Partnership SEEKCommons + Tor Project

This year we are reserving one fellowship to sustainability studies of community networks in partnership with the Tor Project!

The Tor Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing human rights and freedoms through free and open-source anonymity and privacy technologies. Tor-powered applications are used by millions of people every day, and the Tor network consists of more than 10,000 relays (nodes), operated and sustained independently by a decentralized, global community of contributors.

Research Topics

We welcome Fellowship applications on the sustainability of the Tor network with a focus on energy consumption and relay metadata (such as ASN, uptime, and platform). The goal of the partnership between SEEKCommons and Tor is to study the environmental impact of community networks and promote the use of renewable energy in decentralized infrastructures.

We would like to support applications that address one (or more) of these questions:

• What Free and Open Source technologies can be used to promote a more sustainable and distributed Tor infrastructure?
• How can the energy consumption of the Tor network be measured and optimized to reduce its environmental impact?
• How can the “Tor Snowflake” decentralized proxy model be used to improve the sustainability of the network?
• How can we use metadata from relays (e.g., ASN / uptime / platform) to assess the environmental impact of the network?
• What open hardware and renewable energy sources could be used/reused in the Tor network?