[Companion-announce] a delayed hello from your security education companions!

[Soraya Okuda]

Hi good people!

It’s been a while since I’ve emailed, so I wanted so share a few newer things, a few new people, and a few older updates.



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**Welcome to the advisory group!**

A few wonderful people are joining the list.

	• Molly Wilson at Simply Secure, who gave amazing feedback on lesson plans earlier in the year coming from her design/teaching background
	• Natasha Msonza at Digital Society of Zimbabwe, who I have learned so much from as a seasoned trainer and trainer of trainers
	• Łukasz Krol (an independent trainer and teacher at the College of Europe, Warsaw), a seasoned teacher who has been testing some of our materials in the field and giving invaluable feedback

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**For the new folks / and a reminder for the long-timers — what to expect from this email (companion-announce at eff.org).**

	• This is a low-volume list (if you dislike email --as I do-- hopefully that’s a good thing!). It's a one-way interaction--you’ll get the email blast once every few months to whenever our team has a reasonable update or new materials to test. Unfortunately, it’s in the vein of a newsletter rather than a mailing list — this means that there’s no way to respond to the mailing list, but you can send a direct email to me or my colleagues.
	• You’ll get a heads up on major updates before we roll out major or possibly controversial changes to the Security Education Companion. Occasionally, this might include double-dipping into SSD, such is the nature of the things we make, as we try to unify our resources and teaching methodologies.

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You might have noticed that I’ve been a little extra quiet on this list lately. Part of it was that we have been figuring out a new internal structure at my organization, and part of it being that we were a bit at capacity and slower on resource and content development.

The good news is that we have more internal capacity (insert gif of Kermit the frog screaming “yay” here) for Surveillance Self-Defense and the Security Education Companion. I’m ultra delighted to have the help and leadership of my colleague Lindsay Oliver. Lindsay’s been at EFF for a while — you might remember her from her work with the EFA and from her contributions in developing SEC. She brings a bunch of experience as a former classroom teacher, an active contributor to our SSD / SEC and translation meetings, and is a lovely human.

So, in summary: I’ll still be helping with graphics, usability and content development around privacy and security concepts (and with SEC + SSD + our software projects in particular!), but I am beyond stoked to have Lindsay’s guidance and efforts for project managing our security education resources. We’re still sorting out what exactly this will look like, but please join me in welcoming Lindsay. (If you would like to say hi, here's her email: lindsay at eff.org!)

A bio from Lindsay here:
"Hi! I'm Lindsay Oliver, the Activism team's new project manager. I manage SSD, our translations process, general cross-team projects with Activism, and am taking an active role in project managing SEC in the future. My background is in teaching, digital disaster response, and writing. Happy to meet you all, and looking forward to future endeavors!” Her bio is also here: https://www.eff.org/about/staff/lindsay-oliver


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Now, the fun stuff!

New resources (not yet published, just for feedback purposes)

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We’re working on slowly translating pieces from the Security Education Companion into Spanish. This is in preparation for a training of trainers in Spanish, taking place in Chile in late September.  Here’s one of the guides, on preparing for a training. https://docs.google.com/document/d/14BNeZOrQ1VNnTZCnAZxQueLQMb90CPQ7U_nYT9tzze0/edit?usp=sharing

^ I’m curious if this format for a printable will work for others. My hope is that people can remix it easily and that it’s easy to print, and for folks with low vision to see. It’s presently designed in Google Docs, as I’m hoping it makes it easier to remix.

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We’ve been testing out new graphics on how the internet works

Based on a lot of feedback (huge thanks to Sage, the Simply Secure folks, the Freedom of the Press Foundation training team, Natasha, Łukasz and honestly too many trainers to count—I’ve probably talked to all of you about some variation of these), I’m narrowing down working on a remixable version of these animated graphics for explaining how the Internet works. 

Constraints I had: using as little English as possible (all the text is basically applied in slideshow software, so the hope is that people can localize it however they want), and in line with learning objectives. I've asked my colleagues to test them out in the field as well, and would be grateful if you wanted to try them out with groups you're training. 

Why it’s designed in slideshow software: As much as I don’t want to encourage people to use Powerpoint or slides in their teaching, it’s inevitable. The hope, though is to share these as animated gifs, that people can use by sharing in social media, emails, and during trainings themselves. I also hope that people will draw their own versions.

These graphics are getting to a point that I’m pretty comfortable with moving them to a direction for sharing them with the wider public, after cleaning them up and incorporating some feedback (thanks FPF folks for the most recent round of feedback!). Check them out, with an emphasis on slides 5 through 18. 

Feedback received by next Friday, August 30th, would be especially helpful, as it takes me quite a bit of time to animate these things in Adobe. You can email me and Lindsay directly, or schedule a call with me.

Cursory feedback that would be helpful:
+ Can you use these? How would you use or remix them?

Feedback that would be especially helpful if you use them in a training:
+ Did people understand what they were looking at?
+ Could learners explain the difference between no encryption defaults, transport-layer encryption, and end-to-end encryption?
+ Could learners name who might be able to see this data and metadata? 
+ Could learners highlight how metadata might be informative?

Graphics here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1f3hW1rqlH0u-hduUob55fJJmf6U_146cUHXZbTWZZfg/edit#slide=id.g5f63e6bee7_0_289

(The slides also include Privacy Badger, HTTPS, and cloud graphics explainers — feel free to give feedback on those if you wish!)

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Anyway, that’s it!
As always, feel free to email me if you ever want to chat about security education, or if you’re in San Francisco and want to hang out.

Best,

Soraya and Lindsay