About

Core Team

Michael Rogers started the Briar project to support freedom of expression, freedom of association and the right to privacy. He has studied and built peer-to-peer systems for over a decade and contributed to Freenet and LimeWire.

Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian. She has been working as a security consultant since 2003, specializing in security design and strategy, and makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex sociotechnical systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better.

Torsten Grote is a Free Software activist and programmer. He studied computer science as well as philosophy and is interested in various topics of technology-enabled social and political change. As a member of the Free Software Foundation Europe, he ran their Free Your Android campaign to show people how they can use their mobile device securely and in freedom.

Julian Dehm is an advocate of freedom of speech and movement. He studies computer science at Freie Universität Berlin with a focus on security and privacy. He’s contributing to Briar in his spare time.

Sebastian is a free software and open data/knowledge enthusiast. He’s always working on some open source projects either professionally or in his spare time. He’s fascinated by technology that helps people thrive while avoiding vendor lock-in and fostering self-determination and privacy.

Mikolai Gütschow contributes to multiple Free Software projects in his spare time. He is studying Embedded Systems and is interested in free hardware applications as well. He is part of the team that started the development of Briar Desktop, trying to bring Briar to a wider range of devices.

Nico Alt started the development of Briar Desktop to bring Briar to non-Android platforms. Having been an F-Droid developer for a long time, he sincerely wishes free alternatives to Android to succeed and is mainly interested in free software to empower people.

Past Contributors

Benedikt Wieder has contributed to a variety of open source projects ranging from artistic tools to security applications. During his bachelor studies in Computer Science he researched and worked with variations of the Kademlia distributed hash table (DHT) and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for use in secure communication.

Ernir Erlingsson has been building mobile applications on multiple platforms for over a decade. He is a full stack developer, and an avid supporter of open-source software, with a keen interest in theoretical computer science and algorithms.

Jack Grigg is a core developer of the I2P anonymity network and lead developer of I2P Android. He has a keen interest in privacy and anonymity research, and enjoys helping other developers create privacy-respecting software. He is also a budding UX enthusiast and holds a PhD in Applied Physics from Lincoln University, New Zealand.

Bernard Tyers is an independent interaction designer and user researcher. He is interested in privacy and applying user-centred design to usable security. He is a long-time supporter of the Open Rights Group, Tor and free software projects.

Governance

The project is governed by a voluntary board. All contributors must adhere to the code of conduct.

Funding

Briar has received funding from the Small Media Foundation, the Open Internet Tools Project, Access Now, the Open Technology Fund, the Prototype Fund, Internews, the NLnet Foundation, the Next Generation Internet programme, the ISC Project and eQualit.ie.

Contact

To contact the team, please email contact@briarproject.org [PGP key] .