Access Now increases focus & security with self-hosted Mattermost

Access Now is an international human rights organization dedicated to defending and extending the digital rights of people and communities at risk. Founded in 2009, the global organization has team members operating across five continents, including presences in New York, San José (Costa Rica), Brussels, Berlin, Nairobi, and Manila, to name a few.

By combining direct technical support, strategic advocacy, grassroots grantmaking, and events like RightsCon, Access Now fights for human rights in the digital age.

Needing a secure collaboration platform with data sovereignty 

As an organization with a global footprint, Access Now collaborates across time zones in pursuit of its mission.  

“One of the ways Access Now helps build resilience and ensure online safety and security is through a 24/7, 365 Digital Security Helpline, which provides rapid-response support to activists, journalists, and other civil society actors at risk,” says Thomas Kaye, Chief Security Officer at Access Now. “The Helpline knows that when you’re in crisis, time is of the essence. The team strives to respond to all requests within two hours and offers support in multiple languages.”

Such support is both reactive (e.g., a journalist is abducted and their social media accounts need to be locked) and preventative (e.g., digital security training and assessments). 

Each year, Access Now receives roughly 4,000 requests through the Helpline. “By the very nature of the Helpline’s work, these requests can be deeply sensitive — for example, a human rights defender targeted, a journalist in detention, a pro-democracy activist being doxxed,” Kaye continues. 

The organization had been using IRC to coordinate Helpline response but outgrew the platform over time and started looking for a more versatile yet secure replacement. 

“First and foremost, Access Now places a high value on privacy and the security of the communities we support, while using tools that remain reliable, usable, and accessible,” Kaye explains. “We wanted a place that allowed for both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration — one where we had control over our data.” 

Choosing self-hosted Mattermost, a ‘tried-and-tested’ option 

Currently, the organization’s team members are using a popular third-party cloud-based commercial messaging platform as a “front of house” communication solution. But given the sensitive nature of the Helpline, Access Now needed more control over its data along with the ability to tightly limit and regulate platform access. As a result, that commercial messaging platform was ruled out. 

“We started asking the team and the community what tools they use for secure communication and looked at recommendations from trusted sources,” Kaye continues. “We briefly reviewed some other options but didn’t feel they had reached the maturity level we needed. We required a space where we could collaborate but keep tight control of our data, and this is when we turned to Mattermost.” 

Ultimately, the Helpline team chose Mattermost because they could self-host the solution on their own infrastructure — and because like-minded nonprofits were using it for secure collaboration and spoke highly of it. 

“It’s a tried-and-tested product that peers in the sector use,” Kaye continues, adding that initial setup took about a month. “Mattermost provides excellent functionality and has facilitated increased collaboration within the team.” 

Increasing focus with a centralized collaboration space 

Access Now’s Helpline team is impressed by Mattermost’s flexibility and has used it to integrate different systems, Kaye explained.

“We’re making use of webhooks to get notifications coming from our monitoring systems  — from our internal GitLab and the main ticketing system we use,” Kaye says. “We also have single sign-on configured, which has been very useful.” 

With Mattermost, Access Now has been able to reduce reliance on emails, keep inboxes empty, and increase focus by centralizing alert notifications in a dedicated channel. 

“In the past, if there was a request for support, it would get emailed across the team,” Kaye says, adding that — if the 25-person Helpline team received 80 support requests in a day — that’s 2,000 emails clogging up internal networks and inboxes. “Naturally, this approach doesn’t scale well when you start to receive dozens of requests a day. Using Mattermost, we created an alert channel and removed the email alerts, providing a single place for information while reducing pressure on our infrastructure.” 

Looking ahead, Access Now has a project underway to move the entire organization over to another Mattermost instance; both Mattermost instances will be connected via shared channels to keep everyone aligned (e.g., by broadcasting organization-wide announcements) while ensuring only authorized users have access to the Helpline instance. 

“We’re starting to explore Boards,” Kaye concludes. “I see this being a very popular feature within the team once we have the Mattermost ‘front of house’ instance up and running.”