2013 OTF Summit Recap

 
Tue, 2013-11-12 16:29

OTF held its second annual Summit in Washington, DC, from September 4-5, 2013. All current and planned projects were invited to send two people from their teams. Additionally, this year OTF’s Advisory Council members were invited to attend. In total, there were more than 50 participants at this year’s Summit.

The summit is the one time each year that OTF gathers the projects and Advisory Council members in one place. The purpose of the Summit is to facilitate project collaboration, information sharing, brainstorming and for OTF to get strategic feedback on the program goals for the coming year. The Summit is a combination of OTF discussion topics, issues related to global strategy for internet freedom, participant selected sessions and working groups. Concluding at the end of two-day Summit, action items and goals for the coming year were collected. Below we share the sessions and a summary of their action items.

Sessions Held During the Summit

  • The Road Ahead: What does this space look like in three years and what should we be doing now to prepare?
  • Infrastructure
  • Localization
  • Incubation
  • User-centric Research
  • Sustainability
  • Mapping Problems to Knowledge
  • Distribution and training
  • Unified language for explaining surveillance
  • Fixing public key distribution
  • Productizing your code
  • Incentivizing large companies on privacy
  • Inclusion and diversity
  • Getting feedback from users
  • Doing better code audits
  • Describing real-world harm
  • Safe haven questions
  • Leveraging the “Cyber Security agenda”
  • Data-at-rest policy

Action Items

  • Improved documentation and supporting media to make projects more accessible and understandable to new users
  • Facilitation of sharing case studies to learn from success stories
  • Additional methods for project communication and collaboration, like specialized mailing lists, communication spaces and continued presence on existing networks
  • Raising additional funds and access new funding sources to further support important projects
  • Creation of both new tools and alternative secure tools, along with a dedicated effort to improving the security of these tools through security audits and sharing best practices
  • Efforts to standardize certain solutions within the community through the development of frameworks and sharing of experiences, assets and other frequently used or needed resources
  • Improving the quality of community interactions and outreach efforts to other interested communities
  • Development of resources for community members and other people at risk of being harmed by the work that they do with Internet Freedom
  • Further field testing, training, localization and distribution of tools to communities in need of them