August 2020

We’ve recently completed a project supported by the Open Technology Fund (OTF) to help make Tahoe-LAFS—an open source, decentralized, fault-tolerant secure file storage tool—more usable for human rights organizations.

Our focus for our project with OTF has been on meeting the needs of human rights defenders because finding secure ways to store their data away from surveillance is critical. Not only does secure storage protect their work and the data they store; it can often be a matter of personal safety for people who are defending human rights. Read more about the background of this project in this previous blog post.

Over the last three months, we’ve had the opportunity to participate in the Southeast Asia arm of the German Accelerator program – a program aimed at supporting German-based startups in successfully entering the Southeast Asian markets. 

The accelerator is made of a series of workshops focused on conducting business in the SEA region, program milestones and one-on-one coaching by any of their 300+ list of mentors. 

In the program we’re working on furthering the development of ZKAPs – Zero Knowledge Access Passes and have just completed Milestone 2. With this check-in, we conclude the Discovery Phase of the program as we enter its Validation Phase. In this session, we’re joined by our preferred expert mentors, alongside the GA program team, to provide comprehensive feedback on our program journey thus far.