devroom · FOSDEM 2027 · Brussels

Digital Dissident

A devroom for every link in the chain that keeps people communicating under digital repression: getting online, communicating privately, reporting safely, publishing without exposure.

Call for Participation is open. The devroom takes place on Saturday morning, 30 January 2027 at the ULB Solbosch campus in Brussels. Submissions close 30 November 2026, 23:59 UTC.

Submit your talk →
Important: when you submit on fosdem.org/submit, you must select the “Digital Dissident” devroom as the track. Proposals submitted without a devroom selection never reach the organisers — choose our room, or we cannot consider your talk.

▼ life finds a way

01One user, one chain, one room

Someone living under an authoritarian regime — Russia, Iran, China, Belarus, Myanmar, and far from only those — never uses a single tool. Their safety depends on a chain where every link has to hold: reaching the network at all, communicating without leaking metadata, collecting and verifying evidence, publishing without exposing the author, on devices that are themselves a risk. The weakest link decides the outcome.

Privacy and anonymity tools each have a home at FOSDEM today, but they are scattered across the network, security, decentralised-internet and messaging rooms. Digital Dissident brings the builders of circumvention, anonymity, messaging, publishing and whistleblowing tools into one room, organised around the user under threat instead of a technology class. We are not interested in promoting any one tool — we are interested in how tools combine, where they break, and what the free software community can build together.

Get online

Censorship circumvention, pluggable transports, bridge distribution, surviving allow-lists and shutdowns.

Communicate

Mixnets, onion routing, metadata-resistant, federated and offline-first messaging.

Report

Secure submission systems, source protection, document sanitisation and provenance.

Publish

Censorship-resistant hosting, mirrors, decentralised storage, takedown and seizure resilience.

Stay safe

Hardened and amnesic systems, forensic resistance, border crossings, usable safe defaults.

02Call for Participation

We want technical talks from people who build, operate, attack and measure the systems that make it possible to communicate, report, publish and blow the whistle from a digitally hostile environment. We welcome talks on, but not limited to:

Getting online

  • Obfuscation vs TLS/QUIC fingerprinting, active probing and protocol allow-listing
  • Bridge and proxy distribution under enumeration attacks
  • Operating during national shutdowns: mesh, satellite, delay-tolerant networking
  • Running a VPN or proxy service in a heavily censored country

Communicating privately

  • Mixnets, onion routing and metadata-resistant transports
  • Decentralised, federated and email-based messaging in the real world
  • Push notifications, contact discovery and phone-number identity leaks in “secure” messengers
  • Interoperability between anonymity networks, messengers and circumvention layers

Reporting, publishing & whistleblowing

  • Secure submission systems and source protection
  • Metadata scrubbing, provenance and authenticity without deanonymising the author
  • Censorship-resistant publishing and hosting
  • Digital-security workflows for newsrooms and human-rights organisations

Devices & operational security

  • Hardened and amnesic operating systems, seizure and border-crossing scenarios
  • Forensic resistance, duress features, secure backups
  • Supply-chain trust when app stores and package mirrors are blocked

People, usability & evidence

  • Onboarding for users under stress, safe defaults
  • Threat modelling for at-risk groups, lessons from the field
  • Censorship measurement, open data, reproducible research
  • How state adversaries actually deanonymise and detect users

Digital sovereignty (secondary theme)

  • Reducing dependence on Big Tech platforms, app stores, cloud, push and identity providers
  • Self-hosted and community-run alternatives that survive political pressure
  • Legal and infrastructure risks of centralisation: sanctions, forced compliance, lock-in

03What we look for

  • Technical depth: protocols, architectures, measurements, code, honest post-mortems
  • An explicit threat model — including what your approach does not protect against
  • Free and open source software, or open specifications
  • Cross-project thinking: how your work fits into the chain
  • Field experience with, or from, affected communities
  • Product pitches and marketing
  • Talks that work only by exposing operational details that put users at risk

Formats

10 minLightning talks — quick project introductions and status updates
10–30 minFlexible slots, all times include Q&A — leave room for the discussion
Open discussionClosing session on interoperability gaps and shared next steps

Important dates

How to submit

Submit through fosdem.org/submit and select the “Digital Dissident” track. Include a talk title, an abstract (one or two paragraphs), a short speaker bio, and links to related code, projects or previous talks — a photo is encouraged. State your preferred duration (10–30 minutes, including Q&A) in the submission notes, and submit only to the most appropriate devroom rather than the same talk to multiple tracks. Unsure whether your topic fits? Reach out to us first (see the contact below).

Please make sure you can attend FOSDEM in person and deliver your talk if it is accepted. Our schedule is tight, and late cancellations leave empty slots after we have had to turn away many strong proposals. Unfortunately, we cannot offer travel funding for speakers.

04FOSDEM 2027

FOSDEM is a free event for open source software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year thousands of developers from all over the world gather at the ULB Solbosch campus in Brussels. The 2027 edition hosts 77 devrooms — including, for the first time, this one — alongside a main track, keynotes, lightning talks, stands, and birds-of-a-feather sessions, plus FOSDEM Fringe events throughout the city during the surrounding week.

8k+hackers
77devrooms
96stands (FOSDEM 2026)
0€admission

Visit the FOSDEM website →

05Who we hope to see

Community over corporate backing: the projects in this space are mostly small, volunteer-driven or non-profit, and nearly all are free software. They rarely get a conference room of their own. Projects and communities we intend to invite include:

At FOSDEM 2026 the talks addressing this audience — on Russian censorship circumvention, the NymVPN mixnet, and Delta Chat multi-relay messaging — ran in three different rooms. This devroom exists so that audience and those speakers finally meet in one place.

06Code of Conduct

We follow the FOSDEM Code of Conduct. In addition, talks that describe circumvention or anonymity should avoid operational details that would endanger specific users in the field.

Questions about submitting, preparing or presenting — or want to help run the devroom? Contact the coordinators at digital-dissident-devroom-manager at fosdem.org.

Read the full devroom proposal →