Hi, welcome. My name is Moritz, as you can see on the slides. I'm here to talk a little

bit about my experiences in open source. As I was introduced, I want to talk a little

bit about myself and what I did in the past, what I'm currently doing. So I studied computer

science at the Technical University in Dresden. I was a teaching assistant at the software

engineering department. And I was always quite active in open source. I didn't even know

kind of the term. The first contributions I made were in 96 when I got my first modem.

And I found some projects that I found interesting, started contributing. In 2010 I joined the

Tor project. It's an anonymization project. I specifically picked the Technical University

in Dresden because they have a department that researches anonymity and privacy on the

internet. So even though my major was in software engineering, I went there for the privacy

parts. And that is kind of important to understand where I'm coming from to this open source

movement and to the problems. I started a project called Tor Servers in 2010 which turned

an association, a registered nonprofit association in 2011. It's still ongoing. As you can see

in the last bullet, we are now 20 organizations in 14 countries. So the network has grown

considerably. But it's not that relevant what the content of the group, what we're actually

working on. But it's important for understanding the background of how I'm approaching things.

In 2013 I applied for some funding. So I already got some funding in 2011, in 2012, and in

2013 I also approached this fairly new foundation called Renewable Freedom Foundation. And instead

of giving me a grant for my project, they asked me to join the foundation. I was a Google

Summer of Code mentor for the Tor project in 2013 and 2014. And today I'm busy being

on the board of four nonprofits. I'm not a very good coder. I kind of when I learned

how to actually, how you would actually do things like cleanly, I felt like I wasn't

really skilled to do it cleanly. So the more I learned about software engineering, the

less I actually wrote software. So I moved into kind of the organizational matters.

A little bit about the Renewable Freedom Foundation, because that is kind of the context that I'm

working in. I'm gratefully funded by this foundation, started by a newspaper publisher.

It's the newspaper publisher of the Donaukuria in Ingolstadt, which some of you might have

heard of. He set aside some money to address digital privacy issues. He was quite upset

with how things are developing in regards to the security of your own communication.

And so it was a quite natural fit for me to join that foundation. I took some quotes from

our website. So the mission statement is to protect and preserve civil liberties in the

digital landscape. So we have some funding. It's not a very large foundation, but we're

independent from any outside influences. So most of the projects that I work with, I can't

really put a lot of money to them. So instead, we had to kind of come up with a concept for

where is a niche, where is a need in the space of digital civil liberties that we could help

build. And that's the second quote. We support communities, volunteer structures, rather

than sending money, on the one hand, because we don't have it, but on the other hand, also

because it's not always the most useful contribution you can make to a project just to throw money

at it. Actually, money can be quite damaging to a project also if you don't apply it well.

So to say, and I will come back to this. So the main focus of our work is to enable individuals

and groups to concentrate on their core strengths. And we take, it says here, we take bureaucratic

burdens off their hands. And this is kind of the main topic here that I want to talk

about.

Could you give some examples for civil liberties in a digital landscape?

You will see. So we will come to some examples in this talk. When you think about projects

in the digital landscape, there's roughly, there's a few categories of projects. There's

policy groups. There's digital policy groups. There's advocacy groups that, like the Free

Software Foundation Europe or the Digitale Gesellschaft in Germany, that kind of voice,

try to take the voice of the civil society and talk about privacy, invasion, and the

dangers. And then the core part of what we're focusing on is the actual technology development.