# Call for Participation: Digital Dissident devroom at FOSDEM 2027 Journalists, activists, human-rights defenders and ordinary people living under authoritarian regimes face state-level surveillance and censorship. Russia, Iran and China are the best known cases, but far from the only ones. What protects them is not any single application. It is a **toolchain** of circumvention, private communication, evidence handling, safe publishing and hardened devices, where every link has to hold. The Digital Dissident devroom brings those links together. We want technical talks from people who build, operate, attack and measure the systems that make it possible to **communicate, report, publish and blow the whistle from a digitally hostile environment**. We are not interested in promoting any one tool. We are interested in how tools combine, where they break, and what the free software community can build together. **We welcome talks on, but not limited to:** ### Getting online - Censorship circumvention protocols and pluggable transports, and how they fare against TLS/QUIC fingerprinting, active probing, throttling and protocol allow-listing - Bridge and proxy distribution, and keeping infrastructure alive when censors enumerate it - Operating during regional or national shutdowns and whitelist-only networks: mesh, satellite, offline-first and delay-tolerant approaches - Lessons from running a VPN or proxy service in a heavily censored country ### Communicating privately - Mixnets, onion routing and other metadata-resistant transports - Decentralised, federated and email-based messaging, and their real-world threat models - Push notifications, contact discovery, phone-number identity and other metadata leaks in "secure" messengers - Interoperability between anonymity networks, messengers and circumvention layers ### Reporting, publishing and whistleblowing - Secure submission systems and source protection - Document and media sanitisation (metadata scrubbing), provenance and authenticity (C2PA, signing, timestamping) without deanonymising the author - Censorship-resistant publishing and hosting: mirrors, decentralised storage, takedown resilience - Digital security workflows for newsrooms and human-rights organisations ### Devices and operational security - Hardened and amnesic operating systems, device seizure and border-crossing scenarios - Forensic resistance, duress and plausible deniability features, secure backups - Supply-chain trust for tools distributed to at-risk users when app stores and package mirrors are blocked ### People, usability and evidence - Usability and onboarding for users under stress, and safe defaults - Threat modelling for at-risk groups, including lessons from the field - Censorship measurement, open data, reproducible research on blocking events - Attacks: how state adversaries actually deanonymise and detect users, and what defenders learned ### Digital sovereignty (secondary theme) - Reducing dependence on Big Tech platforms, app stores, cloud, push and identity providers - Self-hosted and community-run alternatives that survive political and commercial pressure - Legal and infrastructure risks of centralisation, such as sanctions, forced compliance and platform lock-in ## What we look for - Technical depth: protocols, architectures, measurements, code and honest post-mortems - An explicit **threat model** and a clear statement of what your approach does *not* protect against - Free and open source software, or open specifications - Cross-project thinking: how does your work fit with others in the chain? - Field experience, from speakers who work with or come from affected communities, is especially valued ## What we do not accept - Product pitches and marketing - Talks that only work by exposing operational details that would put users at risk ## Formats Talk slots are flexible, from **10-minute lightning talks** (quick project introductions, status updates) up to **30-minute talks**. **All times include Q&A** — please plan your presentation so there is time for questions, as much of the value in this devroom comes from the discussion. We will close the devroom with an open discussion on interoperability gaps and shared next steps. ## Important dates - **30 November 2026** — submission deadline (23:59 UTC) - **7 December 2026** — speakers notified - **14 December 2026** — final schedule announced - **30 January 2027** — Digital Dissident devroom, Saturday morning at FOSDEM ## How to submit Please submit your proposal through the FOSDEM pretalx system: **https://fosdem.org/submit** - Select the **"Digital Dissident"** track. - Please include: a talk title, an abstract (one or two paragraphs), a short speaker bio, and links to any related code, projects or previous talks. Uploading a photograph is encouraged. - State your preferred duration (10–30 minutes, including Q&A) in the submission notes. - If you are unsure whether your topic fits, or whether it belongs in this devroom or another one, reach out to us before submitting — see the contact below. Please submit only to the most appropriate devroom rather than submitting the same talk to multiple tracks. Before submitting, please make sure you can attend FOSDEM in person and deliver your talk if it is accepted. Our schedule is tight, and late cancellations leave empty slots after we have had to turn away many strong proposals. Unfortunately, we cannot offer travel funding for speakers. ## Contact and volunteering If you have questions about submitting, preparing or presenting, or if you would like to help run the devroom, contact the coordinators at: **digital-dissident-devroom-manager at fosdem.org** We look forward to seeing you in Brussels!