As organizers you will be responsible for accounts such as email and social media accounts. Here are some steps that will help reduce the risk of someone’s hacking into your account.
We also recommend reading “Ten quick tips for staying safe online” by Danielle Smalls and Greg Wilson.
For your personal use (for R-Ladies things and in general!), we strongly recommend using a personal password manager, be it a free one like KeePass (with a back-up you’d set up on Dropbox or Google Drive) or Bitwarden, or a paid service like 1Password.
If you feel on the fence, ask other organizers or your friends about their experience with some password managers.
Password managers make it safe to store all your passwords in encrypted, safe storage. You only need to remember the password to unlock your password manager, to get access to all your account passwords.
This means this “master password” needs to be safe, meaning:
Free for single person, or two person ‘organisation’ (i.e. ability to share certain passwords with a single other person). Download the Desktop client and/or the extension/plugin for your browser of choice. Choose a password you can remember for Bitwarden, and store all your passwords in there. Also has biometrics integration for those using it.
You can even share an account with family members.
You can secure accounts such as GitHub accounts, Twitter accounts with two-factor authentication (2FA). It means that to log in into the account you will need both the password and your phone where you will be given a temporary code either by text message or via an app such as DuoMobile.
Make sure to save the recovery codes of 2FA in your personal password manager, and if relevant to share them with your team.
Note that apps like DuoMobile allow you to sync your account with GoogleDrive which can be very handy when changing phones for instance.
Your chapter will have a bunch of passwords and 2FA recovery codes to share. How to do that?