Open source software teams traditionally reject user-tracking analytics out of ethical concerns. Unfortunately, this means open source developers end up operating without sufficient insight into how their tools are being used, how they could have more impact or be more responsive, and how state surveillance and censorship are evolving to counter their effectiveness and limit their use.
Enter: Clean Insights!
Clean Insights gives developers a way to plug into a secure, private measurement platform. It is focused on assisting in answering key questions about app usage patterns--not on enabling invasive surveillance of all user habits. Our approach provides programmatic levers to pull to cater to specific use cases and privacy needs. It also provides methods for user interactions that are ultimately empowering instead of alienating.
Join us for a workshop to learn how you can collect user data safely and respectfully.
We have a Matrix forum in place already that was generated to host conversations begun at the Clean Insights Symposium in May 2020 (https://cleaninsights.org/event-schedule). We could easily welcome workshop participants to join us in that space to continue the conversation. We are also tentatively planning an event at the conclusion of the project that is funding Clean Insights development (called BASICS); we could invite participants to attend the closing event where we will show off the full capabilities of the SDKs and work with open source developers to help them implement it in their tools.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:If 3 people show up, we'll have a very interesting and in-depth conversation about the tools they are developing, the user insight challenges they're facing, and how Clean Insights could be leveraged to solve those challenges. If there are 30 people, we'll walk everyone through a more structured set of activities in which they'll consider questions about how to respectfully gather data on their users with the Clean Insights methodology. Everyone will walk away with a clearer idea of what it is they hope to learn through analytics and potential approaches to gather that data in a privacy-respecting, consent-forward fashion.
Dr. Gina Helfrich is Program Officer for Global Technology at Internews, where she works to make technology better serve the needs of vulnerable and marginalized people.
Nathan is the founder and director of Guardian Project, an award-winning, open-source, mobile security collaborative with millions of beneficiaries worldwide.