As one of the managers of the Digital Dissident Devroom, I invite you to be part of a conversation we cannot afford to ignore.
Around the world, people are being silenced, monitored, and denied access to information. Free software can help change that, but only if we build it together. We need tools people can trust and control to communicate safely, expose the truth, and resist censorship.
This devroom brings together developers, researchers, activists, and everyone committed to digital freedom. We want real solutions, honest lessons, and collaboration across projects, not product pitches.
If you believe technology should serve people, not control them, join us. Bring your ideas, experience, and questions. Let’s build the tools that help keep freedom alive.
Our focus complements other devrooms, including Decentralized Internet and Privacy, which explores the broader decentralized ecosystem. While they focus on technologies, we focus on the people under threat and the complete chain of tools that can protect them.
How to apply to speak at the dev room?
- Go to FOSDEM’s official CFP portal from here and login or register.
- Click on “Submit a proposal”
- Then fill in the form and select “Digital Dissident” as a track.
- Done!
- Please note that by doing this you also accept the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.
Define: Digital Dissident Developer Room
Privacy and anonymity tools each have a home at FOSDEM: the network, security, decentralised and messaging rooms, and various main-track and lightning talks. Someone living under an authoritarian regime (Russia, Iran, China, Belarus, Myanmar and others) never uses a single tool, though. Their day-to-day security depends on a chain of tools that has to hold up end to end:
- reaching the network at all (censorship circumvention),
- communicating without leaking metadata,
- collecting, verifying and storing evidence safely,
- publishing or leaking it without exposing the author,
- doing all this on devices and infrastructure that are themselves a risk.
The weakest link decides the outcome. Talks about one tool rarely cover how it fits with the others, where the seams are, or what breaks at the hand-offs (for example, a circumvention transport that is fingerprinted, or a messenger whose push notifications tie your identity to a Google or Apple account). Nobody currently owns that cross-project view.
What this devroom does. It brings developers of circumvention, anonymity, messaging, publishing and whistleblowing tools into one room. It is deliberately not about any single project. Each session is judged on how well it advances the toolchain: interoperability, shared threat models, shared failure data, and shared engineering practice.
Why now. Censorship in Russia, Iran and China has grown much more sophisticated. It now includes national allow-lists and whitelist-only internet shutdowns, TLS and QUIC fingerprinting, deep packet inspection with active probing, throttling of specific protocols, mobile internet shutdowns, app-store removal of circumvention tools, and mandatory state-run messengers and “sovereign internet” routing. Anti-censorship developers have responded with pluggable transports, domain fronting alternatives, mixnets, decentralised and email-based messaging, and new obfuscation protocols. Progress is fast but fragmented. At FOSDEM 2026 the relevant talks were scattered: Vitaly Repin’s “The Russian Censorship Circumvention, Tom’s Traps, and Jerry’s VPN: A 5-Year Journey” (Saturday, H.1302, Network track) drew a large audience, while NymVPN and Delta Chat’s multi-relay messaging (both Sunday, Decentralized Internet and Privacy devroom) and other related talks ran in other rooms. A single devroom lets that audience and those speakers meet in one place.
Relationship to the existing “Decentralized Internet and Privacy” devroom. That room covers decentralised technology broadly (P2P protocols, browsers, code collaboration, key infrastructure), and censorship or anonymity is only a part of it. Digital Dissident is different: the organising principle is a user under threat and the end-to-end chain that protects them, not a technology class. We want to work with, not against, that room, and will coordinate schedules so the two don’t overlap, and will point overflow speakers to whichever room fits.
Themes (details in the CfP below):
- Censorship circumvention and transport: obfuscation, fingerprint resistance, active-probing defence, bridge distribution, resilience to protocol whitelisting and full shutdowns.
- Metadata-resistant communication: mixnets, onion routing, decentralised and federated messengers, store-and-forward and offline-first (mesh, sneakernet, Bluetooth/Wi-Fi Direct).
- Secure reporting and publishing: whistleblowing platforms, source protection, document sanitisation, provenance and authenticity, censorship-resistant hosting.
- Devices and operational security: hardened mobile and desktop systems, amnesic systems, seizure and border-crossing scenarios, forensic resistance.
- Usability and threat modelling for at-risk users: onboarding under duress, safe defaults, training, measuring what really works in the field.
- Measurement and adversary analysis: how censors detect and block, open data on blocking events, reproducible censorship research.
- Digital sovereignty from Big Tech (secondary theme): reducing dependence on centralised platforms, app stores, push infrastructure, cloud and identity providers, both for individuals and for civil-society organisations.
Structure. A mix of formats to keep a full room engaged across the whole session:
- 20 to 30 minute technical talks
- A closing open discussion on interoperability gaps and shared next steps
Programme quality. Organisers will review all submissions on technical merit and fit to the toolchain framing, and will aim for a balance of projects, regions and speakers (established projects, new projects, researchers, people from affected communities). Every talk should include an explicit threat model and an honest account of limitations.
Projects and communities we intend to invite (no commitments yet): Nym (mixnet), Delta Chat / chatmail, SimpleX, the Fediverse (ActivityPub implementations and instance operators), Nostr, Psiphon and other circumvention and VPN providers, plus Tor-ecosystem, Reticulum and mesh-networking projects, whistleblowing and secure-submission platforms, and censorship-measurement researchers. Several of these projects presented at FOSDEM 2026.
Code of Conduct. We will follow the FOSDEM Code of Conduct. In addition, talks that describe circumvention or anonymity should avoid operational details that would endanger specific users in the field.
Important Dates
- Sat, 24 October 2026: Call for Participation opens
- Mon, 30 November 2026, 23:59 UTC: Call for Participation ends
- Wed, 2 December 2026: Speakers notified
- Fri, 4 December 2026: Deadline for speakers to confirm
- Mon, 7 December 2026: Schedule published
- The twenty-sixth edition of FOSDEM will take place on Saturday 30th and Sunday 31st January 2027 at the usual location, ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.