In the Guardian Project‘s current work with the FDroid community to make it a secure, streamlined, and verifiable app distribution channel for high-risk environments we have started to become more aware of the challenges and risks facing software developers who build software in around the world.

There are a wealth of resources available on how to support and collaborate with high-risk users. Surprisingly, we could not find any guidance on how to support and collaborate with developers where the internet is heavily monitored and/or filtered, let alone developers who might be at risk because of the software they develop.

We have started conducting research on developers from a range of closed and closing spaces. We hope that the results of this research will help international software projects and organizations better understand and respond to the unique needs of different international developer communities.

Part of this user research was the development of the challenges.tech survey which will be used to help us form a better understanding of the challenges international developers face, their motivations, and their priorities. With the help of the Localization Lab we have translated this survey into Chinese, Spanish, Farsi, Russian, French, and English.

We have two requests:

If you are a developer take the survey. (It takes about 10 minutes.)

Share the survey with your networks and encourage them to pass it along. We would like to get a diverse range of developers to take the survey.

We will close down the survey in a month. We will then replace the challenges.tech website with the aggregated survey results.

We will also publicly share the overall results of our research on the Guardian Project website in a research report. We hope that this report will help international organizations and software development projects understand and respond to the unique needs of different international developer communities.