Something new is happening. But I don’t have to say it, you feel it. You know an intelligence is emerging. And with this, our awareness is growing. We’re adapting, because we must. And in the process of our latest adaptation, some funky things are shaking out, like a hackathon for human rights activists and devs at the edge.

This weekend, the Human Rights Foundation and Bitcoin Park Austin brought together a powerful group of people. The momentum for this event was built from previous mingling at Presidio Bitcoin in San Francisco and all the work that HRF does to burgeon freedom tech and distribute it across the globe with the AI for Individual Rights initiative.

HRF’s AI for Individual Rights program is the world’s first initiative dedicated both to exposing how authoritarian regimes use artificial intelligence (AI) to surveil, censor, and repress, and to supporting the development of open-source AI tools that strengthen the work of dissidents and activists living under tyranny. read more

This hackathon is the first of its kind with a stunning prize pool and an interesting target. Unleashing what vibe-coding makes possible, global freedom leaders and developers worked together to solve real problems on the ground for political prisoners, freedom advocacy, uncensored reporting, [and more] in two days.

The weekend was kicked off with a dinner and few words from the activist leaders connected with HRF, a good few of them coming from the World Liberty Congress. For me, this was when the sparks were lit. I showed up expecting what I have come to know about bitcoin specific events, the values we’re centered around, the reach we have. I see many familiar faces, those from the Austin Bitcoin community and other spaces I’ve visited. But when the leaders began to speak, I quickly recognized this is something new, and in it, a rare opportunity for powerful revolution driven by the technology we love. Each of these men and women shared a story along similar lines: “I’m from this country, the dictator wants me dead, I fled, now I work for change.” Hearing from them, I was struck by the gravity of what we had gathered to do. There are families who need uniting, there are local leaders who need a platform, there is information to be uncensored. There are real people on the end of the vibe-coded hack.

If we truly believe in the capabilities unleashed by the bitcoin network and AI models to liberate individuals, then teaming up with freedom advocacy is a natural next step. And it’s true, as soon as the unlikely pair of activists and devs united, the magic happened. For this hackathon, the activists brought the ideas, the problems that need solving. The devs brought their cheerful and willing-to-serve AI bots.

The ProjectsThe Projects

Here is a list of the projects churned out in 48 hours:

In first placeIn first place

Stringer Safety
An app to keep independent journalists on the field alive.
Automating the habits of expert journalists, AI works through the app to pingyour trusted network privately with updates on location, time zone, context of conflict, testimony, and keeps contacts in one place. Maple AI is powering the app, funneling sensitive info strictly and discreetly to a journalist's channel, organizing a highly diverse network of individuals that would otherwise engage with a journalist across several apps.
The team can see it expanding into use with mental health cases.

In second placeIn second place

Pathos.place
A social app connecting activists on the ground with the power of nostr, lightning, AI
Features a feed for live posts, a map of users across the globe, a bitcoin wallet built with Breeze SDK, and a chatbot powered by Maple AI. Supports bitchat protocol, zaps, and bounties.
Built with intention to capture a specific audience and gather their participation. Already working on the ground in Venezuela. The team will expand to include DMs and group chats as well as verification of users.

In third placeIn third place

Corruption Disrespector
Solving the problem of pouring over thousands of documents to uncover corruption. With this AI tool, you can summarize, analyze, see non-obvious connections at a glance. See relevant info, relationships, patterns and table of your uploaded documents with rich metadata. The team will expand to open source the project and reach out to investigative journalists to solve more of their specific problems.

mindy
An AI tool to comb through the public record of representatives statements, hearings, and testimonies to explore, showing you at a glance who in government supports your cause.
Advocates for human rights want to know who is most easily persuadable and how to contact them, Mindy is built for extracting this knowledge which would otherwise take several hours.
Once representatives are identified in support, Mindy will generate email drafts and call scripts based on your conversation.
The team hopes to expand to other countries, gather info transcribed from interviews, and more.

Aman
An privacy protected chatbot and digital assistant using Signal as the UX and Maple AI as the engine.
Support for grassroots, normal people who are not activists to get connected, securely, privately, with journalists in HRF’s network.
In practice, this is end to end encrypted messages to pass from real people on the ground to activists, journalists, local leaders sharing sensitive politically-charged information.
Open accessibility in mind for expansion.

AI for Human Rights Scorecard
A robust human rights benchmark for LLMs.
To compare between models, discovering how they will compute human rights, and further guiding the models.
The team hopes to spread the benchmark socially for more and more people to test, and to generate an Interactive scorecard website to understand results.

Sanctum
AI powered dashboard for detained activists and their families to know what to do in crisis.
A set of tools, a database with admin functions, and two user types that can be configured, using AI to escalate existing services to detainees with speed and security, delivering trusted internal knowledge privately, and breaking a language barrier, as the AI responds in your language.

OpenCCP
A surveillance tool for human rights with high level information metadata to analyze account activity not available on X. With this chrome extension powered by Grok for scraping tweets, you will see an overview of a topic you choose broken down simply by those in opposition on one side and support on the other.

Despite coming from very different places in the world, and working in almost entirely different ways, the teams found success bringing their expertise together. Being an observer, I found high levels of positivity and encouragement flying around the room. Organizer Justin Moon, HRF Technical Lead, closed the event saying, “Years ago, I thought I had nothing in common with these people, but I quickly found out I do. We’re all freedom fighters. Something new happened in the last year. We hit a block, and AI changed that. I thought, what if we join forces and build bespoke software for problems on the ground? And that’s the reason for coming together.”

Winning Team Leader Anjan Sundaram (@anjansun on X) had this to say in closing - “I came here with a little list of bullet points and it was amazing to see over the last 48 hours that list grow to become a functioning app. Thank you to HRF. I was just having a good time telling stories, and each of these individuals with their respective skillsets built something real.”

I heard it expressed over and over how inspiring it was to witness the reaction of these joined forces. I expect more of these events will be planned in the future. In fact, the Anti-Corruption Foundation who had representatives participating this time, plans to host a hackathon in the coming year because of the success and the learnings of this exercise.

Thanks for reading!