We’re pretty sure that most of our readers already know it by now, but we’ll tell you anyway: the Hackaday community (writers and readers) is currently developing an offline password keeper. In the first post of our first DoH series, we introduced the project and called for contributors. In the comments section, we received very interesting feedback as well as many feature suggestions that we detailed in our second write-up. Finally, we organized a poll that allowed everyone to vote on the project’s name.
The results came in: the project’s name will be mooltipass. We originally had thought of ‘multipass’ but [asheets] informed us that Apple and Canon had both applied for this trademark. [Omegacs] then suggested ‘mooltipass’ as an alternative, which we loved even more. A few days ago we set up a google group which is already very active.
An often under-estimated side of a community driven project is its infrastructure and management. (How) can you manage dozens of motivated individuals from all over the globe to work on a common project? How can you keep the community informed of its latest developments?
As the Hackaday community is very comfortable with online tools, we chose:

  • github to disseminate the mooltipass resources to the public, and for firmware/software development as well
  • dropbox to share quickly-changing mechanical design files
  • trello to discuss specific topics and relate our current progress
  • google groups for general discussion

Github was the obvious choice given that it is one of the most used online repositories out there. It allows contributors to keep track of the file changes and ensures they have the latest version of the mooltipass project. Given the mechanical development process is quite different from developing firmware, contributors in charge of the case design opted for Dropbox. Here is an overview of the Trello board we setup:

Trello was suggested by [Zach] (thanks!). It is free, very easy to understand and convenient for project management (from what we can see at the moment). We took the habit of having our development related discussions in a dedicated mailing list, then move the specific points to Trello.
Unfortunately the firmware guys have still to wait for the first prototypes to arrive to start coding. Next week on Hackaday we’ll detail the first version of the hardware, currently being reviewed in our google group. Depending on the feedback we get, the v2 may be very different. It’s still not too late if you want to get involved in the project (if you aren’t a firmware developer!), so you can contact us at mathieu[at]hackaday[dot]com.

Filed under: Hackaday Columns, hardware, news