to everyone and a big thank you to all supporters of GnuPG. It is awesome to see that GnuPG and its makers received a lot of attention in the last weeks of 2014. This is really appreciated by all of us. Speaking of me, the donations allow me to keep on working on free software and GnuPG in particular — at least for the next months.

Early December friends reminded me that it is the time to kick off a donation campaign to secure the future of GnuPG. They supported me with a press release which was republished by others (e.g. Cory Doctorow) and soon many small and larger donations started to fill up the donation status bar with a bit of green. I was not just amazed by the financial support but also by the many encouraging messages to us developers like Keep the excellent work! Please!, Thanks for keeping us safe an protecting our basic human rights., You guys are great! Safe communication should be a right., Thank you so much for this hard work. You're truly directing us toward a better world, GPG is important software for our society's future, Thanks for doing great work. I know it's under appreciated, but it's absolutely necessary, Please keep it up, guys, and run further donation rounds if you need money. If GPG goes down, we'll all be at a loss, or freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of information. Up until today we received more than a quarter of the campaign’s goal and donations are still coming in. Let me add that my work on GnuPG would have not been possible without the incredible support of my family who deserve all my thanks.

At the 31C3 the Reconstructing narratives lecture (video) told us again about the depressingly sad state of our world regarding to freedom and humanity. It was also reported that most of our secure electronic communication methods don’t do what we expected from them – with the exception of a very few tools, GPG (i.e. GnuPG) being one of them.

With the raised attention towards securing our communication and to help preserving us from a world nobody wants to have, we need to improve GnuPG and its frontends. They need to be easy usable by everyone and be a standard part of every communication device much like the ubiquitous web browser. It will take time and a lot of effort to do that. I am confident that with enough support we can achieve that goal. Now let us look forward and see what is on the list.

As a prerequisite we need to establish a solid organizational framework to free developers of tasks they are not best in, like looking for money, running funding campaigns, preparing paperwork for donation programs, and talking to ties and non-techies.

We need better and streamlined documentation. For example, there are lots of different HOWTOs and other documents explaining the use of GnuPG and frontend applications. Many of them are outdated and some documents contradicts each other. Thus the goal is to prepare a canonical set of documentation to support all kind of users. See and use the Wiki if you are interested to help.

Enigmail is one of the most used mailer frontends for GnuPG and thus should be a primary target for improvements. There are currently only two spare time developers for it — despite that some smaller bugs make it sometimes hard to use for a beginner. This needs to be changed by improving the communication between the developers and finding the resources to assign a paid developer to it.

The network of OpenPGP keyservers works quite well for the relatively small active user base. For a mass use of it we need to add a few things or start to deploy an easier method for retrieving keys. This is essential for making mail encryption the default on the net.

Although the use of proprietary platforms supports the spook’s surveillance programs, it is a pipe dream to believe that free operating systems like Linux or FreeBSD can completely replace Windows, Mac OS, and Android any time soon. Improving our crypto tools on those platforms is thus essential to help those users and to trigger a network effect to make encrypted communication the default. For GnuPG this means to make the core components available on these platforms using a standard unattended installer, so that frontend applications (like Enigmail) can easily install it if not yet available. Separating the GnuPG core from the frontend applications also allows for an automatic update procedure to be prepared for possible security relevant bugs and to be able to easily deploy new algorithms as soon as the needs arises.

As stated in the press release a second full time developer for GnuPG is required to avoid relying mostly on me. Keep in mind that even after having secured enough funds it will take some time to find a developer and it will also take some months until s/he is up to my maintenance experience. Nevertheless, we need to bear these additional costs.

In general we need to simplify the the user interfaces of most frontends and make it easier start with and keep on using encryption. A dedicated developers meeting will be the first step towards this.

Okay, let’s take up our part for a new dawn.