Hello there! We are excited to bring you up to speed with the news from the team that’s building Caliopen. By the way, speaking of team, that’s our first big news!

Caliopen’s Dev Team

The competent team of developers we have been trying to gather for the last few months is finally complete.

Like we told you in our last news edition, Julien Muetton (on IRC he’s themouette) is our lead front-end developer: Gandi assigned him to Caliopen part-time.

Also charged with the front-end part of the project, Kajan Sivaramalingam will contribute too, according to the time he can spare from his day job.

Thomas Laurent (lauth0 on IRC) keeps on working to define the UI elements while Steven Tlucek defines the project’s graphic charter (our priority at the moment).

Aymeric Barantal (Chamal on IRC) is taking care of the back-end development, helped by Benjamin Sonntag for the delivery chain (he’s vinci on IRC) and Alban Crommer, in charge of the APIs and who already helped us reorganize the project in order to make it ready for futures plug-ins, both Benjamin and Alban are from Octopuce.

Caliopen’s development

Now that the dev team is ready, our goal is to deliver an Alpha version of Caliopen for the end of May. Which also means that if the next months we happen to be a bit silent around here, you needn’t to worry: it will be a good sign!

Also important for the months to come is the choice we made to embrace Responsive Web Design for the whole development of the Caliopen UI. In line with currents best practices on the web RWD will allow Caliopen to offer from the start an optimal user experience also on mobile devices, reducing the need for native apps and allowing us to work with greater efficiency.

Screenshots

 

About the back-end, an important choice has also been made: Cassandra will be the only back-end supported by Caliopen.
We shortly thought about supporting also other solutions, lighter back-ends allowing Caliopen to scale to stripped-down hardware requirements. Here as well, we made the choice to easen the future development steps, namely the creation of plug-ins.

For a privacy culture

We surely don’t want to underestimate the importance of this technical news, but still… development isn’t everything. Once ready, Caliopen won’t be able to succeed if it won’t be embraced by the users.

Everybody knows that privacy is an issue these days, but in an abstract kind of way, and we are too often unaware of the daily actions we do that endanger our privacy. Isn’t it quite revealing that so many people are giving up their private, personal, professional and even intimate messages to… spies?

That’s why an important part of our work for Caliopen is to spread the word about our project, sure, but also to make everybody take full consciousness of the issues with privacy and the danger of losing it. We are going to talk about it, and in fact, we already did! Well… we did it in French, for the moment.
Laurent Chemla wrote an article about the myth of having nothing to hide: Rien à cacher and we were happy to see it listed as useful read on the website je n’ai rien à cacher (we’ll try to publish it in English, and if you can help us translate it, do not hesitate!).

Help us!

The Caliopen team is very open and welcomes every contribution. Contributions to the code, sure, (you now know who to contact for specifical topics) but also invitations to talk about privacy and present our project. We should be able to show an Alpha version of the software by the end of May: we’d love to share it with as much people as possible.

If you know a congress, a conference, a talk where Caliopen could be invited, if you’d like us to do a presentation, please, to not hesitate to get in touch with us (contact@caliopen.org)!

If you know Caliopen, you might be aware that one of our goals is to teach our users the best behaviours to ensure the privacy of their conversations, and, most of all, to make our users willing to learn!
That’s why, right from the start, we decided to set up a reward system for the users who take actions to secure their conversations. Still, security is a process, and a long one indeed: we are now trying to determine how to reward our users, and sometimes… we fear we might be out of ideas! If you’re interested in gamification, or maybe even an expert, please, come talk to us, we’d be glad to share our ideas with you and get some valuable feedback!

Contact

It’s so easy to get in touch with us, so please don’t hesitate to provide your feedback:

• Through IRC, on irc.freenode.org, channel #caliopen or, to take part in the development, on #caliopdev. And please, don’t be intimidated if, when you come in, we are talkin in French: let us know that you’d rather converse in English and we’ll immediately switch language!
• On Twitter, we are @caliopen_org
• Drop us a good old-fashioned e-mail! contact@caliopen.org
• Github: everything’s clear, no need to ask questions? Great! We are waiting for your PR! Caliopen is on Github

This blog post is also available in French.