I’m pleased to announce that I’ve joined the Qubes team in a part-time role as Community Manager. I consider it an honor to have the opportunity to work with such a talented team of individuals and to serve such a dynamic community. As the Community Manager, I’ll primarily be responsible for things like handling user feedback, organizing bug reports, tracking community-developed features, and facilitating community contributions to the codebase. (As with any small project, however, we all wear many hats, so if there’s ever anything Qubes-related I can help you with, please let me know.)

I’ve been active in the Qubes community for several years now under the pseudonym “Axon,” primarily writing documentation and helping to maintain the Qubes website in my spare time as a volunteer (which I plan to continue doing alongside my new role). In joining the Qubes team more officially, however, I’ve decided to retire my pseudonym and to begin using my real identity. I consider myself fortunate to be in a position to make this choice. For me, the decision to use a pseudonym was based primarily on considerations of personal privacy. For many other people around the world, however, pseudonymous and anonymous communication is a matter of life and death. This is one reason that I believe Qubes OS – and especially its partnership with Whonix – is so important: it allows for the secure compartmentalization of these various contextual identities (along with all the other areas of one’s digital life) in ways which would not otherwise be possible. More importantly, however, it freely puts this control in the hands of individual users.

Admittedly, it currently takes a certain kind of user – one who is sufficiently self-motivated and willing to learn – to make full use of Qubes OS. This is something we’re continually working on. By working to make Qubes accessible to a wider user base, we aim to make strong endpoint security available to everyone, regardless of their level of technical expertise. As computers continue to become increasingly integrated with our lives (and our bodies), the importance of secure computing increases proportionately for all of us.