Hylo
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FAQ
Frequent Axalotl Questions
Is Hylo in beta? What stage is this project in?
We don’t officially call Hylo a beta, but we are still in an early adopter phase. The platform is live in production, ready to use, and many groups are actively using it. Even so, there’s a bit more work to do before we do a big public launch (estimated for early 2023). We welcome input from everyone using Hylo, and encourage open source contributions like submitting feature ideas or even writing code! You can participate in the conversations about Building Hylo in this Hylo group!
What are the values underpinning Hylo?
What is the relationship between Hylo and its stewards: Terran Collective?
Terran Collective is registered as an LLC in California, and we are the primary stewards of Hylo, in partnership with Holo, Inc (https://holo.host). We also have a non-profit entity that is fiscally sponsored by Empowerment WORKS called Terran Watershed that also works on Hylo (we accept donations here). We are still exploring the best future legal structure for Hylo that will ensure it stays mission-driven in the long run and welcome input on that process too.
What is the relationship between Hylo and Holo?
Terran Collective is partners with Holo, the makers of Holochain, in stewarding Hylo, a free and open-source community platform for purpose-driven groups. Learn more here.
What IT security standards to you have in place to protect user data?
All user data is encrypted and passed through a secure connection via HTTPS when a user is active on Hylo. We have recently completed an audit of our user authentication code, and we follow best practices for session management, password storage, etc. We don’t yet have multi-factor auth support, but we are about to roll out a few more improvements that will pave the way for that in the future.
Where is Hylo hosted and is it GDPR compliant? What data security and protection standards does Hylo follow?
Hylo is hosted on Heroku, with some data storage on Amazon AWS servers as well. Digital Ocean hosts a proxy service that is involved in directing Hylo traffic to the appropriate servers. There are only a couple of trusted team members that have access to the production databases. We use 2FA to access our hosting services and use a company password manager. Users can contact our team for help managing their account via Intercom, and our policy is to only look at user data when asked to do so by those users. Users have the option to Deactivate or Delete their accounts in Settings. Beyond that, we are working to develop a more formal and thorough Data Protections Policy.
Hylo is free to use. How do you fund your work?
Work on Hylo is funded through donations and paid partnerships with aligned non-profit organizations. Right now, our primary funding comes from https://openteam.community and we have a beautiful partnership with them where we are working to turn Hylo into the community platform for farmers and in particular the regenerative agriculture movement. We are open to additional funding partners and are also pursuing larger philanthropic donations to allow us to grow the Hylo community and deliver what is needed. Hylo's long-term plan for financial sustainability is to add various ways for financial transactions to flow across the platform (community membership subscription fees, crowdfunding for projects or groups) with the option for users to offer transaction tips to support the platform. These will be optional donations and Hylo will remain free to use.
Do the Hylo web application and mobile apps support multiple languages e.g. using it in Spanish?
Not yet! This is very high on our priority list and will be happening in the next several months. People do use Hylo currently with other languages, but the app content is all in English until this work gets done.
Last modified 3mo ago
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