Throughout 2025, PITG continued creating spaces where technologists, researchers and advocates can exchange knowledge, follow developments in internet infrastructure and technical standards, and bring public interest perspectives into the rooms where technical decisions are made.

The year also reinforced why this work matters; internet infrastructure and technical governance are increasingly shaped by geopolitical tensions, concentration of power in technology companies, and political pressures that affect how people access and use digital technologies. Sustained public interest participation in these spaces remains essential.

Since 2022, the Travel Fund has been PITG’s main effort to effectively support public interest technologists and civil society participants who face financial or institutional barriers to participate in technical standards, internet governance, and related technical spaces. In 2025, it remained one of our main ways of turning community participation into concrete access to the places where technical discussions happen.

The Travel Fund in numbers

In 2025, the PITG Travel Fund received 51 applications and approved 19. Thirteen funded trips were ultimately completed. Grantees attended standards and technical governance meetings including ICANN 83 and 84, IEEE 802.19, IEEE ICDMW, and IETF 123 and 124, as well as technical and digital rights gatherings including HACS, the Open Source Cryptography Workshop (OSCW), zkProofs, Real World Crypto (RWC), RightsCon and the Global Gathering.

Grantees came from Europe (Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy), Africa (Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria), Asia (India, Palestine and Jordan), North America (Canada), and South America (Venezuela). This geographic range is important because the technical decisions discussed in these forums have global effects, while the resources and institutional support needed to participate remain very unevenly distributed. Visa barriers continued to be one of the Fund’s clearest limitations. Three grantees from Uganda were unable to obtain visas in time, while one grantee from India faced a visa rejection. Another grantee from Uganda was unable to cover travel costs in advance, and it prevented them to travel because of the Travel Fund limited capacity to provide all the booking arrangements.

What the Travel Fund made possible

The reports from 2025 grantees show that the value of the Fund goes beyond attendance. Travel support can allow a participant to intervene in a discussion while a technical approach is still being shaped, build relationships that continue after the event, bring underrepresented experience into standards work, and connect learning across different technical communities. Three examples illustrate these different forms of impact:

Sam Ju: sustained participation around anti-censorship work
Sam researches China’s online censorship practices and their impact on marginalized Sinophone diaspora communities. Building on research into foreign-directed access barriers, including real-name registration requirements, Sam and a small team are developing technical approaches to help maintain access to online services for affected communities.

PITG supported Sam twice in 2025, first for RightsCon and later for the Global Gathering. Around RightsCon, Sam presented the team’s work and brought technologists, internet governance participants, Sinophone rights advocates and lawmakers into a workshop. Feedback from these exchanges helped inform the direction of the project and opened conversations about how similar access restrictions affect communities in different contexts.

At the Global Gathering, Sam continued this work by expanding trusted regional networks and exchanging knowledge on surveillance, transnational repression, privacy, and digital identity. The event also helped strengthen connections with technologists and digital rights practitioners whose expertise may support the project’s future development.

Ritu Srivastava: connecting rural realities with standards work
Ritu Srivastava works on rural connectivity and community networks and chairs the developing IEEE work on Internet Grades of Service in Rural Areas. With PITG support, she attended IETF 123 and the IEEE 802.19 Plenary in consecutive weeks, connecting two technical layers that directly affect rural connectivity: internet performance and protocol discussions at the IETF, and wireless coexistence and spectrum-sharing work at IEEE 802.19.

At IETF 123, Ritu organized a side session and presented at GAIA on connectivity performance measurement for rural regions. She followed internet performance measurement discussions, including IPPM, with attention to how standard measures such as latency, throughput and resilience can fail to capture conditions in rural and under-resourced networks. At IEEE 802.19, she focused on dynamic spectrum access and coexistence mechanisms and on how rural use cases can be reflected in technical models.

Her planned follow-up included locally relevant performance-measurement frameworks for rural operators, work on meaningful connectivity, research on community networks as critical infrastructure, and advocacy around spectrum policies that can support rural connectivity.

Lindsey Tulloch: taking privacy-preserving technology toward deployment Lindsey Tulloch is a software developer on the Tor Project’s anti-censorship team and the lead developer of Lox, a reputation-based bridge distribution system that uses anonymous credentials to preserve user privacy. Her work is moving Lox from academic research toward deployment through Tor Browser while exploring how its anonymous-credential components could be specified and reused by other projects.

PITG support enabled Lindsey to attend four closely connected cryptography events. At HACS, she contributed practical experience from developing and implementing Lox to discussions on anonymous credentials and offered a skill-share on censorship-resistant technologies. At OSCW, she presented lessons from integrating Lox into Tor. At RWC, she discussed possible uses of the anonymous-credentials library with other organizations, including OONI, which was considering using the library to limit malicious behaviour among volunteer probes while preserving anonymity.

The trip also led to concrete follow-up: Lindsey identified potential collaborators working on similar libraries, began compiling additional use cases, and planned to follow related standardization efforts. This led to the publication of the sigma-rs libraries, and a corresponding USENIX paper that describes the libraries and test results from an updated Lox implementation and the new OONI anonymous credential scheme. Her participation brought an anti-censorship use case into cryptographic communities where many applications are otherwise framed around commercial deployment.

Looking ahead

These examples show why access to in-person technical spaces still matters. Informal discussion, detailed technical exchange and repeated participation can influence work in ways that are difficult to reproduce remotely, particularly for people whose communities and use cases are not consistently represented in standards and technical governance processes.

Across many activities, including the Travel Fund support, PITG’s work in 2025 was centred on the same basic goal: creating the conditions for public interest technologists and civil society actors to understand, enter and contribute to technical spaces that can otherwise be difficult to access.

Thank you to everyone who applied or were grantees of the PITG Travel Fund in 2025. We look forward to continuing the work together in 2026. If you have any question, comment or contribution, please contact the PITG chairs team at [email protected].

Raquel Renno and Juliana Guerra are co-chairs of the Public Interest Technology Group.