Authored by Riley Wong

*Black text on light yellow background: "How can physical and digital infrastructure for community privacy, agency, and consent co-inform one another?"*

Hello! Kicking off this blog by sharing a talk I gave recently at the International Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2025) at Yale University, plus some recent areas of focus. (Slides below.)

Community Infrastructure

A recent interest of mine has been around digital public infrastructure — including civic tech, public data sharing, and the digital commons. Trust in government institutions can yield positive results for community voice and democratic governance, exemplified by Taiwan; yet similar infrastructures can turn into mass state surveillance systems, such as Flock, automated license plate readers, or digital ID becoming tools for surveillance capitalism. With the state of current events in the US and beyond, who do we turn to when the state becomes unreliable or antagonistic to many communities, including people who are activists, immigrants, journalists, sex workers, transgender and queer, BIPOC, and more?

My focus has since turned towards community infrastructure — thinking about mutual aid and community groups such as Cooperation Jackson, The Young Lords, and the Black Panther Party, to name a few, from community health centers to free lunch programs and more. Communities build their own infrastructure when illegible, overlooked, or even targeted and harassed by formal institutions.

What does digital community infrastructure look like? Some examples that come to mind include community mesh networks, free and open-source software, federated and distributed tech, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, and community-governed data collectives. How can physical and digital infrastructure for community privacy, agency, and consent, in turn, co-inform one another?

Collective Data Action

Data is relational—and so too are privacy, agency, and consent. Given this, how can we apply collective action–e.g. boycotts, strikes, collective bargaining–to reclaim people power over our algorithms and data?

Frameworks of data labor imply strategies for data strikes and algorithmic collective action (crediting my colleague Nick Vincent). Through encrypted data collectives and collective data action, this is already possible, and the technology for creating this infrastructure already exists; we just have to build it.

Movement and community building towards more equitable tech futures will require work on multiple fronts; tech is one, and so too are social culture and policy. As AI continues to displace creators, information workers, and more, what systems, safety nets, and infrastructures will we have in place to steer ourselves towards the future we want? What does being proactive about this entail?

Community Privacy Residency

Want to also announce that we’ve been working hard to plan the Community Privacy Residency for this year :) Will be taking place in Berlin in July 2026. Applications will be opening soon, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, we’re currently still looking for a few more sponsors. If you or someone you know would like to support or collaborate on community-driven privacy infrastructure and applied cryptography work, let’s talk!

Slides: Community Infrastructure for Privacy, Agency, and Consent.
International Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD),
Yale University, Dec 2025.