What's this site all about?

To encourage wider uptake of encryption and identification using GPG we need to streamline the whole keysigning process, making it as easy as possible for people to become part of the Web Of Trust without compromising its strength by using poor keysigning techniques. A smooth, documented procedure and toolkit for people to use when running their own keysignings would be a very useful thing, but so far it's all a bit disjointed. There is a lot of very good documentation around, and many people have written scripts etc to help manage keysignings, but it can be hard for a newcomer to the world of encryption to figure out where to start.

And even experts can find running a keysigning to be quite painful. There are various guides for how to do it and the general process is reasonably well known, but when keysignings involve more than a couple of people they can become extremely time consuming to manage. The process of collecting public keys, generating a keyring, creating the keylist, and distributing the procedure to the participants can be very annoying. There are some scripts around to help streamline things but they only provide part of the answer, not a complete solution.

When I started organising the keysigning for LCA2004 I discovered that running a large keysigning is a whole new kettle of fish compared to getting together with a couple of friends and handing out fingerprints. I went looking for scripts and documents to help guide me through it and found surprisingly little available.

This site aims to help solve that problem by providing a centralised location for reference information, links and tools to manage keysignings. If you are interested in helping out please contact me.