FOSDEM 2027 Opens CFP for Digital Dissident Devroom
Original: I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27
Why This Matters
Fragmented anti-censorship tooling is a known weak point; a dedicated cross-project forum could accelerate coordination.
Bogomil Shopov, manager of FOSDEM 2027's Digital Dissident Devroom, invites developers, researchers, and activists to submit talks on censorship circumvention, anonymity tools, and the full security toolchain facing users under authoritarian regimes.
Shopov has opened the call for proposals for the Digital Dissident Devroom at FOSDEM 2027, positioning it as the first dedicated space at the conference to address the complete chain of tools people under authoritarian regimes depend on — not individual projects in isolation.
The devroom targets a specific gap: talks at FOSDEM 2026 on censorship and anonymity were scattered across the Network, Security, and Decentralized Internet tracks. The Digital Dissident room aims to bring developers of circumvention tools, anonymous messengers, whistleblowing platforms, and evidence-preservation software into one shared space to address interoperability, shared threat models, and failure points at the handoffs between tools.
Shopov's framing is direct: a person in Russia, Iran, China, Belarus, or Myanmar never uses just one tool. Their safety depends on an end-to-end chain — reaching the network, hiding metadata, storing evidence, and publishing without self-exposure. One weak link can be fatal. Current state-level censorship includes TLS/QUIC fingerprinting, active probing, national allowlists, app-store removals, and mandatory state-run messengers. Proposals can be submitted via FOSDEM's official CFP portal by selecting 'Digital Dissident' as the track.