Last year, a discussion happened around security workshops, including cryptoparties. Lots of interesting feedbacks were shared, you can find everything about it here, including the link to the transcript of the discussion : Gendersec - #4 by XavCC
[TL;DR] You can skip to the last part of this post if you have the background already[/TL;DR]
To summarize my interventions, I told about our local experience of “crypto/install-parties”. As we tried to bring in more outsiders to them a few years ago, noticing that only nerds were actually coming, we started annoucing them as “digital self-defense” workshops allowing people to address their main concerns/threats with dedicated techniques. It was then basically about switching from a “solution-based” cryptoparty to a “problem-based” approach. It worked really well, every session was fully booked with newcommers and everybody wanted to follow up.
I still think those 2 formats are both relevant. The cryptoparties are to be updated for sure with confronting more recent techniques (chat apps, smartphone OSs) to the threats’ tools, even tho the traditional ones (PGP, desktop distros) are still good to practice. But I feel like they symbolically imply some former backgound, or at least the feeling of community belonging to create more bonds and strenghten them.
Now one of the main issues I feel, noticeably including OFFDEM happening at the undocumented people’s squat in BXL, is that there’s still a huge gap between our community and the inhabitants’ one (if there is to be a single), except Natacha and hellekin. So, I wonder if there’s room for bonds to be created and how can we make it ? Or maybe we think it’s already important enough to strengthen our own community only since we don’t even know how much outsiders do desire to enable such a bond ?
Propositions for OFFDEM4
That brings me with 2 ideas. The first one is a one-to-many approach and the 2nd one is a many-to-many.
1- welcoming desk : a desk dedicated to newcommers to talk about their usage and their threats, then bringing them to appropriate persons who can guide them through and furthermore.
2 - melee: a session mediated by some of us, dedicated to the squat’s inhabitants: investigating usecases, threat analysis, then guiding to demos and setup. We could split up between basic topics (chat, organization, device, browser for instance).