Helder S Ribeiro

Software engineering contractor.

Headed software development, crowdfunding, community, and communications for Você Fiscal in the 2014 presidential election, working alongside Professor Diego F. Aranha, founder of the project and security researcher at University of Campinas (Unicamp). We beat our target funding in 3 days and more than doubled it in 30. I wrote the script for the video, shot and edited it, wrote the copy for the campaign, newsletters, and social media. We got the project feature on every major news outlet in Brazil (including #1 Globo), national celebrities like Luciano Huck took Instagram selfies wearing our t-shirts, and tens of thousands of people used our mobile app on election day. I designed the mobile app and managed its development with contractors. I also designed and developed by myself a real-time full stack web app in Meteor.js for crowdsourced verification of photos taken by the mobile app against the official data published by the electoral authorities. As a result of our mobilization efforts and of a formal proposal we sent to the electoral authorities, the source code of the voting machines was changed to include a cryptographically-signed hash of its contents in a QR code for easier voter verification. In 2016, 144 million Brazilians cast their vote in one of 500,000 voting machines with the updated source code because of our work.