At the Critical Kits symposium Ross Dalziel had set up a number of PiratePad instances for attendees to use to document their thoughts, experiences and findings during the day.

Sadly, the PiratePad server wasn’t running too well, which made using it an exercise in frustration. Reflecting on it afterwards, Ross and Adrian wondered if a locally hosted version of Etherpad (the collaborative editor used by PiratePad) might fare better at future events.

The obvious way to run local server software in 2016 is to stick it on a Raspberry Pi. That’s what Etherpad-in-a-Box does. It’s an Ansible playbook to install Etherpad onto a bare Raspberry Pi setup, configured to start automatically.