Funder: Open Technology Fund
Due Dates (Anticipated): September 2027 (Concept note deadline)
Funding Amounts: $7,000 USD monthly for 3, 6, 9, or 12 months, plus up to $5,000 each for travel and equipment
Summary: Supports individual researchers investigating repressive internet censorship and surveillance and developing technical outputs to advance internet freedom.
Key Information: Researchers must work full-time with a host organization throughout the program; duplicate project funding is not allowed.
Description
The Open Technology Fund’s Information Controls Research Program (ICRP) supports applied research into how authoritarian governments restrict information, disrupt access to the open internet, and implement censorship and surveillance. Research must benefit the internet freedom community or contribute to developing and improving tools used in the most information-restricted environments. The program welcomes cross-disciplinary work and particularly encourages applicants from the majority world and people with experience living in repressive environments.
Research priorities include network interference measurement, application security and privacy, anti-censorship protocols, shutdown-resilient communications, and evaluation of censorship and circumvention tools. Other areas include state-sponsored surveillance, digital threats against civil society and human rights defenders, diffusion of information-control technologies, threat intelligence, and the roles of artificial intelligence and quantum computing in internet freedom.
