Scuttlebuttoons: Animations of Scuttlebuttian Concepts

Scuttlebuttoons are short, simple animations which can be used to illustrate the various complex aspects of Secure Scuttlebutt that may be difficult to communicate using text or spoken language alone.

These can be used for communication of ssb in websites, presentations and videos, and licensed under CC-BY for anyone to adapt and use in their talks, blogs, etc. Each animation will only be a few seconds long, the idea being that they would visually illustrate something which is being communicated in an accompanying text, or being spoken about in a conversation/presentation.

Development of Scuttlebuttoons is supported by an ssbc-grant of $5000 USD.

But there's already a Scuttlebutt Animation!

This is both visually and conceptually a different style of animation than @zach's wonderful Scuttlebutt Love Story - my proposed animations don't have that project's human-centered aspect, and they don't really work as standalone pieces in the way that it does.

BUT, these are designed to be flexible and multi-functional enough to support various different communication approaches. So, a short animation showing how the gossip protocol works could be used by different people discussing different aspects of that protocol - Zach might include it in a blog post with a detailed character story along the lines of A Scuttlebutt Love Story, or @Dominic might use it in his slides at a tech conference while discussing some highly technical aspect of the gossip protocol at the code level. It could also be used as graphics by a TV/documentary crew interviewing community members about ssb, and they could adapt it to their color scheme to look like it was a product of their graphics department ;)

In addition, by carving up "an animation about ssb" into "lots of little animations about ssb", it gives us a little more future-proofing as the technology and community develop. If a core ssb concept changes drastically, maybe the text around an animation will need updating (which is a lot less effort than updating the animation). We saw this need in the More Friends for Scuttleville thread, where it became apparent that existing communication about ssb needed updating, and new technical features needed to be added. If we have lots of little animations, even if one of them is rendered obsolete by a technical or social change, ideally it can be updated, but otherwise it can just be dropped from the slide deck/online article without the other animations being affected. You don't want to send someone a link to an animated video with the caveat: "ah, but the parts from 1:13-1:26, and also 1:50-2:05 are now obsolete, so, um, just ignore those."

Topics

The topics might be, for example:

• how messages are gossiped
• Basic blocking & privacy concepts
• subjective naming of things
• what pubs are for

...but those are just a few initial thoughts off the top of my head. Ideas welcome.

Who is involved in this project?

I'm Sam, I work at the intersection of animation and open source collaboration. I'll be leading the collaborative development of animation ideas together with the community on Scuttlebutt, and creating the animations myself.

I will likely be leaning heavily on vtduncan's Protocol Documentation, and mixmix will be helping me get my head around git-ssb.