary
for.
I would say, you know, the success
of this project.
First of all,
you might guarantee
your own independence,
which means there should be a
permanent communication
between organizations,
producers,
the users as well and the developers.
And on the other hand,
by doing this, you could also guarantee
the kind of crowd funding for
for, for, for, for the success.
You know, on the other hand,
regarding, I would say, the.
The quality of your
offers means there could be a
kind of toolbox which is
as flexible as possible on
one hand and
could offer, on the other hand, as
simple programs
as necessary by respecting
the educational level of
the users. Yeah, and by doing
that, I would say
this could be a real, brilliant solution
for anybody because this could
guarantee the freedom of individual
rights by using the internet
and whatever.
Thanks. I appreciate that.
I think that your point around the
toolbox is part of what we're hoping to
try and get to now.
I'm not sure what when I said framework,
it could be interpreted as a toolbox, a
guide, anything like this.
And I think that what I
want to be clear again, that
whatever form it ends up taking and we're
not going to come up with the answer
after this project, I think we really see
this as a stepping stone that we hope
everyone will be interested in iterating
upon
together and
that, you know, if you look at even even
basic information about how
to apply a different kinds of need,
finding techniques
and appears from everything we've learned
so far will provide at least some value
to the space. And so we feel good about
that.
Thank you for your speech.
Oh, so sorry.
He was first. Sorry.
The most striking thing in the whole
presentation was when
will Microsoft Office be available
in Myanmar language?
And as I'm
I'm totally not a native English speaker,
and especially for those not of my
generation, see my parents that are
both
not completely
proficient with a computer.
So, for example, they don't know that,
like in all Windows
programs, a save command
is in the first menu.
The fact that they don't have.
A way to read the interface
is extremely problematic because it
completely stops them from
using software in a productive way.
The point is that we don't really as the
coders, I'm speaking here as a coder,
we don't need to translate
the software ourselves.
We can just provide
internationalization books and then
anybody that is proficient in both
languages can do the translation.
And you can have normal users
multiply your user base
with no effort, and it takes
no effort for the developer
to do 80 percent of the interaction in
the of the interaction of a recession
job.
And localization can just be done
by anybody else, and that will
multiply your user base and your
effectiveness.
Yeah, I think that's an important point
about localization. I also want to use
this opportunity to give
a shout out to a great organization
that we've talked to.
The bunch called open it up and we're
doing a lot of localization efforts
of different internet freedom tools.
And yes, language localization
is an incredibly important part of this
work. And it's not just about machine
translation of one word to the other.
Another interesting thing that that
has been coming
up more and more is
that it's not just about language
translation, but also
cultural translation,
right? Understanding the context in which
someone's using a tool in their own
culture. It becomes more than just,
I mean, on a simple level, that might
mean the swapping of buttons that they've
been the yes and the no buttons, because
that's the norm
in one place or another.
But it can go even much deeper than
that and not kind of
localization effort is really important
to all tools.
Thanks.
Now, thank you for that speech.
I have a question because you said in
your you said that
the people there want to know when
their language comes out of my office.
And you said you want to
address their thoughts.
What is most important?
And then I have another question did you
actually try to
talk to them about a different approaches
that maybe there's another there are more
important things or that you just focus
on what they want?
Yeah, I'm actually really glad you
brought that up because you've identified
something I was hoping someone identify,
which is I said a lot during a
presentation.
You can't just rely on what someone
says they need.
You have to examine deeply what they
need. So I want to make
a point that when people said,
when will the Myanmar language come to
Microsoft Office, that's the most
important thing to me.
I didn't mean to infer that
that is therefore what we should do.
But what I was trying to illustrate was
that the fact that they would even say
that is surprising to me, and I think
many of us says something about
how we are able to understand and
empathize with the needs of users
so that that was a signal to me, not
the signal not being this is the moment.
I mean, it might be the most important
thing.
You know, I don't know. I don't I don't
go there yet because we didn't.
We didn't do this work in Burma.
That was that was a precursor to this.
That was just something that we learned.
But the most important point is not
that they said that, but the fact that
myself
and people I talked to were surprised by
it.
Right. I think if we
better understood and empathize with
the needs of users, at the very least,
we wouldn't have been surprised when they
said that.
So thank you.
I was thinking of two approaches,
and I would like to know if you consider
this as well.
One would be like copying
or like
building substitutes for products they
already use for tools, but
making them secure like
collaboration stuff.
I don't know if it's like a prevention
of like censorship, but
if you build like stuff into the
collaboration tool already.
So I think that's not quite as
creative as the approach you mentioned.
But then on the other hand,
someone else had done the analysis
of like what people need.
And yeah, and you
got a big study of you consider
that so people, you know what people
need and what functionality they need?
Yeah, that's a great point.
So the question was, have you thought
about looking at tools that people
already
use and trying to make them more secure?
I think that is a very viable and
valuable approach, and it's something
even we heard in our interviews,
which is to say that, you know?
When you if you're going to build an
effective tool, that's a fit in with
a user's daily process like there, no
one ever, I think is probably this is a
common term. Like no,
no one's
goal on the internet. No one comes on
the internet to be secure.
You come on the internet to email your
mom or chat with
your friend or go to this website.
You don't like your goal isn't to be
secure or to
to have proper privacy protections.
So an effective way to build those things
in is to have it be a seamless
part
of a user's
experience. Now that's maybe
not always possible, but I think
it's an important thing to strive for,
and I think so. I think you hit upon a
good point there.
Thank you.
Things that you came up with,
the people going through the web to share
things and they want to make it safe.
So because maybe I don't get
the whole idea of internet freedom tools
because like many people also in Burma
want to go there to share
safely information together.
Which brings me to the like, there's
many. There's two things like the
city of Munich.
They wanted to change to open source
and an old into the
the average cities were a city
worker was used to Microsoft
Office, and when they changed to open
source, the problem was not the backbone.
The problem was the people saying like,
Oh, it was a control
f. Now I have to do control.
D was open office.
I cannot get used to this.
Everything is so different now.
And also, people are getting
stuck with proper terry
learning when they when they use office,
my office and and suddenly something
comes up, which is a little bit
different. And maybe it's a little bit
more safe, but they have to
do control f instead of control, you
know, or whatever, and they don't like
it because they learned it like this.
And another thing is with open, open,
open, um, OpenStreetMap.
You know, there were the discussion
was in Germany, how to stop using
Google Street Map and all that stuff.
The best way to do that would be to give
50000 euros by the government
to the open the always M community
to make these surveys, the usability
of OpenStreetMap even more smoother
and make it make it closer to what
a commercial map provider's
doing because they do it for all,
then the dulce de noobs out
there who have no clue.
And so the idea is,
I don't know how, how you want to do the
what you want to do, because therefore
you need a sustainable developer
community, which is
not easy to
organize collaboratively.
Even something like Ubuntu or Wikipedia
like these successful stories
of an ongoing collaborative
online work is very difficult
to to sustain.
So we need money for that and we need
collaborative, sustainable environments.
And I don't see how the work
you want to do will lead to to
overcome the main problem, which is that
people are becoming lazy
when they want to use the web.
I appreciate your point.
I'm not
sure that I agree that the main problem
is that people
are becoming lazy when they use the web.
I think there's lots of challenges here.
I do think that you bring up a really
good point, which is, you
know, all these
software tools face a variety of
challenges, whether they're funding
challenges, resources or challenges
sustainable development
communities, right?
I think that there are a lot of tools out
there that have those things set.
I think there are new ones being built
that have the potential for that.
And I think again that this is one
part of the puzzle, an important part of
the puzzle. There are many other
important parts of the puzzle,
whether that be, you know,
the usability decisions
you might make in terms of
how close something should be to
the related proprietary solution.
If you're creating an open source
solution or part of the puzzle
being, how am I going to fund this tool
that I'm not like?
I can sell it. So how am I going to fund
the ongoing development of it?
So I think it's important
to recognize, even in this work, that
there are many other ingredients to make
something
successful and
to make more effective and more usable
tools.
And I hope this will be a valuable
contribution to that.
Thank you. OK.
Very last question.
OK, thank you.
Thanks again for your interesting talk.
You made, I think, a lot of good points.
Like, for example, the usability
statements you made also
interesting points about like landscape
analyzes and stakeholder analyzes.
And I see a lot of parallels
with solution
methods we use in the industry to
design like, no, let's
say, normal business solutions.
And maybe you can give
us two points where there are
definitely parallels between
solution design methodologies for
RFP tools compared
to business solutions.
And there are no parallels or contrast
where you say the solution we are using
in industry and the
and the and the
experience we made in the interests
industry are not the same for for
between have and industry solutions.
Right. So so the point was that, you
know,
there are there seems like there's a lot
of similarities here between some of the
things that that we're working on
and how
products are often developed in industry.
I think that's almost a hundred percent
correct. That's absolutely correct.
And what we're doing here is, you know,
none of the stuff that I'm talking about
is something
we've invented or anything we're
borrowing from
successes that we see in industry and
in and in
other industries, not even just software
development industry. So I think that's a
really good point.
To answer your
specific question,
I think an example of the way things are
done in industry a lot
of times.
Excuse me. That could be valuable.
Here is
user, you know, user focus groups
spending time shadowing users, spending
time with them during in-depth interviews
with them. These are all common things
in industry to understand the
needs to then develop
a product
that addresses those needs.
As for what doesn't work, I think we're
going to uncover some of that.
One of the things that I
suggested before is a common thing of
industry is all sorts of recording
processes that happen when you're
studying users who want to record their
interactions, their faces, you want to
record how they're interacting
with something that may not always be
possible in this in this
case. Right.
And may be possible if you're studying
someone
in the context of a safe environment
or if that person doesn't have feel like
there's an individual threat against
them. But by and large, if you're using
an internet freedom tool, that's because
you're concerned about
some threat that often relates
to whether or not you can be identified.
So if that's a concern?
Notice that even in the photos I
had of Burma, no one's faces were in
them, not because they've specifically
expressed to me, don't put
my face in this, but because it's a
legitimate risk.
So I think finding what methods
maybe won't
translate effectively is going to be an
important part of this work.
Thank you. A big applause for Michael,
everyone.