Internet censorship is a pervasive and growing global problem, as authoritarian governments worldwide make it harder and harder to freely access information online. While there are a variety of known circumvention tools that can help individual users dodge locally-imposed blocks, from an organizational perspective, the challenge looks slightly different; for example, for media outlets, human rights groups, and civil society organizations, there may be a lack of resources to build technical solutions, forcing the burden onto users and users alone.
In this context, AppMaker was born. AppMaker is a tool that allows any organization or individual to easily create a customized Android app in minutes, with localized content and circumvention tech baked in.
In this session, we'll show how AppMaker works while also collaboratively exploring new ways to decentralize circumvention tech.
The primary goals of this session are to:
1) raise community awareness of AppMaker;
2) share how AppMaker works from a non-technical perspective;
3) learn about and discuss other decentralized approaches to circumvention tech; and
4) seek out new avenues of collaboration with others, whether they be groups/individuals working on similar problems or those who could benefit by using AppMaker directly themselves.
Above all, our goal is that attendees need not be well versed in censorship, circumvention tech, or internet freedom generally to find this session meaningful. Indeed, it is the views and contributions of a diverse audience that we hope will enrich our own work in a truly collaborative, mutually beneficial exchange.
We're hoping that many efforts and discussions will continue after Mozfest. Share any ideas you already have for how to continue the work from your session.:AppMaker is a relatively new tool, released within the past year. It is under active development and refinement, so it is viable and will continue to grow into the future. We hope that from this session, interested individuals can try out AppMaker and tell us about their experience in real-time, as well as by joining our mailing list, following us on Twitter (or GitHub), or otherwise connecting with us as we build increased community awareness and engagement around the project. We are also very open to collaboration with others around novel circumvention tech approaches and/or use of this specific tool, should any attendees find AppMaker particularly useful or relevant to needs within their own movement.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:Our session does not rely on a set number of participants and will be easily adaptable whether the number of attendees is 30, 3, or somewhere in between. The workshop portion of our session dedicated to showing how AppMaker works (and inviting active participation by attendees) can be conducted with any number of attendees. The portion of our session dedicated to discussing our approach and exploring with participants other collaborative solutions to decentralized circumvention tech will of course look slightly different depending on the number of people who show up. With that said, we believe the topic can be just as fruitfully engaged with a small, intimate number of people as it can with a larger, more diverse group. While we hope to engage the perspectives of a wide range of backgrounds and interests, a smaller attendee number would not inhibit our session as planned.
Internet freedom enthusiast. Currently Grants Manager at GreatFire.org, monitoring and challenging internet censorship in China.