FAQ
General
Section titled “General”What is Tidepool?
It’s the official wiki for the SurfScape project.
What is SurfScape?
SurfScape is an umbrella with the mission of developing ethical software and services with a heavy focus on user choice, privacy, and minimalism. More information is available on the official website or the About the project page available on Tidepool.
What type of projects are developed?
The types of projects we develop are varied, they can be desktop software, web services/apps, or mobile apps, but they all have one thing in common, they have to adhere to the SurfScape principles.
What principles does SurfScape run on?
We always focus on 4 priciples:
- User choice - Everyone should have the option to change what they want, this can include appearance or even how a feature works, and we try to achieve that goal by making most of our products open source (FOSS), and even for our proprietary solutions we allow the usage of APIs to extend the functionality and share whitepapers documenting how the software works under-the-hood.
- Privacy - A good software should not be spying or monitoring you, so you can trust that ours don’t, we sometimes might include telemetry but it’s always anonymised and opt-in meaning that you decide if you want it enabled.
- Minimalism - We think the simpler the better so you can expect that not only our products all have the same cohesive design but also minimal. How can this be done? We opt for a flat, utilitarian design that only shows what the user needs but also be beautiful to look at. We call this design language Steel.
- Ethical Development - At the base of every project, we always need to have ethics during development, this means that we have to take privacy protection seriously, have transparency, be inclusive, and be considerate about the effect of something we do.
Who created and maintains SurfScape?
SurfScape was created between 2021 and 2022 by ReduxFlakes, who still leads and maintains the project today. To see who are the members in the project check the Team page.
Where is SurfScape from?
SurfScape was founded in Portugal, Europe.
Contributing
Section titled “Contributing”How do I get started contributing?
The best way to start contributing is to read the Contributing page, but also be motivated to help, since motivation goes a long way.
Do I need coding experience to help out?
Depends on what you want to help out with, we have a variety of tasks like:
- Development of projects which in this case coding experience is required
- Design-related work which is made up of branding, the Steel design system, and the creation of mockups
- Writing-related work that consists of mainting documenations like Tidepool, and Blueprint, but also the official website.
Don’t see your question here? Open a discussion on GitHub!