Starting tonight, developers from around the world will gather in at least sixteen cities to participate in a memorial hackathon dedicated to Aaron Swartz, the late coder, activist, and transparency advocate.
Participants can contribute to all sort of projects Aaron was interested in, but one of the major projects everyone can choose from is SecureDrop, the open-source whistleblower submission system that can be used be journalism organizations to safely accept documents and information from sources. Aaron was the original developer of this project and tragically died just before its launch in March.
Freedom of the Press Foundation took over managing the SecureDrop project recently, and we've committed to contributing significant resources to make sure it is the safest and most secure system available to journalism organizations. But we can't do it without your help. We have a list of issues on our Github page which we'll be tackling this weekend. Please read more about them here and see if they are something you can help us with.
On Friday night in San Francisco, the Internet Archive will kick off the worldwide event and will include several speakers, including James Dolan and Garrett Robinson, who are leading the development and implementation of Secure Drop. You can RSVP for this event here.
James and Garrett, along with several other experienced SecureDrop developers including Yan Zhu and Bill Budington, will also be at the San Francisco-based hackathon all weekend at Noisebridge to answer any questions and guide coders in helping add features to SecureDrop. You can go here to see the schedule.
But you don't have to be in San Francisco to help. You can go here to see if your city is participating in the hackathon. And SecureDrop developers will also be on the #securedrop-dev IRC channel (irc.oftc.net) all weekend to answer questions from remote hackathon participants.
