---
layout: post
title: Joining the Qubes Team as Community Manager
date: 2016-04-29
author: Andrew David Wong
categories:
  - announcements
---

I'm pleased to announce that I've joined the Qubes team in a part-time
role as Community Manager. I consider it an honor to have the
opportunity to work with such a talented team of individuals and to serve
such a dynamic community. As the Community Manager, I'll primarily be
responsible for things like handling user feedback, organizing bug
reports, tracking community-developed features, and facilitating community
contributions to the codebase. (As with any small project, however, we all
wear many hats, so if there's ever anything Qubes-related I can help you
with, please let me know.) 

I've been active in the Qubes community for several years now under the
pseudonym "Axon," primarily writing documentation and helping to maintain
the Qubes website in my spare time as a volunteer (which I plan to continue
doing alongside my new role).  In joining the Qubes team more
officially, however, I've decided to retire my pseudonym and to begin
using my real identity. I consider myself fortunate to be in a position
to make this choice. For me, the decision to use a pseudonym was based
primarily on considerations of personal privacy. For many other people
around the world, however, pseudonymous and anonymous communication is a
matter of life and death. This is one reason that I believe Qubes OS
-- and especially its partnership with Whonix -- is so important:
it allows for the secure compartmentalization of these various contextual
identities (along with all the other areas of one's digital life) in ways
which would not otherwise be possible. More importantly, however, it
freely puts this control in the hands of individual users.

Admittedly, it currently takes a certain kind of user -- one who is
sufficiently self-motivated and willing to learn -- to make full use of
Qubes OS. This is something we're continually working on. By working to
make Qubes accessible to a wider user base, we aim to make strong
endpoint security available to everyone, regardless of their level of
technical expertise. As computers continue to become increasingly
integrated with our lives (and our bodies), the importance of secure
computing increases proportionately for all of us.