VPN Community Initiative Village 2022

VPN Village Description

The VPN Community Initiative Village is a two-week virtual event focused on VPN user education and solidarity. Events held over the last week of November and first week of December will address gaps in user education around VPNs, the challenge of analyzing and selecting VPNs, and will invite attendees to set up their own VPN servers and proxies to support their own communities and users combatting censorship globally.

What is the VPN Community Initiative? The VPN Community Initiative at Team CommUNITY was formed in 2022 to bring together individuals working across the VPN ecosystem to:

• Build relationships across providers, technologists, academics, digital security specialists and end users to increase communication and collaboration within the sector;
• Further discussions around VPN industry standards to promote user safety and security; and
• Highlight the needs of at-risk users to improve the VPN offerings that address their use cases.

Workshops & Events

Run Snowflake Proxies and Strengthen Internet Freedom (Workshop)

Date: Tuesday, November 29, 2022
Time: 14:00 - 15:00 UTC / 9:00 - 10:30 EST ([What time is it in my city?])
RSVP:

Summary: Have you considered helping users from censored regions to access the free and open internet? Snowflake is a new pluggable transport that allows people from all over the world to access the open internet.

In this workshop, you will learn what Snowflake is, and how to set up a proxy and help censored users bypass internet censorship.
Presenters:

Gus:
Works as Community Team Lead at the Tor Project.

Threat Modeling and VPNs (Talk and Q&A)

Date: Wednesday, November 30, 2022
Time: 13:30 - 15:00 UTC / 8:30 - 10:00 EST ([What time is it in my city?])
RSVP:

Summary:
Presenters:

Getting Started with Outline: Helping your friends and family access the Open Internet (Workshop)

Date: Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Time: 14:30 - 16:00 UTC / 9:30 - 11:00 EST ([What time is it in my city?])
RSVP:

Summary:
Presenters:

Daniel LaCosse:
Daniel LaCosse is an engineer on the Outline Team who's previous work includes a TEDx talk on the logic of storytelling and building the Vine web player from scratch (RIP). He spends his free time improvising board games and trying to convince random strangers they should only be building their apps on web.

Vinicius Fortuna:
Vinicius Fortuna is the engineering lead of the team at Jigsaw that protects people’s ability to participate in the global internet. He has led the team through initiatives to prevent censorship via stronger internet standards and platforms; mitigate censorship via circumvention tools such as the Outline VPN and Intra; and expose censorship via measurements and data analysis.

How to Critically Choose a VPN (Talk and Q&A)

Date: Wednesday, December 7, 2022
Time: 15:00 - 16:00 UTC / 10:00 - 11:00 EST ([What time is it in my city?])
RSVP:

Summary:
Presenters:

Everything You Wanted to Know about VPNs, but Were Afraid to Ask (Glitter Meetup)

Date: Thursday, December 8, 2022
Time: 15:00 - 16:00 UTC / 10:00 - 11:00 EST ([What time is it in my city?])
RSVP:

Summary:
Presenters: