David Benque

Centralized proprietary collaboration software has recently faced a grown scepticism. In November 2022, the French Government officially asked schools to not use Google's and Microsoft's collaboration services. Luckily there are open source alternatives that can be self-hosted to give individuals and institutions more contol over their data. While users thus do no more need to rely on big companies, they still need to trust the system administrators hosting the software to respect the user's privacy.

CryptPad is an end-to-end encrypted open source collaboration suite. It seeks to reconcile collaboration and privacy. Users make changes to documents and these are encrypted by their client (web browser) before being sent to the server for real-time synchronization. CryptPad hides the technicalities of encryption from its users and provides a clean and intuitive interface to ease fast adaption. In this talk I will present how CryptPad keeps the user's data private and protects them against a passively sniffing server. I will show why we combine end-to-end encryption with open source and will talk about the ecosystem around CryptPad.

The import and export of common office formats (.ods/.xlsx, .odt/.docx, .odp/.ppt) is taken for granted in many online office suites. However, in the case of CryptPad, implementing such functionality presents a number of challenges to preserve our privacy requirements. This has long held back adoption of our platform as it prevented users from migrating existing documents and/or integrating CryptPad in their workflows.

In this talk I will summarize our work on INTEROFFICE, a project realized by the CryptPad team in 2021 with funding from the EU's Next Generation Internet (NGI) DAPSI program. The core of this work consists of a new set of converters that use Web Assembly to perform conversions between file formats in the browser. This allows for CryptPad to be vastly more inter-operable while preserving end-to-end encryption (the server still has no access to the content being converted).

Speaking as the designer on the team, I will focus on the research we conducted with users and on the ways this new functionality is making its way into CryptPad's interface.

CryptPad is an encrypted and open-source collaboration suite. One year ago I joined the team as a designer. In this talk I will present some of what has been achieved and reflect on the challenges ahead.

When I joined CryptPad in November 2019, the project had already been operating for a few years. Like many open-source projects it was lacking on the design front and I was brought in to "improve the user experience". This broad task takes on many forms, but they all boil down to one thing: improving communication. Whether in UI design, UX writing, answering support tickets, writing documentation, or visual identity, all of my work to date has been about how CryptPad communicates. I did not set out to re-invent everything from scratch but rather aimed to consolidate what was already there and to make the software more legible in a broad sense. This includes the strategy for implementing design changes gradually, negotiating immediate demands (e.g. implementing a new feature) and longer-term ambitions (e.g. rebranding) all while adhering to the release cycle. In this talk I will highlight examples of design improvements achieved this year, from specific features to the release of our documentation and our upcoming 4.0 release with a new visual identity. I will also reflect on the next major challenge: accessibility.