OONI's recent participation at events in Africa, India, and Europe

Over the last months, the OONI team had the opportunity to host workshops, give presentations, and participate in discussions at the following conferences and events:

• Seminar at the University of Cape Town (South Africa)

• Internet Policy in Africa: Research Methods for Advocacy workshop (Uganda)

• Nullcon 2018 (India)

• Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) 2018 (Spain)

• Tor Meeting (Italy)

These events provided us a great opportunity to meet many fascinating people from various communities, learn about their work, form new collaborations, and collect feedback for the improvement of our tools and methodologies.

This blog post summarizes our participation at these events.

Seminar at the University of Cape Town

Our 2018 conference marathon started off in South Africa.

On 16th February 2018, OONI’s Arturo and Maria hosted a seminar at the Computer Science department of the University of Cape Town. As part of their seminar, they explained OONI’s network measurement methodologies and how to analyze OONI data. The aim of this seminar was to engage computer science students with the analysis of OONI’s expanding dataset.

More information about this seminar is available through its slides, which include an example of code on how to mine OONI data.

Internet Policy in Africa: Research Methods for Advocacy workshop

After South Africa, OONI’s Arturo and Maria traveled to Uganda to participate in the “Internet Policy in Africa: Research Methods for Advocacy” workshop in Kampala between 26th February 2018 to 3rd March 2018.

Organized by the Internet Policy Observatory (IPO) and Uganda’s CIPESA, this week-long workshop brought together lawyers, policy makers, academic researchers, human rights activists and technologists from multiple African countries. It therefore provided us a unique opportunity to engage directly with a variety of stakeholders, learn more about their work and needs, and to better understand local challenges. We were thrilled to meet OONI community members from Africa in person (with whom we had only previously corresponded via email), and to meet many fascinating people with whom we’re now forming new collaborations on the study of internet censorship.

As part of our participation at this event, we facilitated the following workshops:

• Network Measurement Research: A 1.5 hour workshop explaining OONI methodologies & presenting OONI censorship findings from various African countries (co- facilitated with Moses Karanja)

• Deep Dive: Network measurement data analysis: A 2.5 hour workshop teaching OONI data analysis and interpretation (slides)

We also participated in a working group that designed a research project examining the relationship of internet censorship with conflict resolution in South Sudan.

Nullcon 2018

Meanwhile, OONI’s Leonid traveled to Goa to attend Nullcon, India’s annual security conference. On 2nd March 2018, Leonid gave a talk that provided a brief overview of OONI and which focused on some information security incidents caused by the deployment of internet filtering technologies. Further information is available via his presentation slides and notes, while the video recording of his talk will eventually be available via the Nullcon archives.

Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) 2018

Upon returning to Europe, several members of the OONI team joined the internet freedom community at the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) in Spain during the first week of March 2018.

As part of our participation at the IFF, we (co-)facilitated and participated in the following:

• Which questions would you like internet censorship data to answer? (slides)

• Internet-based information controls and elections

• Tool Showcase: OONI presentation

• Localization Sprint: Engaging the translator community with OONI Probe

We also hosted an OONI Partners Meetup to meet and greet with our partners and to address OONI related questions. Following our partners’ requests, we facilitated a session explaining how to use OONI Explorer and interpret its data.

This year OONI was an IFF partner and we helped organize the social evening on 7th March 2018, where Arturo put on a live modular synthesizer performance.

Tor Meeting

Our participation at all these events left us feeling inspired and ready to brainstorm on next steps. The Tor Meeting in Rome conveniently took place right after, providing our (distributed) team the opportunity to meet in person to work on (improving) our roadmap for the next six months.

We also facilitated the following sessions at the latest Tor Meeting:

• Building communities to measure & respond to global censorship events (discussion of challenges & brainstorming on strategies)

• OONI Tor vanilla + Tor launcher: One click to solve all censorship problems!

• OONI’s internet blackout methodology

• OONI Censorship Alert System

• OONI data analysis

These sessions helped us collect more fine-grained feedback for our upcoming activities.

We are thankful to the Forte Prenestino residents for hosting the Tor Relay Operators Meetup, and to the organizers of all the events that we participated in over the last months. We also thank participants and community members for their feedback, stories, ideas, and enthusiasm to help build a better internet together.