We publish this annual update for our contributors on Open Collective: This is what we've accomplished in 2022, and some of our upcoming plans for 2023!

What did you accomplish during 2022? How did you use money?

In 2022 we completed the transition of our main website framework from Jekyll to MkDocs, using the mkdocs-material-insiders documentation software. This change made making open-source contributions to our site significantly easier for outsiders, because instead of needing to know complicated Jekyll handlebars syntax to write posts effectively, contributing is now as easy as writing a standard Markdown document.

MkDocs also enabled us to extend our website functionality in many various ways, most notably allowing us to publish translated versions of our site, which volunteers have begun creating in 2022.

We additionally launched our new discussion forum at discuss.privacyguides.net as a community platform to share ideas and ask questions about our mission. This augments our existing community on Matrix, and replaced our previous GitHub Discussions platform, decreasing our reliance on proprietary discussion platforms.

A challenge for us historically has been community management, and we’ve been working on ways to deal with this, including strengthening our moderation teams. Our transition to our own self-hosted forum powered by Discourse has been an excellent tool for us to handle community feedback and triage suggestions. We’ve also faced multiple volunteer team members joining and leaving over the year, and we’ve focused on clarifying our internal mission and structure to make it easier for us to onboard new volunteers in the future in a more complete capacity.

One exciting new form of outreach has been in the form of interviews with media outlets about our mission, our own Niek interviewed with Tweakers in October, and later gave a presentation on threat modeling at their annual privacy and security conference.

Our biggest new project will be self-funding technical product reviews, one of our first new posts on this will be evaluating the privacy and privacy claims of various consumer router equipment. We also want to publish some of our first translated versions of privacyguides.org, translations in French and Hebrew are nearly completed, with many more on the way. We also want to focus more on outreach and education, finding ways to more clearly highlight the dangers of a lack of privacy awareness in the modern digital age, and the prevalence and harms of security breaches across the technology industry.