We have added the Oakland Unified School District to our roster of organizations where users will automatically get free Academic Accounts when they sign up, using their @ousd.org email addresses.

Kerika’s free Academic & Nonprofit Accounts let folks have up to 10 people working on boards owned by each account, and each individual within an approved organization can have their own account: that includes students, teachers and staff.

Our roster of whitelisted organizations now runs in the hundreds, and includes users from across the world.

We have enough of our new mobile version built that we have started doing beta tests with a handful of users from around the world. Initial feedback has been very positive.

We expect to stay in beta mode for another few weeks and then make the mobile version available to all our users.

There will be no app to install: you will be able to use your Safari, Chrome or Firefox browser on your phone.

We are making some changes to our Privacy Policy to get ready for some new analytics work we are planning to do. Here’s a summary of what’s changing, and why.

Using Amplitude for Product Analytics

We will use Amplitude to help us understand better how our users actually use Kerika, so that we can make better product decisions. In order to use Amplitude’s analytics, we need to send this information to their servers:

1. An internal Kerika User ID: it is not your name, email or any other personal information.
   
2. A device ID: this identifies each session, and doesn’t include any personal information either.
   
3. Events (mouse clicks) that take place when someone uses Kerika: they tell us which parts of the Kerika software are being used, how often, and in which sequence.

Here’s an example:

On the left side of this screen we can see that this user has been creating a series of boards, and that that our server had a fast response each time. We can see from the right side this was in California; if someone else were to complain about Kerika being slow, we could determine if it is a regional problem or a global one.

We have signed a strong protection agreement with Amplitude to protect our users’ privacy; you can find it online here.

Using Sentry for Error Tracking

We use Sentry to help us track and debug errors because we want to fix every single error that occurs, even when users don’t notice anything. (Which they don’t, 95% of the time .)

Using Sentry helps Kerika log every single thing that goes wrong. Here’s an example:

This example is of a temporarily broken connection. No one actually complained because Kerika restores connections automatically, but it’s still useful for us to know where inside the Kerika app the error was detected (the URL), and the context of the user:

• IP Location helps us understand whether there is a regional problem or a global one.
  
• Browser and operating system is very helpful in debugging problems that lurk within specific browser versions. In this example, the user is using a very outdated version of Firefox (v68 instead of v73).

Using Google for Website Analytics

This hasn’t changed in years, but we thought we would reiterate it here so you have a complete picture of your privacy protections. We use Google Analytics to help us understand how people find us and which parts of the website are browsed most often.

It turns out that even though we have over a hundred website pages, just a few ever get visited. Oh, well.