highlights from 2025

We’re revving up for Community Privacy Residency 2026 in Berlin, Germany! As we start to plan for the next iteration, we look back as well to highlights from the past one:

RightsCon conference

We attended the four-day RightsCon conference, focused on the intersection of human rights and technology, covering issues like counter-surveillance, free speech, and net neutrality. After each conference day, we held internal debrief and sharing sessions, and collectively contributed to notes on more than thirty sessions. Several of our residents also presented sessions at RightsCon, on topics including digital security training, algorithmic bias, and network security.

We also attended various satellite events, including the g0v hackathon, and the Abortion Access and Internet Freedom side-event.

Community events

We organised a post-RightsCon decompression event, featuring partners from Accessibility Lab, Plurality, and more. The event was attended by seventy-five participants and consisted of:

• A yoga session led by one of our residents;
• An interactive workshop on accessibility on digital platforms, conducted by Nancy Reyes of Accessibility Lab; and
• A fireside chat on digital rights and democracy, featuring Audrey Tang (Taiwan’s ambassador-at-large for cyber affairs), and moderated by co-organiser Riley Wong.

Sharing sessions and workshops

Over the course of the month, we organised workshops, lightning talks, and reading groups, on a range of diverse topics:

• Fully homomorphic encryption
• Zero-knowledge programming in Noir
• Red teaming policy design
• Political culture
• Reverse-engineering
• Threat modelling
• Trauma stewardship
• Self-sovereign identity
• Digital security
• Co-design
  Explorations of peer-to-peer based identity)
• Provenance detection for AI-generated images (perceptual hashing, homomorphic encryption)
• BBS# signatures
• Lightning talks on cryptographic metaphors, intellectual property, financial privacy, and more

We also hosted sessions from external guest speakers, including:

• Afsaneh Rigot of DeCenter, who shared her work on the Design from the Margins framework, and practical advice in facilitation and activism.
• a virtual guest speaker from Nowhere publishing and bookstore, which published a Mandarin translation of the Autonomous Worlds anthology

Local partners

At many points in the program, we collaborated with local partners and community organisations from Taiwan, including:

• Representatives from Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs and OdditySay Labs, who shared their work on the Taiwan Digital ID Wallet; and
• University Cafe, a community cafe supporting local youth and activism projects, where we hosted an internal demo day with invited friends.

Projects and demo days

Our residents’ public-facing contributions have been documented here, with many of them still under active development. Some of these include:

• Privacy in digital ID systems
• Machina iO
• Taiwan as a model for participatory democracy
• …and more!

We presented these at two public-facing demo days; videos are available here:

• midpoint demo day
• final demo day

Community Privacy Residency 2026 in Berlin, Germany

We are actively sourcing locations, partners, and funding for the next iteration of the residency. If you’re interested in collaborating in any capacity – be it as a mentor, volunteer, event space, or sponsor, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

As in the previous iteration, we are committed to keeping the residency accessible, and a big part of this is in heavily subsidising travel and accommodation. Any contribution goes a long way in making this possible:

• OpenCollective page
• Giveth campaign

all love <3,
ying tong, riley, and janabel
the CPR co-organizers