OONI Hackathon: Join us to explore internet censorship!

Interested in exploring (and exposing) internet censorship? Join the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) hackathon in Berlin!

• When? Friday, 11th November & Saturday, 12th November 2016

• Where? The OnionSpace (Gottschedstraße 4, 13357 Berlin, Germany)

• What time? 10am onwards

• Who? Software developers, data analysts, academics, journalists, bloggers, lawyers, activists, and all those who don’t go by any particular label, but are curious enough to join! We only have one rule: Be excellent to each other.

OONI is a free software project under The Tor Project which aims to uncover internet censorship around the world. Since 2012, OONI has collected millions of network measurements across more than 100 countries, shedding light on multiple cases of censorship and network interference around the world.

But our work is far from done and we need your help! Below you can learn about some of the ways that you can contribute to the fight against internet censorship through this hackathon.

Hack on censorship tests

OONI has multiple free software tests that you can hack on! These tests are designed to examine the following:

• Blocking of websites

• Blocking of instant messaging (IM) apps

• Blocking of Tor, Psiphon, Lantern, and OpenVPN

• Presence of systems that could be used for censorship or surveillance (such as BlueCoat)

Join us to improve OONI’s tests and/or write new ones!

Learn how to run censorship tests

Regardless of your technical skills or background, you can still contribute to transparency around internet censorship.

We would be happy to teach you how to run tests from your terminal, your web browser, or how to set-up a Raspberry Pi to automatically run tests for you!

Create lists of URLs to test for censorship

Are you familiar with any blocked sites? Again, regardless of your technical skills or background, you can play an important role!

Our findings are probably only as interesting as the websites that we test for censorship. Join us to learn about our methodology and to suggest websites that we should be testing!

Data analysis

Collecting all those network measurements is great, but we need to improve our data analysis capabilities to better detect and confirm censorship events. That’s where data analysts can play an important role! Join us to:

• Improve OONI’s data processing pipeline

• Analyze existing measurements to potentially find hidden cases of censorship

• Share data analysis methodologies and techniques

You can dig into OONI’s data through OONI Explorer and OONI’s list of measurements.

Research

Studying internet controls? We are sitting on millions of network measurements that might be useful to your existing research, or which might help develop new research questions.

Join us to learn all about OONI and how you can use its data as part of your research!

Story-telling

Journalists and bloggers, this is a place for you!

By collecting network measurements, OONI can provide you with evidence of internet censorship. This can include the blocking of various websites and instant messaging (IM) apps (such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger), as well as the blocking of circumvention tools, such as Tor. Furthermore, OONI’s data can help uncover the covert presence of censorship and surveillance equipment (which we detected in various countries around the world in the past).

Join us to learn how to dig into OONI’s data and find evidence that you might need for your next story!

Hope to see you all soon!

Thanks to the Ford Foundation for supporting the OONI team’s travel costs.