Group communication requirements

@akwizgran
Mon, 05 Sep 2016 10:57:21 +0000

Hi everyone,

I'm the lead developer of a secure communication app designed for activists and journalists (https://briarproject.org). We're about to start work on a group communication feature, and I wanted to ask the journalists here about use cases you'd like that feature to support.

This follows on from the recent discussion about group comms options (https://tinfoil.press/t/group-comms-options/46), but here I want to put the focus on use cases rather than existing technologies.

We already have a group communication feature called forums, designed for public discussions among an open group of participants. The new feature we're working on will be designed for private discussions among a known group of participants. Not all of the participants need to know each other's personal identities - some of them may only know each other by pseudonyms - but at minimum, every participant will know the personal identity of the person who invited them to the group, and every participant will be able to see which pseudonyms belong to the group.

We plan to support threads, as I agree with @pudo's point in the previous thread that this is important for keeping track of long-running and complex conversations.

Journalists: would you have a use for something like this in your work? If so, how would you use it? If not, what would we need to add or change to make it useful to you?