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Each anniversary of Project Galileo serves as an impetus for big-picture thinking among the Cloudflare team about where to take the initiative next. For this eighth anniversary, we want to help participants get the most out of their free security and performance services and simplify the onboarding process.
Organizations protected under Galileo are a diverse bunch, with 111 countries represented across 1,900+ web domains. Some of these organizations are very small and sometimes operated solely by volunteers. It is understandable that many do not have IT specialists or other employees with technical knowledge about security and performance capabilities. We strive to give them the tools and training to succeed, and we felt it was imperative to take this effort to a new level.
Introducing the Cloudflare Social Impact Projects Portal
To provide Galileo participants with one place to access resources, configuration tips, product explainers, and more, we built the Cloudflare Social Impact Projects Portal.
The crisis in Ukraine was a key source of inspiration for this endeavor. With overall applications for the project skyrocketing by 177% in March 2022, we were rushing to onboard new participants and get them protected from devastating attacks online. The invasion has sparked conversations among our team about how to effectively communicate the wide variety of products available under the project, get groups onboarded more quickly, and make the process easier for those who speak English as a second language.
With this portal, we hope to accomplish all of these goals across all Cloudflare Impact programs. In addition to Project Galileo, which protects groups that might otherwise be in danger of being silenced by attacks, we also have:
- Athenian Project for government election sites
- Cloudflare for Campaigns for securing federal candidates and national parties
- Project Pangea for connecting underserved communities to the Internet
Helping participants on their Cloudflare journey
With the help of numerous volunteers among the Cloudflare team, we are launching the portal with the following resources:
- New engineer-led video walkthroughs on setting up security and performance tools
- Quick summaries of technical terms, including DNS lookups, web application firewalls, caching, and Zero Trust
- Resources for support and troubleshooting
Throughout the portal, we have included links to our Learning Center, developer docs, and Help Center so participants can get user-friendly explanations of terminology and troubleshooting tips.
What’s ahead
Since we started Project Galileo back in 2014, we have routinely added new products and tools to the program as Cloudflare innovates in new areas and as participants’ security, performance, and reliability needs change. We are now working toward adding more Zero Trust capabilities within Project Galileo.
For more information about Project Galileo, check out our other 8th anniversary blog posts: