Contributing to the project

We need an enormous amount of help to make Awala realise its full potential. Read on to learn how you can help us get there.

We recommend that prospective contributors familiarise themselves with the code of conduct and the Awala Way.

Current priority areas

Spread the word about Awala, especially amongst diaspora communities.
If you’re an Android developer, consider building or prototyping an Awala-compatible app.
If you’re a UX designer and have experience with Offline First / Delay-Tolerant Networking, please give us feedback on our UX guidelines for service providers.
Test the Awala, Awala Ping and Awala Courier apps on Android, and give us feedback on the forum.

Upcoming priority areas

Please bear with us whilst we pave the way for people to contribute to the items below:

Build or prototype Windows/Linux apps once we release the Awala app for desktop.
Translate the Android and desktop apps to your native language(s). This is currently blocked by two things:
- We want to wait until the text has been finalised.
- We need to identify and provision the translation service we’ll use, and integrate it with our automated release processes.
Review our plan for all Awala services to circumvent Internet censorship based on deep packet inspection.

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Code contributions

Please refer to our documentation for contributors on GitHub.

Protocol and code reviews

An earlier version of the protocol suite was independently assessed and we’ll arrange for the initial implementation of Awala to be independently audited too. However, we want Awala to be throughly reviewed before we put it in front of at-risk users, so please:

If you have a background in cryptography and/or networking, consider reviewing the specs, and the apps and libraries we’ve built so far – in particular:
- The core Awala libraries for Node.js and the JVM.
- Awala Gateway for Android.
- Awala-Internet Gateway (Node.js, Kubernetes).
If you’re an SRE or SecDevOps engineer, consider reviewing the cloud infrastructure for the Awala-Internet Gateway instances operated by Relaycorp.

Please refer to our security policy if you find a security vulnerability.

Partnerships

If you’re an organisation interested in contributing to Awala, please contact Relaycorp.

Ancillary projects

We’d love to start the following projects, but they’re not within the scope of Awala strictly speaking and our resources are extremely limited, so it’s unlikely we’ll do so any time soon. We’d be willing to participate if someone else were to take the lead.

Add 25519/448 support to PKI.js – at least X25519/X448 (RFC 8418) – so that we can use it.
Research and document User Experience best practices in Delay-Tolerant Networking.
Implement a service to alert to potential Internet/telecommunications blackouts.
Research and document practical implementations of steganography at scale, so that we can eventually use them. We’re particularly interested in approaches that wouldn’t turn into a whack-a-mole game with censors.

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