Aspect 1: Community security

Community security

Illustrated by Jasmina El Bouamraoui and Karabo Poppy Moletsane, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

We all work together—and need to keep safe—as a community. If there is one person in the community whose security is compromised, this could also compromise the safety of others who for example cooperated with that person or shared data or photos with them. This makes it crucial for communities, particularly small and interconnected communities, to work together to keep everybody secure. This might include:

• Answering other community members' questions about security and assisting those who struggle with it

• Cultivating certain community members who act as security champions—or people whom others approach when they have questions about security and procedures

• Creating a common set of rules within the community. This might include not adding each other on social media (so that connections are not publicly visible) or saving each other's contact details as pseudonyms. We write a little more about rules the community can adopt in the next sections

• Establishing online and offline spaces for community members to regularly communicate on security issues 

• Orienting trainings towards entire organizations or communities rather than individuals to increase adoption rates and create shared accountability

Don't forget that good security practices should make members of the community more confident and bring people closer together. Sometimes, community members can retreat into feelings of fear and paranoia, feel like security rules have been imposed on them by others, that they should be suspicious of everybody else, or that security is impossible. Asking all community members for feedback about security practices, as well as supporting those who might struggle with them, is key.