Guide Drop boxes
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Drop boxes

A protest has far more witnesses than equipped people. A drop box lets anyone film for your collective: they scan a QR code, film, and the footage leaves encrypted, as it goes, for your account. They have nothing to create, nothing to remember.

Drop boxes belong to a collective (legal team, observatory, newsroom): switch to your collective with the space switcher at the top of the page. All its members can create and run boxes.

Creating a box

In Drop boxes, fill in:

  • the internal name, for you only, encrypted;
  • the name shown to witnesses: the public name of your collective. It is visible to anyone who scans the QR, and in clear on the server;
  • the lock of each contribution: 24 hours by default. Enough to keep the footage safe, short enough to sort afterwards and erase what does not belong;
  • the sending time of a contribution, from 1 to 24 hours;
  • the location, off by default: the witness can refuse it;
  • a maximum number of contributions, if you want a limit.

The poster

When created, the box shows a QR code and a 16-character code, ready to print: poster, leaflet, card on the back of an observer's armband. The code is shown only once, in that tab: the server keeps it hashed. To print again later, change the code: the old one stops working at once, along with the posters that carry it.

Changing the code is also the answer if a poster circulates where it should not.

On the witness side

The witness scans the QR with their phone's camera. The usual field page opens, headed by "Your footage leaves encrypted for:" followed by the name shown for your collective, and a reminder that they will not be able to see it again or delete it. Then it is the usual field phone: recording, continuous sending, degraded network, alert.

Without a camera, they open the field phone address and type the 16 characters of the code.

Receiving and sorting

Each scan creates a contribution: a session of your collective, which you read like your own. Contributions appear in the box, not in your session list; the dashboard says how many you received.

After the lock, a useless contribution is deleted like a session. A useful one is kept, extracted, filed in an incident file, exported.

Limits and abuse

Contributions use your collective's quota. The server refuses a new contribution when that quota is reached, when the box is closed, expired or full, and beyond 30 contributions per hour per box. You can close the box at any time and reopen it later.

The witness has no account: they receive no notification and cannot check in. If they want to keep track of what they filmed, they must tell the collective by other means.