Information Controls Research Program
Forecasted
Information Controls Research Program supports individual researchers studying censorship, surveillance, and countermeasures to serve the internet freedom community and improve tools for restricted environments.
Funder: Open Technology Fund
Due Dates (Anticipated): September 2027 (Concept Note deadline, anticipated)
Funding Amounts: $7,000 USD monthly for 3, 6, 9, or 12 months, plus travel and equipment stipends up to $5,000 USD each
Summary: Supports individual researchers conducting applied, technically grounded research into censorship, surveillance, and countermeasures in repressive information environments.
Key Information: Researchers must work full-time with a host organization providing supervision and progress oversight.
Description
Open Technology Fund’s Information Controls Research Program (ICRP), formerly the Information Controls Fellowship Program, supports applied research into how authoritarian governments restrict information flows, cut access to the open internet, and implement censorship and surveillance. It funds individual researchers whose outputs serve the internet freedom community or improve tools used in the most information-restricted environments.
The program welcomes multidisciplinary work, including network interference monitoring, application security and privacy analysis, censorship circumvention, shutdown-resilient communications, and evaluation of circumvention tools. Other priorities include state-sponsored surveillance, digital threats against civil society and human rights defenders, the diffusion of information-control technologies, threat intelligence, and the roles of artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Researchers embed with host organizations, and projects must include a technical component or output.
