The Anonymity Networks Community Is Going to Global Gathering 2026
Global Gathering 2026, hosted by Team CommUNITY, runs from 4 to 6 September in Estoril, Portugal. We applied for a booth and the slot is now confirmed.
- Date and time: 6 September,
13:00to15:00WEST (UTC+1, Portugal local time during the event) - Location: Booth
6in the Regional Perspectives Village, 3 x 3 meters - Booth title: anoni.net Hub: Sinophone Asia-Pacific Networked Freedom
Event details are at Global Gathering 2026.
What the Global Gathering is
The Global Gathering is an annual event hosted by Team CommUNITY. It draws people from around the world whose work covers digital rights, internet freedom, and protecting civil society from digital attacks.
There is no main stage and no keynote, and the three days are built out of Circles, Meetups that bring together a region or a shared topic, and Booths open to anyone walking past. Villages then group those activities by theme, such as Circumvention Tech, Digital Security, and Regional Perspectives. Our booth sits in the Regional Perspectives Village.
Why we are taking part
This is our first time at the Global Gathering, and the main hope is to meet more people, both technologists developing anonymity networks and other circumvention tools, and others working across the Asia region.
We are a group of volunteers who care about anonymity networks and internet freedom, starting from Taiwan, and what we do covers keeping journalists' sources protected, letting activists organize without leaving traces, and helping people support sensitive causes without exposing who they are. All three rest on having an anonymity network that works. We run the Matrix home server im.anoni.net and this docs site, which keeps our observations and discussions somewhere they can be checked.
The community counts from the anonymity network workshop we ran in August 2025, where the first group of members came together. Three threads are open in 2026, with practical privacy guides sorted by scenario for everyday life, sensitive work, and high risk, campus Tor relays pushed forward together with EFF and the Tor Project and one already running at National Taiwan Normal University, and the anonymous payment work we are bringing to the booth.
Others across the Asia-Pacific work on the same problems, and so far each side has not known the other exists. Sinophone communities are spread across Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, the situations they run into are connected, and opportunities to compare experiences are rare.
The other purpose is taking part in coordination across the region, since internet freedom work is rarely something a single community can finish, what any one of us can observe and maintain has limits, and most of these problems need more than one region to cover them properly. Establishing contact first is what makes working together possible later.
For the 30 minutes of mobile throttling in northern Taiwan on 13 August, we turned OONI's public data into a guided tour of what it recorded. Taiwan logged 238 connection speed tests from 47 devices that day, one of which saw its median download fall from 132,096 kbit/s to 1,223 kbit/s, and every query in the write-up runs without a key so anyone can recheck it. That record comes along to Estoril, and if anyone there is working on shutdowns or throttling, it is available for comparison.
We are bringing anonymous payment to the booth
The agenda went up in late August, and across the three days it covers shutdown response, circumvention tools, platform accountability, AI governance, and journalist safety. Having gone through the Circles, Villages, and Booths one by one, we found no session that takes financial privacy as its subject. Donor anonymity, cross-border disbursement, and what sanctions and currency controls do to civil society appear in no session title or description. A few sessions do take fundraising strategy and grant applications as their subject, where the focus is getting money in. How a payment reaches its recipient without exposing them goes unaddressed.
Sanctions lists, banks refusing to do business, donation records being subpoenaed: these are day-to-day realities for many organizations, with no matching discussion anywhere on the agenda.
We are making anonymous payment the main topic at our booth. As a community we are still at the research stage, gathering real situations, including who needs an anonymous money trail and under what circumstances, where current practice breaks down, and what limits regulation and compliance impose.
The people we would especially like to talk to:
- Operators with cross-border disbursement experience: particularly where the recipient sits in a high-risk or sanctioned region.
- Organisations that have dealt with donor anonymity: who know where the current tools fall short.
- Projects blocked by financial controls: unable to receive support because a bank refused them or currency rules got in the way.
- Anyone following the topic in research or advocacy: the regulatory side included.
Please just walk up during the booth slot, with no appointment and no prepared topic needed, and topics other than anonymous payment are just as welcome. The booth is meant to work as a regional meeting point, so that people in the room can find each other.
Another team from Taiwan is at the Gathering
Cofacts is here too, at Booth 10 on 6 September, 13:00 to 15:00 WEST, the same two hours as our own slot. They are showing Cofacts.ai, a multi-agent AI framework built on top of the crowdsourced fact-checking community and chatbot they have run for years.
The two subjects meet in the same place. A public sphere needs information that can be checked, and it needs a network that carries that information without exposing the people passing it along. Both booths are open the same afternoon, so please come to both.
Sessions on the agenda that overlap with our work
On anonymity and circumvention:
- Technologist Meetup (4 September,
13:30to14:30) is where technologists working in digital rights and public interest technology get to know each other, hosted in the Circumvention Tech Village, and we are looking for people with experience maintaining measurement tools or self-hosted services. - Cross-Borders Storytelling: Device Searches, Metadata, and Collective Preparation compares experiences of device searches and metadata scrutiny across regions, and covers digital, legal, physical, and psychosocial preparation. Sinophone journalists cross jurisdictions often, and how others prepare is something we can put to use.
- Can Signal Become Phishing-Resistant? addresses phishing aimed at journalists and activists, where the attacks abuse Signal's legitimate account recovery and device-linking workflows, with no software vulnerability required. How to write the risk in account recovery into a privacy guide is what we are after in this session.
- Lights in the Tunnel: Co-Creating an Accountability Framework for VPN Transparency starts drafting a methodology for assessing VPN transparency and accountability, along with the providers to be evaluated. People keep asking us which VPN they can trust, so we want to know how that methodology turns into advice a user can act on.
- Age Verification and Digital Identity Systems runs across two sessions, mapping how these systems are being rolled out and by whom, and discussing the harm-reduction pathways civil society can push for.
On measurement and regional coordination:
- Strengthening Rapid Response Efforts to Censorship Events covers how groups around the world coordinate when censorship events emerge, including OONI's tools and methods for rapid response. We work with OONI's public data, and the August throttling write-up came out of the same methods.
- Asia Meetup (4 September,
12:00to13:00) is a connection point for people working across the Asia region, and it is where we hope to meet others nearby working on adjacent problems. - Internet Shutdown Contingency Planning Help Desk builds a shutdown contingency plan around your own threat model, using the BRACE framework. Taiwan runs drills every year that give us something to compare against, and which parts of the framework connect is what we need to work out.
- We See, We Archive, We Remember addresses how public-interest information can be preserved when it is being erased, drawing on archival work from Hong Kong, China, Iran, and Palestine.
Booths we plan to visit
- The Onion Odyssey Cryptographic Universe is run by the Tor Project together with the Guardian Project (Orbot, Onion Browser), at Booth
22in the Circumvention Tech Village, open all three days, and we want to hear about the friction Sinophone users hit with Orbot and Onion Browser. - Lockdown Systems brings OnionShare, which shares files, hosts websites, and runs chat anonymously over the Tor network, alongside Cyd for backing up and deleting social media history, and where a source gets stuck the first time they use it is exactly the kind of detail our privacy guides need.
- Air Messenger is built on the MLS protocol, combining end-to-end encryption, low metadata, and a federated architecture, and since we run a Matrix home server ourselves, we want to know how far a federated setup can push metadata down.
- Amnezia VPN shows their research on VPN blocking and DPI filtering, along with Amnezia Pulse for tracking shutdowns, and we want to compare our August throttling data against how they decide a shutdown is happening.
- LEAP's MANTA measures tunnel health in censored environments, and we want to find out whether the same measurement approach fits the connectivity we see in Taiwan. Their booth (Booth
21) is open on 4 September only,15:30to17:30, and a MANTA session runs in the Circumvention Tech Village earlier that day,15:00to16:00. - po1ytech's polymorphic is an automated mirror system that keeps blocked independent media reachable, and we want to ask how much staffing it takes to keep running, because a volunteer community has limited capacity and sustainability comes first when choosing tools.
The full agenda is at Global Gathering 2026, and it runs far wider than what is listed here.
For those attending
Our booth is on the final day, which leaves no fixed spot for the first two days. Any of the following will reach us.
- The Matrix room set up for the event is the most reliable, at
#gg2026:im.anoni.net, where a message is enough to arrange a time and place, no phone numbers need to change hands, and we will reply as soon as we can during the event. Any Matrix account can join, so a freematrix.orgaccount works and takes a couple of minutes to set up. Times in that room are in WEST unless someone says otherwise. Accounts onim.anoni.netare issued by a person and take a day or two, which is too slow for meeting someone at the venue, so do not wait on one. - Two sessions on 4 September are ones we will be attending, the Asia Meetup (
12:00to13:00WEST) and the Technologist Meetup (13:30to14:30WEST), so meeting there works directly. - We will most likely be around for the Networking Hour,
12:00to13:00WEST each day, though plans may still shift, so checking that room before you leave for Estoril helps. On 4 September that hour is where the Asia Meetup above sits, so it is one slot rather than two. - We will be at the venue for most of the three days, with anoni.net and a handle on our badges, so please do say hello.
- The booth slot on 6 September,
13:00to15:00WEST, is the easiest place to find us, and giving the name you go by is enough.
Taking part without travelling
Most people will not be travelling to Portugal, and there are still two things we can do together.
Please write down a coordination gap you have run into and send it to us, and we will take it along to compare against what other regions are seeing. Observations from Taiwan do not surface often at international events, and describing one concrete situation carries further than an abstract overview.
We would also like to hear real experiences of anonymous payment, so if you or an organization you know has dealt with small cross-border support, the trade-off between donation receipts and identity disclosure, or a recipient put at risk because a money trail identified them, that experience is what the booth needs. Anything you would rather not attach your name to can go to the anonymous mailbox below. We check it within a few hours across the three days of the Gathering, and reply within a day or two the rest of the time.
Beyond the event, all three threads for 2026 are short of hands. The privacy guides need people to sort scenarios and proofread, campus Tor relays need someone willing to ask about feasibility at their own institution, and the anonymous payment work needs more real cases. If you have compared the August throttling write-up against the raw OONI data and have something to add or correct, that is welcome too. Say which part interests you in the Matrix room.
Help pass this along
The booth runs for one slot only, and whether the right people walk past depends a great deal on how far word travels. If you know someone heading to Estoril, or there are journalists and open source community members around you working on these topics, please forward this to them, and there is no need to tell us first. If someone responds after you do, sharing that in the Matrix room helps us connect with them before we set off.
After the event
Whatever the booth collects will be written up and published in a later newsletter and on this docs site. We look at the situation a case arose in, and the people and the region involved stay out of anything published. Both the list of coordination gaps and the anonymous payment cases are de-identified first.
Channels
- During the event: Matrix room
#gg2026:im.anoni.net, for the three days of the Global Gathering - Live discussion: public Matrix room (home server
im.anoni.net) - Anonymous tips: [email protected] (GPG key), checked within a few hours during the Gathering
