General Grant Proposal

• Project: Community Privacy Residency

Project Overview

Overview

The Community Privacy Residency is a 2-4 week residency centered on researching, co-designing, prototyping, and building open-source community privacy applications. This residency will build community, organize events, and create original work and research promoting open-source applications of privacy and cryptography tools in direct collaboration with vulnerable communities.

Residents will be invited to engage with sessions at RightsCon (Feb 24 - 27, 2025) on collective approaches to privacy and data protection; community resilience against surveillance; digital rights for marginalized communities; and more. Throughout the duration, residents will be invited to host knowledge sharing sessions and interactive workshops. The organizing team will also invite local cryptography, ZK, MPC, and governance communities to attend and host sessions.

The residency will culminate in a demo day, where residents share their outputs and processes. Outputs may include code prototypes, workshops and research reports, and educational communications and materials. The organising team will compile these outputs in the form of a written publication. After the residency, teams will continue to work on ongoing projects that have emerged. The residency will not directly provide funding for these projects, but will connect teams to potential trusted funding sources.

The core organizing team has backgrounds ranging from privacy and governance research, cryptography R&D, and academic research to community organizing. The team has also had experience organizing research groups, community engagement programs, and large organizations before.

Short Rationale

Given our experiences with community activism, transgender healthcare, housing, labor, and investigative journalism, we’ve seen how a lack of privacy protections endangers vulnerable communities. Mass deportations, murders of Boeing whistleblowers and Ferguson community organizers, overturn of Roe v. Wade, and rising murder rates of transgender people underscore the urgency of privacy protections for vulnerable communities, now more than ever.

From our experience, there currently exists a large gap between those building privacy and cryptography tools and the communities who need privacy protections the most, communities that are not yet well-represented in cryptography spaces. We hope to bring these communities together for emergent collaboration to address real-world community privacy needs.

Project Details

In addition to building community and organizing events for privacy, cryptography, and community organizing, several expected outcomes from the residency include:

• Open-source technical prototypes and proofs-of-concept of privacy-preserving tools and community-focused applications
• Original research and writing, e.g. blog posts, whitepapers, reports
• Development of educational resources and guides, e.g. publications or public-facing workshops
• Participatory co-design workshops, including write-ups of learnings and takeaways, and process documentation

Sharing of outputs would include:

• Sharing sessions and workshares from residents and local Taipei communities
• Demo day on the last day
• Written publication collating outputs: progress reports, new projects, publications, documentation, etc.
  Our residency outputs will be open-source and publicly available, and the ecosystem will benefit from added perspectives and real-world applications of ZK, MPC, FHE, and more, especially for voices and communities not yet well-represented within the applied cryptography space.

Team

Team members

Ying Tong Lai

• Email: [e-mail]
• Telegram: @aubreymoss
• Discord: @therealyingtong

Riley Wong (they/them) – emergentresearch.net

• Email: [e-mail]
• Telegram: @rrriley
• Discord: @ry.w

Janabel Xia (she/her) - janabelx.com

• Email: [e-mail]
• Telegram: @janabelx
• Discord: @janabelx

Team Website

• https://community-privacy.github.io

Team's experience

Ying Tong

Ying Tong is an applied cryptographer working on zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation. She is a regular contributor to community and educational initiatives (e.g. https://zkiap.com, https://halo2.club), as well as standards efforts (https://zkproof.org).

Riley Wong

Riley Wong (they/them) is the principal of Emergent Research (https://emergentresearch.net/), a consultancy lab for privacy, governance, and data. In particular, they investigate emerging privacy and cryptography tools with emphasis on applications for vulnerable communities as well as infrastructure for collective agency and consent.

They’ve written on and given talks on privacy-preserving data governance (https://ash.harvard.edu/resources/privacy-preserving-data-governance/) (https://www.rileynwong.com/blog/2024/1/20/talk-privacy-preserving-data-governance-at-the-second-interdisciplinary-workshop-on-reimagining-democracy-iword-2023-harvard-kennedy-school-ash-center), applications of MP-FHE for vulnerable communities (https://www.emergentresearch.net/mpfhe-reporting, https://www.rileynwong.com/blog/2024/11/17/talk-applications-of-mp-fhe-for-vulnerable-communities), collective governance (https://www.rileynwong.com/blog/2024/3/11/talk-collective-governance-governance-archaeology), and more.

Previously, they were a research fellow with 0xPARC (https://0xparc.org/), machine learning engineer at Google, investigative journalism fellow at ProPublica, and a QTBIPOC community organizer.

Janabel Xia

Janabel Xia (she/her) is a mathematician working on researching and developing applications of privacy for communities. She plans to pursue a math PhD in the upcoming fall at Harvard.

Previously, she has worked with 0xPARC (https://0xparc.org/) on research, building applications of ZKPs (https://github.com/janabel/frog-POD-counting, https://github.com/zk-poll/zk-poll), educational resources (https://notes.0xparc.org/notes/mpc-fhe-key-switching/, https://notes.0xparc.org/notes/collab-snark/), and outreach. Prior to that, she has given talks on and published academic research in both combinatorics (https://ecajournal.haifa.ac.il/Volume2024/ECA2024_S2A23.pdf) and theoretical cryptography (https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/573.pdf) as an MIT undergrad.

She has also led community engagement programs for incoming students out of the MIT PKG Center for Public Service (https://pkgcenter.mit.edu/). Her experience there has led to her current involvement in Justice 4 Housing (https://justice4housing.org/), a local grassroots organization tackling housing justice and re-entry support for the formerly incarcerated.

Team Code Repos

• https://github.com/community-privacy

Development Roadmap

This section should break out the development roadmap into a number of milestones and related deliverables.
Since the milestones will appear in the grant contract, it helps to describe the functionality we should expect, plus how we can check that such functionality exists.

Below we provide an example roadmap.

For each milestone:

• Please be sure to include a specification of the software. The level of detail must be enough so that we are able to verify that the software meets the specification.
• Please include total amount of funding requested per milestone.
• Please note that we require documentation (e.g. tutorials, API specifications, architecture details) in each milestone. This ensures that the code can be widely used by the community.
• Please provide a test suite, comprising unit and integration tests, along with a guide on how to run these.
• Please indicate the milestone duration, as well as number of Full-Time Employees working on each milestone, and include the number of days along with their cost per day.
• Milestones should be structured to ensure smooth progress tracking and clear accountability, without adding unnecessary complexity for evaluators or grantees. It’s important to have enough checkpoints for oversight while keeping the administrative workload on grantees and evaluators low.

Overview

Estimated costs: ~$125-130k for 45-50 people for 1 month, including rotating 2-week residencies

Essential: ~$100k
$1-1.5k for a month of housing per resident: $45k
$1-1.5k to cover flights per resident, depending on departure city: $30-45k
$10k for coworking space for the month
$160 to cover RightsCon registration per resident: $4.8k

Important: ~$25k
$3k to cover participatory co-design stipends and resident materials, licenses, etc.
$2k to cover food/drink for hosting community building events, community mixers, or dinners
$5k to cover labor for the operations team
$10-15k to cover labor for organizing team

If possible: $4k
$3k to cover honorariums for residents’ time and work
$1k for office, project, and home supplies

Any remaining funds will go towards supporting and sustaining longer-term initiatives and collaborative projects that have emerged from the residency.

Programming Timeline

Week 1:
The primary focuses of Week 1 will be social and educational. We will facilitate community-building activities and strive to learn from both RightsCon and each other as much as possible.

• Organizer intros/talks and guided community bonding activities during the day, community dinners and free time at night
• RightsCon immersion
• Conference debrief, begin project ideation
• Optional: Community social outing, inclusive of broader community

Week 2:
The primary focus of Week 2 will be emergent ideation and project planning, given the interdependent strengths, skills, and interests of the residents as well as from topics covered and connections formed at RightsCon.

• Group brainstorming sessions, begin team and project formation (ongoing throughout week)
• Project roadmapping
• Begin project prototyping and core heads-down work
• Weekly community social mixer at the end of the week
• Throughout: various workshops from residency members on topics ranging from participatory co-design, community organizing, and governance to ZK/other cryptographic primitives, cryptography/privacy models, and building with cryptography

Week 3:
The primary focus of week 3 will be heads-down project work. There will be less core programming and we will have daily touch points.

• Daily:
  • Quick project team standup
  • Lunch workshares and group feedback: each day 1-2 teams will talk about their work and invite group input
• End of week: Weekly community social mixer

Week 4:
The primary focus of week 4 will be finishing up heads-down project work and shipping a deliverable by the end of the residency.

• Early to mid-week: Begin project documentation
• End of week:
  • Finish written project documentation
  • Demo day and presentations
  • End of residency community social

Week 5: Post-residency
The primary focus of week 5 will be to publish and compile all residency outputs into public-facing artifacts. This follow-up effort will be led by the core organizers.