Security
One of the major values the development team has carried in the creation of the Network Dashboard plugin is security. Not only has the team extensive knowledge of religiously hostile environments, hostile government and internet censorship, and the rising world of personal data privacy concerns being led by Europe, but we also carry a high value for unstoppability. To us, we have an enemy beyond any government, hostile religion, or restrictive law, and in whatever way we can build systems that do not central dependencies and cannot be broken at any one point, the better.
The Disciple Tools site contains names, phone numbers, email addresses, location data, and much more about contacts, but none of this information is shared through the Network Dashboard connection. All the data shared is aggregated or obfuscated data. This provides compliance to GDPR and other regional privacy laws.
One unique system inside Disciple Tools is its Location Grid, which is developed from open source global mapping sets, like GADM and Geonames. This system allows us to abstract personally identifiable longitude and latitude data, and convert it into a standard location identifier. This allows us to send with the network dashboard data only the location identifier which is referenced by the receiving dashboard. This Location Grid system allows us not only to lighten the data transfer between sites and communicate saturation information with greater precision than other obfuscation techniques, it gives a wider framework for the Christian community to use for sharing knowledge of gospel penetration and church saturation across systems. To learn more about the Location Grid Project see the open source project hosted on Github. (https://github.com/DiscipleTools/location-grid-project) For those interested, this project solves many problems regarding proprietary and expensive geolocation sources provided by the commercial sector.
As covered above, the Network Dashboard does not share any personal information of any single contact or group or user. All information about contacts, groups, churches and users is aggregated. This includes reducing location precision of personal addresses or event locations to their containing county, states or country referenced by their location grid id.