For Facilitators

Would this work for your group?

About 10 minutes per platform. Three tasks, then a look around.

The Tech Committee is looking at three replacements for Google Drive. You are being asked because you run a Working Group or a Committee: you know how your people share things, what they lose, and what happens when somebody new joins halfway through.

What we want to know is whether your group could actually work in it.

Nothing personal or sensitive goes in here, for the whole run of the pilot. No member names, phone numbers, addresses or rosters, and nothing confidential. Anything else can be real.

Keep your own copy of anything you put here. Treat all three platforms as scratch space: we may have to delete them at short notice. If the chapter goes on to adopt one of them, we expect to be able to copy content across from Nextcloud or OpenCloud, but keep your backups until that is confirmed. CryptPad is the exception either way. Nobody but you can read your documents there, which is the entire point of it, so nobody but you can move them.

Getting in

Message Esteban on Discord for your log in details. If you have Signal, include your username in the message so the details can be sent more securely.

Sign in, change your password when you are asked to, and start below.

Three tasks, on each platform you are given

If you cannot work out how to do one of these tasks, give it a couple of minutes and then move on. "I could not find it" is a useful answer.

1. Make a space for your group. A folder, or a Space, named after your working group. Share it with another tester.
2. Write in the same document at the same time as somebody else. Use one of the documents already in there.
3. Find something somebody else shared with you, without being told where to look.

Then set it up the way your group would

Spend a few minutes building out what your group actually keeps: the folders you would want, named the way you would name them, with whatever documents fit. Then poke at anything you are curious about.

A few things to think about while you are in there:

• Could you hand this to a new member without walking them through it?
• Where would your group get stuck?
• Is there anything here your group needs that you could not find?

Tell us what happened

Post in the Tech Committee forum on Discord, or message Esteban, ideally straight after your session while it is fresh.

Say what you tried, what got in the way, and whether you would hand this to your group. "I could not find it" is a real answer that we want.

If you want to do more

The three tasks above are what we are asking for. If you want to go further, every tester in the pilot gets a longer guide for each platform, six tasks and about twenty minutes, and you are welcome to work through those too: Nextcloud, OpenCloud, CryptPad. Each one also links to the manual published by the people who make that platform, if you want to go further still.

Those guides were written in August, so if a guide and the screen disagree, trust the screen and tell Esteban.

If CryptPad shows you a blank page

CryptPad loads its editor from a second address, and privacy tools often block it. You get a blank pane, or a sign up stuck on "Hashing password". It does not happen in every browser, so try it before changing anything.

• Firefox: click the shield beside the address, turn Enhanced Tracking Protection off for the site.
• Brave: turn Shields down for the site.
• Chrome or Edge: no such setting. It will be an extension or a cookie setting, so try a private window.
• Extensions: a content blocker, such as uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger, has to allow both cryptpad.odsapilot.com and cryptpad-sandbox.odsapilot.com.

Still blank, or something else looks wrong? Tell Esteban.

Back to the pilot page