 What's the catch? Good question. So we have four people up here this evening who are going to be talking with you guys and answering your questions. First of all, I'd like to introduce... First one on the end, that would be useful. Willow Rue, she's a fellow at the Berkman Centre, an affiliate at MIT Centre for Civic Media. And then next to Willow, we have Kate Krause, who's the Director for Communications and Policy for the TOR project, which she started working with in March of this year. And she's also a human rights activist in China. Next to Kate, I have Josh... Excuse me, I do not have Josh. I have Josh. Thank you. Excuse me. I have Josh King, who is a lead technologist at Open Technology Institute and a lead developer on commotion. And then moderating tonight is Nat. So Nat Meitznberg, who's a technologist with Open Technology Institute as well. They'll be fielding your questions this evening. Also, we are translating this talk. So if anyone would like to tune into the German version, as well as Übersetzt heute Abend, when you have an S on Deutsch, Hördenwil, then we have the noma AXIK 11, Act 01-1. Enjoy. Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming. As was said, my name's Nat Meitznberg. I'm a technologist with the Open Technology Institute, which is part of a larger Washington, D.C.-based think tank called New America. And what OTI does is a range of tech policy research, cybersecurity research, community free software development, and free software, just straight up free software tool development, which is one of the things I do is work on the commotion wireless project with Josh, which he'll get into a little bit more. And I come from a background of community hosting. I've done a bunch of work with May First People link, worked for years as a consultant, working with nonprofits and media groups to implement free software in their offices and operations. So I've been doing this between 13 and 15 years, depending on how you want to count. And so when I started at OTI, I found myself in this ecosystem of projects that were funded by large and interested organizations, in commotions case, the U.S. government. And for me, this brought up a lot of new ethical questions that I never really had to think about before starting at OTI. And it's been something that my colleagues and I have had the discussions over and over and over again in our office. And I wanted to bring that discussion outside of our office walls, and I really couldn't think of a better place to do it than with the audience that I would find here at camp. And so I really hope that all of you join us in a really lively and interesting discussion about how it is we go about funding free software and various models for where that money comes from. So I'm going to start with a little bit about my own experience and then turn it over to the folks on the panel. We're not going to talk for the whole hour. We're going to try to not talk for even half of the hour. And we're going to turn it over to discussion as quickly as we can. One quick note. This is a discussion mainly about ethics and process. So if you have really deep technical questions about things like protocols and stack choices, we want to talk about those things just not here on stage. Maybe afterwards over beers would be nice. But if you do ask really deep technical questions, I might moderate away from those and moderate towards things that stay in the ethics and process and overall social discussion of this topic. So there are lots of ways to fund open source projects. And I don't want to make the case that government funding is the only way or the best way or the right way for your project. We do want to share some of our experiences of how you can possibly do that right and do that well. So again, we encourage you to listen and come back with your own questions and ideas. It'll become really clear that we're all Americans. All of our experiences with the US government and very American. So we want a broader global view and disagreement to come again in the discussion period. So people make the casual assumption, and I certainly did before I started working in Washington, that the government is this monolithic thing where everyone is working on the unified American mission. And it turns out that it's really not that way in the sense that agencies have different goals and different missions and sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don't. Another thing that's really striking about Washington that I didn't know was that so much is done by people in their 20s and 30s from reviewing grant applications to writing laws. You would be amazed how many legal staffers who are fresh out of law school have written laws for Congress. So it might be very different. The makeup of the US government might be very different than what you might think it to be. And a little different from, you know, how it's portrayed on TV and movies. And I'm just going to give one example. The White House is now regularly hosting hackathons and they call them hackathons where people are working on Python and JavaScript things and the outputs of those are actually going up on open GitHub repositories under free software licenses. The White House on technical matters is now collecting comments on open GitHub issue queues. So this idea of openness has kind of caught on in certain parts of the government, particularly with some of the younger hires that are being hired straight out of Silicon Valley. There are, well, and I should note, there is one place or two places where this really isn't true, the openness thing and that's the defense and intelligence sphere for obvious reasons. But there are other sources of funding out there. There are big foundations that have been funding free software projects a lot lately, Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation, those kinds of things. While they're great, they're oftentimes very small, small grants for prototype type work. And that's great, but if you want your project to be successful, have a wide user base and be self-sustaining in its own community, you really sometimes need more than a six-month grant that can only fund one or two developers. And the U.S. government is spending a lot of money on this stuff. Before 2012, the spending on Internet freedom was something in the range of 20 to 25 million. After 2013, that jumped up to $55 million. And that happened in part because they've had successes working with free and open-source software. And, you know, at very least this has allowed projects to make these multi-year roadmaps and hire developers with real paychecks, you know, because we like to eat and sometimes more than once a day. So I'm going to stop talking now and turn it over first to Willow to share her thoughts. Oh, there we go. All right. Has anyone else ever played Marco Polo with a video in the browser? It doesn't work as well as you would like. All right, so I am Willow Brew, and I'm going to open with a quote that I've really been... It's not actually a quote, it's a poor translation of one that I've really referred to in this tension of should I take this money or should I not? And what is it like for the community that I hail from and am I being true to those roots and those values as well as furthering the goals that I would like to further, which is from the Zapatistas, which are one of the few groups that have maintained a governance structure after their revolution. That's incredibly rare in history. And it roughly translates to we walk while asking questions. So we need to be critiquing each other and asking questions while also being in solidarity with one another, and we succeed in that and I'm glad to be having this conversation. So the last time I spoke at a camp it was about hacker and makerspaces, but since then I've started working on disaster and humanitarian response. And I did that for a while with a group called Geeks Without Bounds, which still continues. It's under new leadership, which is awesome because I want something to be bigger than I am. I don't just want it to be my project, but something beyond that. And I started working in this because I wanted to see how the tools and the values that we hold together as a community, how those translate beyond the, is it 5,000 people here? That's a laughably small portion of the population of the planet, right? So what can we actually do? And most of the projects that I see fall into two categories. One are finite interventions. They have a set endpoint, and we can do a lot in that context. But those other things are municipalities or what we call municipalities. So we think everyone should have access to the internet for always. I think we would agree to that or some approximation of it. That's a municipality. And that is a fantastic emoticon. Okay. Both of these are necessary, but they're very different. Now I'm not with geeks with that bounce anymore. I work with a group called Aspiration, and I adore it. And we think that technology and technology should act in service to people and to nonprofits. And I think of nonprofits as organizations that help us move beyond the governance and economic structures that we have to deal with in a non-consensual way on a day-to-day basis right now. So going back to Disaster Humanitarian Response, and we do take a lot of money from government organizations, we're working in zones that are conflict zones an awful lot of the time. And just like in hacking, we have to be aware of the adversary. We can't say we're going to ignore you. Like you don't count. Not only do we have to be aware of it, but sometimes we have to play with them. In post-conflict zones, if you don't design with them in mind and even include them in your project, you can have an oscillation in the other direction. And it can be just as bad by the people that you used to think were good, right? Good as a relative term and subject to change. So there's a great framework that I encourage you to check out called Do No Harm, which is about taking the Hippocratic Oath from medicine into response and how you deploy resources and how you gain resources. It's beautiful. And the people who have been doing peace-building have been doing it for way longer than the internet has existed and they're better at commenting things than we are, and maybe we should learn from them. So I'm going to give you a quick example, which is about water points in Tanzania. I worked on a project called TORIFA, T-A-A-R-I-F-A, which is about tracking water points and infrastructure. There are all of these water points in Tanzania because 60%, 60% of Tanzanians do not have access to clean drinking water, and that is the government number, so guess how much worse it actually is? We want to know where those water points are, which ones working, which ones aren't, so we built an open-source project to do this. The people that care about that to fund it at the level that it needs to be funded, not just to pay us, but to pay people in-country to learn the amount of code that they need in order to maintain their own project are the government of Tanzania and the World Bank. I think the World Bank is evil, right? But I also believe in creating platforms where people can self-organize to take care of their own things and also to hold others accountable while they do so. And if you design your project right, those can look like the exact same thing. So we took a grant, not alone, because that had a finite end to it, and we were able to define exactly what was going on, give up no ownership of the structure itself or the organization or anything else, and now more people have access to clean drinking water in Tanzania in a way which also allows them to self-organize around things like protest if they need to in a safe way, as safe as we can, right? One more minute? Good, okay. So these things boil down to, I'm not perfect, no one in this audience is perfect. I also feel the same way about organizations, locations, including home. We usually think these things are far away, and in fact, we need to do a lot of our own shit. And governments sometimes. So again, over beers, I will be glad to tell you about official organizations that couldn't talk to other parts of an official organization when they needed to collaborate in order to get something done. Like bureaucracy can be useful, but it's also terrible. The other is that we need a pluralistic approach, pluralistic. There's an extra vowel in there. I don't expect what I do to work for everyone else in this room, and vice versa. But by asking questions while walking, we can learn from each other. And finally, we need to trust other people. These are not lambs ready for the slaughter, the people in the frontline communities. They are extra hands, they are us. We are all in this shit together. And just because a logo appears on a website somewhere doesn't mean that someone is going to blindly follow something into the great horribleness of the World Bank, right? People are smart. We should count on them. And I think that that is it. Good? Thanks. Josh? So I work on the commotion wireless project, which is a toolkit to help communities build community wireless networks. And over the course of the duration of that project, we've received grants from several large government agencies in order to fund that sort of work. And the thing that always strikes me with doing that and deciding which funds we want to pursue is the times that we've done that where it worked out the best were the times where we were seeking funds from funders who wanted to accomplish the same things that we wanted to accomplish for the same reasons. And the times where we had the most difficulty were times when we didn't have enough clarity inside of the team and inside of the organization about what we were doing and why we wanted to get this particular money in order to do this particular work. So I think something that is really important with taking money from large and powerful entities is just in having clarity within your project and within your organization about what it is that you're accomplishing and why and to continually be having those sorts of conversations about it because when you take money from, say, large government agencies then the kinds of things that people always ask you are, does this mean that your software has back doors? Does it mean that you're endorsing a position of this particular organization? And there are answers to those questions which are largely around the stuff that we do is open. All of the source code is out there and we let the work speak for us. But something that I was trying to take into account is the kind of strain that that puts into people on your team that are getting asked those questions and making sure that everyone has a shared sense of purpose about that and a shared strategy around addressing those sorts of concerns. Something else that we've definitely dealt with is Will was talking about doing work outside of your home country and other places that's something that is a big part of our work, going and deploying networks in places outside of the United States. But a challenging part for us is how a lot of the ramifications of the funder that you're taking money from, that there are definitely ramifications if in certain areas of the world if you are trying to accomplish something with money from the U.S. State Department and that doesn't come without a lot of optics and perceptions attached to it. And so the way that we've typically addressed that is just to what we came around to is just trying to be as open as possible with who our funders are and the work that they're funding us to do. And then we've been able to find the places that we can work with and the communities that we've been able to interact with without trying to, in any way, obscure where our funding comes from or anything like that, but working with them with a full understanding of where that comes from. And that's the main way that we've been able to work in country in places outside of the United States is by finding those groups. Yeah, I think that's it. My name is Kate Krause. I work for the TOR Project on communications and the beginnings of a little bit of public policy. I started in March and I'm not yet an expert on TOR. But I thought I would walk people through sort of our fund rate, our process for deciding what we actually do. And it's probably a familiar process for most people who work in nonprofit organizations, at least in the United States. And in some cases in startups, which is that we brainstorm stuff on our email list and we sometimes lock groups of us into hotels for, say, four days or five days and brainstorm what we want to do, what new tools that we want to develop, how we want to refine the tools that we already have. Most recently, we had a hack fest in Arlington, Virginia in a hotel that you can see the results of on our website in the form of a huge set of tear-off, gigantic post-its and notes and a blog post. And then we take those ideas and those decisions that we make in these groups and hotels or sometimes on our email list and we break them down into tasks. And then we take those lists of tasks and we take them to potential funders and we try and get them funded. And sometimes we do get them funded and sometimes we don't. And Hidden Services is a good example of something that has been very difficult for us to fund, but we see as really important and possibly a future of privacy. Many of us would like to see Hidden Services built into a lot of different things so that they're a default. And if we don't get them funded, then we do them as volunteers and it takes a lot longer, it takes a lot longer and it's a much bumpier process. And that's how we basically make decisions. One of the first bits of funding that we ever had was a small subcontract from the Naval Research Laboratory so it's like a research group. And so we've always had this relationship with the Navy since the very beginning and we've taken government funding for a long time. And much of our funding is U.S. government funding. We also take funding from, and we accept it, we're grateful for funding from the government of Sweden, the government of Germany from the website Reddit and from hundreds or thousands of people, trying to think of how many thousand, but thousands and thousands of people who give us small amounts of money every month. And when we look for the future of funding for TOR, we look to those people that are giving us $5, $10, in some cases $100, or we get the proceeds from different software projects. We get bug bounties. We just got a $11,000 bug bounty that we're really, really grateful and excited for. And in many ways, that's our future because that is money. If somebody agrees to give us $20 a month or $100 a month, that's money that we can count on. It's not a one-time donation and we can budget and we can start to do really exciting projects with it. So we're going to be looking more toward that. We're also finally, after like three painful years of confusion, working on a really exciting crowdfunding project that we'll be launching I think in November for December. And we are applying like any organization would for like foundation grants. And the main thing I want to say though is just like most non-profit organizations, we brainstorm, we make a list, and then we try and get it funded. We are not, we make our decisions first and then we try and get them funded and lots of things are not funded and you can actually go onto our website and see which things have not been funded. We have a section of our track software called Sponsor Z, which some of us call Sponsor Z for zero because there's no funding for it. And you can see the different tasks that have not yet been funded but that we would like to do. Some of them are fantastic, epic, some of them are just one person's idea but that's the sort of starting ground for a lot of things that TOR ever does. But I wanted to tell you also my background is as a human rights activist and prior to coming to TOR most of the great human rights groups that I am aware of get money from the State Department from this like human rights civil society building fund so it's very normal for me for that to happen and I didn't have big doubts about that because I was really already familiar with it. But I also feel like when people ask us about our funding I do believe in the maxim like follow the money and it is a valuable thing to ask. It's an important question. Are we not influenced by the policies of our funders? I think the main way is that we decide what we want to do and then we try and get funding. We also have things like reproducible builds where developers can see for themselves what happens when they build TOR. Ideally, it's what you're expecting, it's what we say it is. And I guess that's basically all... We have a new mission statement which I may have been... I can't really... No, that's aspiration tech. But the TOR project has a new mission statement. I think this is the first time that we're announcing it in public but it has human rights and freedom in the first sentence. We are a secret human rights organization. That's why we build the software. That's what we care about. And you'll see that in a minute. So I guess that's basically it. Okay, great. So before I open it to questions for everyone else, I want to give you guys a chance to ask each other questions if you have them or me since I'm up here too. Anyone? Does it work now? I'll just keep talking until it starts working. Is it working now? Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Let's try this. There we go. All right. Sorry. Do you think that it's possible to disentangle... Can people hear this one? Musical microphones. There we go. Completely unformed question. Do we have an unfair assessment of capital because of capitalism? Is it possible to disentangle those and have you done those internally? Sorry. Philosophical question. I just came up with it. Who knows? Sorry. Do we have an unfair assessment of capital because of capitalism? I don't know if it's unfair, I guess. I mean, I think it's just important like any of these funding entities that we're talking about by their very nature are powerful entities and powerful institutions and it's really important to understand those institutions on the basis of those interests and it doesn't make sense to think about them in terms of like, you know, well, I was going to say like it doesn't make sense to think about them in terms of like personal relationships or like, oh, they're like really nice and everything or they seem like they share your goals, but I actually do think that the, that kind of speaking to something that Nat said about government agencies not being as monolithic as they seem that actually is important is like building a relationship with funders and making sure that you're working with people who trust and above all that share your goals and like being clear that, you know, you're doing the work for the same reason that they want you to do the work and to accomplish the same things is really important. But that's still kind of like understanding them on the basis of like what their interests are and that's the only way that you can deal with powerful entities. I will also add this that when, if I were doing this work for a corporation, I would, there are two interests that are primary just under capitalism, which is that everything is for the bottom line in profit and ever increasing shareholder value and for public image and PR value. So when we go to the government to get this money, we're writing the grants and we're envisioning our project and in many ways we're saying this is what we want to do. Do you agree? And starting from that point, which is never a starting point you can get to with straight up working for a corporation. I guess I would ask a question for the rest of the panel, which is something that we, I mentioned a little bit is like where are the ramifications of, you know, taking funding from a particular organization and then they, you know, they endorse a particular policy position or they endorse a particular political position or something like that. And then one of the questions that gets asked of you is like do you endorse that position as well? So then what about the reciprocal? Like what happens when we get funding and then we endorse a particular position or something like that? Do we have a responsibility to our funder in that respect as far as like keeping them in the loop? Or like what are more broadly like when taking, you know, government funds or funds from large corporations or things like that, what are the responsibilities and the things to think about that we have to them? I'm not sure I'm the right person in the tour project to answer this question. All right, can I throw the microphone to Jake for this? I think that when you use language like in country, for example, it shows that government money corrupts you. And I think that what happens with government money is that it fucks us all and we are all kind of fucked by it. The question is, does it fuck our software? And I think it doesn't fuck our software. Sorry, I'm using fuck so often. But I don't think it fucks our software, but it fucks all of us. I think that's the thing is that it does taint us. I mean, I just, yeah, for sure, there's just no question it does and it ruins us all. For example, who isn't more reticent to associate with WikiLeaks if you take grant money from the State Department? Who would be a little bit afraid to say that they supported Julian Assange? For sure. I mean, when we have big fights with General Alexander, he goes to our funders and tries to pressure them. And that does cause internal fights. That really does cause serious problems. And I think that we have to be careful not to let it corrupt us so much that we forget that it has changed us and does change us. I think one of the challenges in the TOR project is to see the ways in which we do support human rights and we do support these larger issues as a group. And in the past, sometimes we've had, like, Jake out front talking about political things, and not everyone in the group has always been completely in a team in that way. And I think we're kind of reevaluating that right now. And it would be great. And I think it's one goal that we have to sort of bring together our views as a team and move forward as a team and support human rights together. So I think now we're going to open it up for audience questions. And I already see there's a line forming on that side, although I can barely see the microphones. Okay. So thank you very much for the talk. I hear that 15, 20 years ago, when you get the money from a military part of the government, the restrictions and the limits they are putting are less that if you get the money from some corporation maybe, right? So how is this working today? How is this difference between money from a military part of the government like US Navy and some corporation putting these policy restrictions and forcing you? So in my background, the most restrictive funder I've ever seen in my career was a major health organization, a major health foundation that was extremely restrictive and short-sighted and really put its grantees under its thumb. The Navy entity that we received funding from or that we did in the past, I don't even think we're receiving funding from them right now, is the Naval Research Laboratory. So it's like researchers, academics. We started out, our two co-founders went to MIT. We are deeply entrenched in the academic research community. We support research conferences. We go to research conferences. We submit papers. We edit journals. We are part of this research community and so is the Naval Research Laboratory. They do important research that helps the TOR network. As do other researchers. I just want to speak for a second actually. We have this phenomenon at TOR where every week someone is appropriately and excellently writing a paper about a way to either attack or defend the TOR network, which we want to happen. We want those papers to happen. That doesn't mean that those research projects will ever be built. It doesn't mean that they are, you know, they're important research. They're investigations. They're science. They're not necessarily reality or something that will ever be built. They're essential though for us. They're how we learn to move forward. And they're one of the things, our research, our relationship to the research community is one of the things that keeps us strong against unbelievable adversaries that we have. So when we are, you know, somebody, some reporter will call us and say, what's your thought about this huge attack against the TOR network? That's not the right frame. It's the right frame is, you know, the right way of thinking about it is like, you know, fantastically healthy research community is keeping TOR strong and we are lucky to have it. And when you think about whether or not, I know people are concerned about whether TOR would ever be backdoored by one of these funders. The answer is we will never be backdoored by any funder. But then also, think of the dozens or the hundreds of academic researchers who are pouring over our code every day whose whole careers are based in some cases on evaluating TOR's, you know, code and thinking of attacks and thinking of defenses and really, that's one of the things that also keeps us strong. Another thing is we have all these different mechanisms for staying transparent. One of them is the fact that I'm standing here or sitting here is to just be able to talk to the community in this way. But anyway, I just wanted to shout out to the research community because they're really important to us, not because they're trying to attack us, but because they're trying to keep us strong. Anyone else want to talk about the difference between corporate and government restrictions? One of the... Government is really slow to move on things and that makes them really awful to work with. And at the same time, it means that if they ever pick up something, they're probably going to carry it a long way. And they make it a lot... It's like, what's the term, boxing a glacier, right? If you want to... If you find a good person who's in a bad part of the government, bad, of course, like all relative terms, even if they have the best intentions, it's highly unlikely that they're going to be able to shift things overall, to be accommodating, to have those values in the long term, etc. A corporation, because of the nature of corporations, can be far more nimble, but that also means that they will turn on you much more quickly. And so it all has to do with what your circumstance is, what your project is, what your long-term goals are, everything else, based on which one seems possible to deal with, if either. All right, next question. Maybe we can bounce to the other side of the room. Hello. I think it's brave of you to stand up there, so thank you for it. And I really respect the comments about getting changed by Jake. I think that's totally right. You've got to have a lot of defenses and do that. I just wanted to ask, do you think you're changing them as in like the government funders? We were actually asked by a major government funder to count our users in a way that we felt was edging close to de-anonymizing them, and we refused. And I was not in the room, but what I was told yesterday by Roger Dingledine who's one of the founders of TOR, is that first there was this kind of shock, and then apparently they really respect us for it. And that's one example. I think that we've changed a lot of funders. I think that depends a lot on which, like every one of these agencies and every one of these funding programs and grant programs, they're very, very different, and they're run by very different people, so I think it varies a lot depending on which one. And just because of something that Nats said at the beginning about the massive expansion of the available money in this space, a lot of these agencies are actually pretty new at funding projects in different areas, and so they're always learning at the same time. And so I think that for... I mean, some agencies have had funding programs that have been running for an extremely long time that are extremely hidebound, and they don't change very much at all, but a lot of them are really new, and so they're just figuring out as they go, and so there's a lot of room to change their practices and their processes and the kinds of things that they think about when they're funding particular kinds of projects. The people who are involved in government or funding agencies or whatever else are there because they signed up to do good, and their idea of doing good might differ from ours at points, especially the means to the end, but especially when we demonstrate what works and having values that we stand up for and having integrity like you talked about, it does shift people. I've seen this happen time after time in many different organizations. Like, wait, that's how that works, and you are happy doing that? Yes, I'm happy doing that. There are a bunch of other people who are also making this work in this way. Do you want to come with us? And sometimes people leave their agency if they can't figure out how to make it work internally, and sometimes they change their agency. So yes. All right, going to bounce back to the other side. Hi. Wow, hi. Yeah, thank you all for being here. I've heard a lot of sort of general statements about things that do and don't work, and so I'm actually curious to hear from each of the three panelists what's a situation that you either have been in personally or that you have heard about from somebody else where you felt like the question is, what do you give up, where you thought that some organization really did give up too much or without the risk of giving up too much because of their donor base? Sorry, just for a question. Just for clarification, what we gave up as part of accepting that or do you mean an instance where we gave up funding because of a particular wine being crossed or something? I guess name some compromises that either you or other people you know took that you think were regrettable and you can see that in hindsight because it's avoiding those mistakes and that is sort of why I'm here to hear from you and so I want to be able to predict what those mistakes are when I see them coming at me so I don't end up like having made the wrong decision. Yeah, I heard from somebody in the audience at what drug-free workplace. What's a particular instance? I can think of, I mean, one compromise for us is when we take something, when we have this whole list of things and we only get certain things funded and then some things aren't funded and then it takes a really long time to do those important things that weren't funded. You know, that's a type of, in a weird way, that's a type of sacrifice, but it's the ethical way to go. There's a group in the crisis response. I'll tell you about it again over beer because I don't want to let anyone lose dignity on a stage, but there was a group in the crisis response group that got funding for the first time ever and the person who was leading it up had no accountability to anyone in the frontline communities affected by those crises or to the rest of the digital responders and went nuts, just spent the money in non-useful ways, didn't contribute back to the community or to the causes or anything else, and it was a huge detriment on that space for a long time and it's still a detriment on that space because now when funders, government or otherwise look at us, they wonder, is that going to happen again? Like, we didn't have any successes up to that point. That was the first time anything big had happened and it didn't go well. So that was a big one where someone didn't necessarily compromise but also didn't have integrity in what they were up to. I think one thing for me is there have been instances where we've been doing a project with a particular community in a particular place and similarly I can give more specifics like not on stage but where we've been working with a particular community and establishing a relationship with them and in my case like building a network with them and engaging them on that and then having to basically pull out of that work because of a political shift within the funder or because of sufficient due diligence not being done about that and so that's definitely a regret of mine and I think that's not always entirely mitigatable. I mean things shift and everything but I think that was their instances where you want to work closely with your funder to make sure that all of those angles are taken care of before engaging with the community and then making promises to them that then you end up needing to back out on. I also regret the stuff that gets similar to what Kate was saying the stuff that gets left off that's on our roadmap because we just can't get it funded through those funding sources and there's a lot of important work that we end up just not doing because we can't find the money to spend the time to do it. I'm going to bounce to the question over here. Hi, at first I want to thank you for this debate I think it's very important and I want to point out something not only for you but for the audience as well. Disclaimer, I work for a German municipality so local city government and we pay companies to patch things and stuff like KDE or LibreOffice and there are many people in the government which want to do open source and want to do good things and not everyone is a spy and not everyone likes the government or what they are doing so sometimes people tend to forget that. Thanks. Thanks. I guess I'll bounce back over here. Yeah, so I think the real question I don't think we should really bat around too much is, you know, is the government using the open source community to accomplish their long-term goals or is the open source community using the government to accomplish their long-term goals and I really don't like the shared goal talk, right? The US government's long-term goals are to overthrow regimes that they don't like for whatever reason. Some of those regimes deserve to be overthrown, you know? They would want to replace them with a friendly client state. I would like to replace it with a decentralized network of anarchist communes but there's a temporary short-term agreement on overthrowing this government, right? So that's the strange socially awkward position that at least some people are at and I do think that the real question we have to ask is why, because it's all Americans up there, why is it that like the only person who's interested in the internet freedom slash government overthrowing agenda and human rights is the US government and why are they the only ones funding things intelligently? Why don't we have other governments? Why don't we have, because it's a national sovereignty issue, fighting mass surveillance. Why don't we have random, rich Bitcoin millionaires throwing millions of dollars at you guys? Why don't we have, you know, even private capital? What is, why, I think this is a hard question that we think we should be very honest with and I don't know if this is going to work out in the long-term either, so I don't know if we should advertise it as a convergence of goals that will actually work out in the long-term. There's a few people who can't hear somebody just say, Germany funds open source projects and just flippantly one of the reasons we're all Americans is because I propose the panel and a lot of the people I know happen to be Americans. But it is a good question, so I'm going to toss it to the panel. You guys can be quick, we have 10 minutes left, so I'd like to maybe get this one in one more question. Germany just started funding the Tor Project. They are helping to pay for our development meeting next month, which will include an open, I think an open public hacking day, at least if not more open public things. And I forgot what I was going to say. Sorry, I think we were supposed to give a shout to the fact that it's all Americans up here at the beginning and I think we forgot to do that. Oh, we did do that? Oh, okay, well then I forgot that we did that. Yeah, I mean, I think that the... I mean, I can't really speak to the why aren't other governments funding these projects or if they are. But I think with the shared goals thing, that's probably not the best way for me to put it. I think it's important to have a good sense of your goals and how they relate to the project and making sure that you're always trying to get this funding for the right reasons. Because I think that the open source community and the funding community kind of use each other. And I think that it's important to keep that in sight because I think that we're all familiar with the idea that we have something that we want to accomplish with our work and we have a way to sell it to funders to just like you would represent your project to any other audience. And so I think that it makes sense to look for where those things overlap and pursue that. And that's where the shared goals thing comes in, I think. So two points, and I'll state them both because I'm going to forget the second one as soon as I start on the first one. So the second one will be about why aren't other groups or governments throwing it on this. The first point is... God damn it. I'll just start on that. That's fine. Okay, so why is the government is nefarious and they're out to get us and they're about overthrowing regimes and everything else? Sure, some people in the government are, but I talk to people that are in different parts of government on a regular basis and most of the time they don't even know what's going in their own department and it's not for lack of trying or a desire. It's because it's a really messed up system. It's just been patched and patched and patched and patched and patched and it means that people who want to do bad things can get away with doing bad things and it means that people who want to do good things can get away with doing that really quietly. It's not a concerted effort. It's just, it's not. So that's one part. The other part is why aren't other governments spending time and attention on this? Most governments care about keeping their people fed and clothed and with water. Like, the internet is still considered icing on the cake to most governments. That's why they aren't throwing in on this. We're really lucky that our governments think that this is worthwhile, lucky, right? More hyperactive, funny quotes. We're in a really small bubble here. Most people don't care about the internet. It's really good that we do because they should and when everyone is able to care, hopefully we will have made it a better place. Like, we'll make it a more free place so that as people continue in the progress of life, they'll have more progress and more freedom when they get there, right? But it's not something that most people care about. Let's remember that. I'm going to just say that also, you know, your large tech companies who are funding open source aren't doing it to get to anarchist communes either. And they also may well favor regime changes in lots of countries. This is probably going to end up being the last question because we have five minutes left. Okay. So it doesn't really seem like anyone has brought up a concrete example of turning down funding. And I'm not willing to say what organization I'm talking about, but I used to be involved in a decentralized, internet-based journalism network that turned down a huge, huge amount of money because the people involved in that network who were in the global south said, oh, hell no, we are not dealing with that funder. Let me tell you what that funder funds where I live. And so I think that's kind of important when we're considering who's up on the stage and talking and saying, yes, it's okay to accept that money, especially when we combine it with how we're defining frontline communities and who is in country or out of country and that in many ways, tech is a weird bubble when it comes to human rights in terms of we don't believe we need the kind of buy-in that most other aspects of deeply entrenched human rights work believe is fundamentally necessary. And I think it may be one of the biggest weaknesses is that we believe we can create something and release it instead of understanding that there are much, much, much larger systems and networks at play. And so I would just really love if any of you could maybe search a little deeper for instances of funding being turned down or aspects where you have shifted how you have addressed or related to funding because of the communities that we're thinking of as being on the front. I mean, definitely as far as the shifting based on what communities want on the front lines, it's kind of like something that is definitely a big part of my project because a lot of the initial, like the initial grant that we got for commotion was largely around circumvention technology and then due to, like, we very purposefully engaged in sort of a community-oriented to design process around that project. And the, I mean, what we found was, like, that the communities that we were working with, they didn't want or need, really, a circumvention tool. They needed an access tool, and they needed, like, ways to make the sort of, like, getting access easier, and that was the thing that they needed. So even though we still sought to increase the, you know, the available security of tools like ours and, you know, retain a lot of those aspects around encryption and everything, we largely shifted the entire focus of the project to be more around community engagement because that's really, like, once we engaged with, like, once we went and talked to people on the ground, that's what they wanted from us. And, you know, that also hasn't been without problems, for sure, but I think that that's a major instance where we, like, after we were talking to people that we intended to serve, we sort of shifted the whole purpose of the project. I'll give you a couple of examples during Superstorm Sandy. There were plenty of opportunities for funding and resources to come from large organizations that occupied Sandy said, you know, we got this, it's fine, we don't want it, and we didn't press it. Awesome. Also, working in Nairobi, there's an art hack space there that's glorious, and any time we line up a project and we look at what the funders are and I say, hey, is there any way that I can help out with this? Often the groups that I have connections with are ones that they absolutely will not take funding for. Like, sweet, let me know how I can help, that's not it. So there have been plenty of times, those are the top two in my brain that I can say concisely that we haven't done funding, and that's rad. I would just add that we are also, we're partnering with a small organization that is also in a situation where they can't and won't take funding from a big corporation because it would alienate their user base and it would be the wrong thing to do, and so I feel like we're just doing everything we can as a partner to support them in every other possible way that we can. I'm not sure, actually, I'm so sorry, I understood the question, so if I'm answering the wrong question. I would also just add that I see the Tor project as a, we're started by two brilliant or three brilliant MIT researchers and we have many advantages. We're small and we want to be bigger and we want to do many things, but we also, when I think back to all the human rights groups that I've worked with, I also see us as in many ways very advantaged, and that's all. And I would finally just answer that question with because we go out and seek funding, funders don't come to us and say here, here's millions of dollars, we deny funding before we ever apply for it in a lot of cases. So the things we've found the most distasteful and the areas that it would be impossible for us to do anything positive with, we don't even look to that. We don't go out to DARPA and say, hey, can you fund this for us? So that's, so a lot of these things, it's hard to find specific examples where we've turned down money because we've proactively applied for it in grant form. Though I would add, there have definitely been instances where we've very deliberately not pursued particular opportunities that we have for funding. There was getting defense funding was something where, and there are a lot of interesting projects that get DARPA funding and things like that, but we do some stuff with mesh networking and the origins of some of that stuff originally came out of US research around connected infantry systems and things like that. And when we had the opportunity to go in and at least explore that option, we were really uncomfortable with the ramifications of exactly the kind of collaboration that they likely would have wanted to have with us. And so there have been instances like that where it is a little bit more directed where there's a very clear and definite opportunity that we've chosen not to pursue it. And that instance, not because of necessarily engagement on the ground, like in the original question, but where there's a line and everyone, every project needs to determine where that line is or what you're not going to accept. I think we're out of time. So thank everyone for coming. This has been great. Thank you all for being up there and doing this. Thank you. Thank you. So a big thank you to the Lou Kate House, Josh King and that mizzenberg for moderating that tonight. It's such a shame we only have an hour because it feels like we could talk about this for a lot longer with more wonderful examples. I'd really like to hear some examples, but we've all been invited for a beer from the sands of things, so we'll see you guys later.