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Lantern Network Building
Lantern depends on a strong trust network of users that spans the censorship divide and that includes enough Give mode users to have proxies available when censored users need them.
To this end, both Give and Get mode users need tools to help them grow their trust networks. The benefits of growing the Lantern trust network aren't immediately palpable to users. It may take Give mode users a while before they see any Get mode users connecting through their proxy. Due to the immediate availability of fallback proxies, Get mode users may not sense the importance of building their trust network in order to improve the speed and reliability of the Lantern proxy network.
Given these challenges, Lantern should both make it as easy as possible to grow one's trust network, as well as provide education and encouragement to get users to engage in this process.
The tools for growing ones network are universally applicable, while education and encouragement need to be sensitive to differences in the Give and the Get mode experiences.
This document outlines approaches for addressing all of these aspects of building the trust network.
note - It is important to remember that much network building can proceed informally and outside of the Lantern application - ultimately Lantern just needs to know once the connection has been made. Before going too far down the road of building specific tooling, we should make sure to talk with our "connnectors", i.e. the people who have relationships that bridge the censorship divide and who are likely to be the lynchpins of the Lantern trust network in its early stages.
Lantern should make it easy to find Lantern friends, in particular ones who can help bridge the censorship divide. To this end, Lantern should integrate with popular social networks
- Email via Google contacts (already implemented)
- Google+ circles
Not all friends are created equally. We want to connect users from uncensored countries with users in censored countries. To this end, we want to prioritize relationships where:
- The friends have different censorship status (e.g. U.S. and China)
- One of the friends has connections to people with a different censorship status
Item 1 can be accomplished with most social APIs that include location information about friends (which is most of them). The problem is that there aren't necessarily a lot of people who have friends across the censorship divide.
Item 2 can be accomplished with LinkedIn. The upside to this is that it can help us expand the pool of "connectors".
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