Call for Application: Open Technology Fund’s Internet Freedom Fund 2018

Through the Internet Freedom Fund, OTF strives to uphold and increase capacity for individuals, organizations, and companies who support technology-centered efforts that aim to strengthen internet freedom and promote human rights by circumventing repressive censorship and surveillance, improving related digital security capabilities, and contributing to the overall health of the internet.

Ideal Internet Freedom Fund applicants are:

• Open in nature and collaborative;
• From within communities affected by censorship or are co-designing and co-developing with them;
• Promoting a deeper understanding of internet freedom challenges and limitations;
• Solving a currently unaddressed challenge or preempting an emerging one; and/or
• Are actively maintaining technologies demanded and utilized by people on the front lines of the world’s most repressive environments.

Ideal applications for this fund are focused on:

• Creating new open source circumvention technologies that fill a current need of targeted users;
• Improving the security, usability, and adoptability of existing open source internet freedom technologies;
• Providing new or deeper insights into the challenges of front-line communities that ultimately contribute to the improvement of technological solutions;
• Projects that emphasize applied research;
• Research that focuses on real-time monitoring and analysis of both technical and political threats to internet freedom, including network interference and shutdowns;
• New content redistribution methods able to reintroduce content behind firewalls, or similar services;
• Making targeted communities more resilient to digital attacks via customized solutions;
• Creating new open source circumvention technologies that fill a current need of targeted users;
• Next-generation tools that move beyond traditional “cat-and-mouse” circumvention techniques;

Ideal applications adhere to the following:

• Candidates can apply for up to $900,000 and no less than $10,000 for a year long contract. Note, however, that OTF’s target support ceiling is $300,000, with most supported efforts receiving between $50,000 and $200,000. More information on OTF’s previous levels of support can be found in our Annual Reports.
• Preference is given to organizations and individuals without a history of prior support, and who have a deep understanding of the surveillance, censorship and security issues affecting communities from the Global South living in repressive environments.
• Strong priority goes to projects with the potential for immediate impact and long-term sustainability, and that make intellectual property publicly available via open licensing and open source code.
• OTF highly values projects that incorporate collaborative partnerships with other organizations and/or individuals within the internet freedom community or their respective area of focus.