The world is becoming smaller and smaller very quickly. We are centrilizing our day to day communication through a small number of organisations, and as they merge our privacy is erroded. Building secure applications is not the answer to this problem. A new trend has to be set that privacy is a default and not a feature. The idea of this project is an attempt to set an example of software driven by Experience Design but does it while being Free, Open and Secure.
Provide a way for people all over the world to instatly communicate, weather that be from a laptop, desktop, tablet or mobile phone. Privacy should be blended into the application in such a way that the user does not need to be aware of it. Where possible use established open technology to decentralise and secure communication.
With project members around the world the project must be truely distributed, we must work on ways to be an effective team without having to rely upon single physical locations. Some suggetions so far have been to rely heavily upon GitHub for code/wiki, Trello for task management, Freenode IRC for chat, and the mailing lists.
Not knowing yet what the group will produce we needed non-descript name. It's named after the Epiphyte Corp from the book Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Becasue who doesn't like a geeky book reference, espeically when the book is about a fictional history of cryptography.