Technology Tools

Alissa for North Olania! is a mobile-friendly, single-player choose your own adventure game designed to teach digital security best practices - especially to those active in political or civic campaigns. As the campaign manager for Alissa Orme, a first-time presidential hopeful in the fictional country of North Olania, players are tasked with boosting Alissa’s popularity to help her win the election, while navigating digital security incidents on a shoestring budget. The game is built using Twine - an open-source tool for telling interactive stories. 

We all have too many passwords. The only way to create and safely manage them all is to use a password manager like KeePassXC. A free, open source tool, KeePassXC can secure your passwords and other important information easily, though without automatic cloud synchronization.

Civic, political, and governmental groups need to keep in touch with their people, and reaching audiences on their near-omnipresent phones has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to do so. Twilio is a commercial provider of mobile device connectivity via text, messenger app, and voice aimed at larger, more technically sophisticated organizations with mass communication needs.

Transifex is a popular, well-established online translation platform, allowing a global group of volunteers, paid interpreters, or machine translators to collaborate on new “localizations” into any desired languages. While built for translating software, it can be used for other purposes as well. Publicly shared free, open source code can use Transifex without cost.

Internet censorship, slowdowns, and complete cuts are an increasingly common risk, particularly around critical moments like elections. But how do you know if your connection is bad or the whole internet has been shut down? Ooni was developed by human rights technologists to collectively monitor and document censorship.

Cloudflare provides protection from distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on websites and many common forms of hacking. One of the largest companies in the internet infrastructure space, Cloudflare has special programs aimed at protecting human rights, democracy, and government communities.

Text messaging is one of the most popular forms of communication today. Signal is a full-featured, easy to use messaging app that is one of the best around. Unlike WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, or basicSMS, Signal additional cost beside your cellular data plan, is very secure, and doesn’t track and monetize you as a user.

Without a trustworthy computer, no aspect of our digital lives is secure. For those with a strong desire to keep themselves safe online, and willing to make some sacrifices in ease of use to do so, the free, open-source Tails operating system is a great option.

Deflect provides solid protection from distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on websites. Built for and by people within the human rights and democracy community, Deflect can help defend against some of the most common ways a malicious actor may try to take down an organization’s online presence.

Many organizations want to know what people think about a given topic, understand their needs, or receive feedback. SurveyMonkey is one of the largest survey creation tools out there, with millions of questions answered in their system every day. With very little technical expertise, people can put together their own form to gather useful information from online audiences.