Community Privacy Residency (2025)

A 2-4 week residency focused on researching, co-designing, prototyping, and building open-source applications for community privacy, with emphasis on Applications for Vulnerable Communities, Community Co-Design, and Privacy Infrastructure. Applications due January 7, 2025.

As privacy-preserving applications mature beyond the infrastructure layer to reach end-users, it is crucial to anchor their design in the needs of real-world users. This residency brings together researchers, builders, and community members to explore user-centric methodologies, such as participatory co-design and participatory threat modeling, in conversation with the privacy needs of marginalised groups.

We invite community builders, engineers, designers, cryptographers, researchers, technologists, labor organizers, journalists, members of vulnerable communities, and advocates for digital safety, bodily autonomy, privacy, and more to join us.

Residency Info

  • Residency Dates: 2/22/2025 - 3/22/2025
  • Location: Taipei, Taiwan

This residency offers:

  • Registration for RightsCon, Feb 24 - 27
  • Travel stipend and accommodations for non-local residents
  • Dedicated environment for learning and collaboration
  • Community building with local privacy and governance groups

We encourage residents to attend RightsCon, participate in community events, open-source project outputs, document processes, share learnings, and demo work with the broader community.

Project Tracks

The theme of the residency will be “community privacy,” i.e. privacy and cryptography tools that protect and empower communities from the ground up. Community privacy means creating safe spaces for vulnerable communities to live, share, organize, and interact with those outside their community.

Below are proposed project tracks and example project ideas. We also expect flexibility and potential for new tracks relevant to these themes to emerge throughout the residency. Feel free to propose your own project!

» Applications for Vulnerable Communities

  • building privacy-preserving coordination tools, such as using multi-party computation or multi-party fully homomorphic encryption for whistleblowing, labor strikes, or reporting abuse
  • compiling a privacy guide for vulnerable communities, with specific tools and use cases
  • analyzing data using multi-party statistics libraries for a specific community with privacy needs
  • updating Callisto Vault with zkEmail, MP-FHE

» Community Co-Design

  • facilitating a participatory co-design session with a specific community or topic, e.g. non-consensual media abuse, privacy needs for labor organizing or journalism, data autonomy for intimate digital media, data strikes
  • conducting UX research, user interviews, or creating mockups for consent interfaces
  • gathering feedback on existing privacy tools, social media platforms, or applications and identifying gaps in safety features and privacy needs
  • documenting threat models, e.g.: Invariant-Centric Threat Modelling; “On Privacy Notions in Secure Communication”

» Privacy Infrastructure

  • publishing a project boilerplate, writing a tutorial, or adding technical documentation for an existing cryptographic framework, e.g. zero-knowledge, multi-party computation, fully homomorphic encryption, trusted executive environments, proof-carrying data
  • integrating verifiable ID into community governance platforms, e.g. Polis, for private messaging boards, private majority reports, hierarchy of opinions (e.g. concept of expert analyses)
  • testing or auditing existing data provenance tools

Expected Outcomes

In addition to building relationships and community, as well as organizing events for privacy, cryptography, and community organizing, we anticipate the creation of:

  • Open-source technical prototypes and proofs-of-concept of privacy-preserving tools and community-focused applications
  • Original research and writing, e.g. blog posts, whitepapers, reports
  • Development of educational resources and guides, e.g. publications or public-facing workshops
  • Participatory co-design workshops, including write-ups of learnings and takeaways, and process documentation

We will facilitate sharing public outputs such as:

  • Community workshops and workshares from residents and local Taipei communities
  • Demo day on the last day
  • Written publication collating outputs: progress reports, new projects, publications, documentation, etc.