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AMENDMENT Who needs to know? Private-by-design collaboration

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AMENDMENT Who needs to know? Private-by-design collaboration
FOSDEM 2019

It is often difficult to untangle technical choices made when designing systems from the values and implicit assumptions of its those systems' designers.

For many developers of open-source software, radical openness and permissionless participation have become the de facto methodology to follow when designing collaboration systems. This ideology has driven the creation of a wealth of information systems and collaboratively curated data sets which could not have been created in a top-down fashion. Consequently, different values, and thus different architectures have remained largely unexplored.

This lecture will present CryptPad, a web-based suite of collaborative tools which employs client-side encryption to restrict access to those who possess the cryptographic keys which are unique to each document. I will include an overview of the underlying architecture, and provide insight into its design process and the values that it encodes.

This talk was originally proposed by Aaron MacSween.

Speakers: Ludovic Dubost