Hello,
In February 2019, the OONI team established 3 new partnerships and published a research report on media censorship amid Cuba's 2019 constitutional referendum. Further information is provided below.
## Established new partnerships
We are excited to have established new partnerships with: * Software Freedom Law Centre (India)
* COMPSUDEV: Community Participation in Sustainable Development (Cameroon)
* R3D: Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (Mexico)
## Report on media censorship in Cuba amid 2019 constitutional referendum
During Cuba's 2019 constitutional referendum, several independent media websites were blocked.
We collaborated with locals on producing the following report: https://ooni.torproject.org/post/cuba-referendum/
## OONI Probe Android 2.0.0 Incident Report
We published a report to share details about the OONI Probe Android 2.0.0 bug, what we did to fully resolve it, and what we are doing to prevent similar incidents from recurring in the future: https://ooni.io/post/ooni-probe-android-200-incident/
## OONI Software Development Guidelines
Following the OONI Probe Android 2.0.0 incident, we wrote and published a document which explains the software development practices that the OONI team will be following: https://ooni.io/post/ooni-software-development-guidelines/
It is particularly important that we improve upon the testing of our apps (both in terms of unit tests and end-to-end integration tests), strengthen our quality assurance and release management workflow, and improve upon how we do code review for all of our software projects. Details about the software development practices that the OONI team (and anyone else contributing to OONI software projects) should follow are provided in our published guidelines.
We also started to improve the testing of the OONI Probe Android and iOS apps by writing Unit & Integration tests:
* Probe Android: https://github.com/ooni/probe-android/pull/195
* Probe iOS: https://github.com/ooni/probe-ios/pull/246
## Beta release of MK v0.10
As a requirement to integrating a new Psiphon test into the OONI Probe apps, we have been making a number of changes to Measurement Kit (MK).
We released a beta (MK v0.10) that includes these changes: https://github.com/measurement-kit/measurement-kit/releases/tag/v0.10.0-beta
## Community activities
### Censorship measurement campaigns
Leading up to and during Nigeria's and Senegal's 2019 elections, our Nigerian (Paradigm Initiative) and Senegalese (ASUTIC) partners coordinated local OONI Probe censorship measurement testing.
In addition to coordinating local testing, ASUTIC updated the Senegalese test list (https://github.com/citizenlab/test-lists/pull/434) and Paradigm Initiative encouraged the use of OONI Probe through their relevant guide ("How to Remain Online During Internet Disruptions" - Verifying and testing blocked websites, apps, and social media platforms): https://paradigmhq.org/download/how-to-remain-online-during-internet-disrupt...
Our Venezuelan partners, Venezuela Inteligente and IPYS Venezuela, continued to monitor emerging censorship events by coordinating local OONI Probe testing. They confirmed the temporary blocking of YouTube and many other services through the use of OONI Probe (as documented, for example, by IPYS Venezuela: https://ipysvenezuela.org/alerta/23f-balance-ipysve-medidas-de-censura-y-agr...).
### OONI Run button page
To support censorship measurement campaigns, we set up a quick page on our website that includes OONI Run buttons: https://ooni.io/get-involved/run/
OONI Probe mobile app users can tap on these buttons to test entire country-specific test lists, as well as select social media and VPN sites. We recently added an OONI Run button to enable the testing of Wikipedia URLs as well.
We will likely continue to populate this page with more OONI Run buttons over time (based on community requests).
### FOSDEM
On 2nd February 2019, OONI's Elio participated at FOSDEM where he facilitated a session (https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/ux_overhaul_ooni/), providing an overview of the UX overhaul of the OONI Probe mobile app.
## BarCamp Chiang Mai
On 16th February 2019, OONI's Lorenzo presented OONI at the BarCamp event (https://www.barcampchiangmai.com/) in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
As part of this 30-minute session, Lorenzo explained how to use OONI Probe and OONI data to examine internet censorship.
Our previous research with the Thai Netizen Network and Sinar Project, examining internet censorship in Thailand (https://ooni.io/post/thailand-internet-censorship/), was also presented and discussed as part of the event.
## OONI workshop in Bangkok
On 17th February 2019, OONI's Lorenzo and our local partners jointly facilitated a day-long OONI workshop (10am to 6:30pm) in Bangkok, Thailand, for local human rights defenders.
The workshop covered the following: * How the internet works / types of network interference * Introduction to censorship measurement research (and potential risks) * Installing & using OONI Probe * Translating OONI Probe * Legal, social and political context from Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries * Contributing to test lists * Using OONI Explorer to find and interpret censorship measurement data * Producing research based on OONI data * Using OONI Run to coordinate censorship measurement campaigns (particularly during political events)
## Userbase
In February 2019, OONI Probe was run 258,610 times from 4,544 different vantage points in 209 countries around the world.
This information can also be found through our stats: https://api.ooni.io/stats
~ OONI team.