LiberaForms

Cloud services that offer handling of online forms are widely used by schools, associations, volunteer organisations, civil society, and even families to publish questionnaires and collect the results. While these cloud services (such as Google Forms and Microsoft Forms) can be quite convenient to create forms with, for the constituency which has to fill out these forms such practices can actually be very invasive because forms may not only include personal details such as their name, address, gender or age, but also more intimate questions including medical details, political information and life style background. In many situations there is a power asymmetry between the people creating the form and the users that have to supply the data through that form. Often there is significant time pressure. No wonder that users feel socially coerced to comply and hand over their data, even though they might be perfectly aware that their own data might be used against them.

LiberaForms is a transparent alternative for proprietary online forms that you can easily host yourself. In this project, LIberaForms will add end-to-end encryption with OpenPGP, meaning that the data is encrypted on the client device and only the final recipient of the form data can read it (and not just anyone with access to a server). Also, the team will add real-time collaboration on forms, in case users need to fill out forms together.