Emerald Onion is transit internet service provider focused on developing privacy infrastructure. We're also a Seattle-based 501(c)(3) public charity that is 100% volunteer-run and 100% donation based. Below is a list of voluntary roles and responsibilities that we need help with to grow. Do you have the time and passion to donate to help empower millions around the world? We’re interested in folks who have different levels of experience.
Emerald Onion would appreciate having more legal and tech policy folks around. We think there’s a lot that can be done in this space, not to mention helping with the occasional subpoenas for non-existent user data.
As a growing 501(c)(3), we have specific responsibilities managing donations and filings. This is a manageable task for our existing admins, but we’d love to bring someone on board who’s passionate about internet privacy while also looking for professional experiences in nonprofit finance. One task that we’d love help with is publishing our donation amounts and categorical expenses on an annual basis since launching in 2017.
Even though Emerald Onion is 100% volunteer run, we don’t have any kind of HR-style compliance policies or procedures. We’re hoping to find someone interested in helping us mature in this area.
We’re an ISP doing BGP, Tor, DNS such as DoH, DoT, and DoQ, distributed cryptographic randomness as a service, censorship detection, and who knows what else in the future. We want to make the internet more anonymous (privacy), safer for everyone not just the privileged (encryption), more accessible (anti-censorship), and we want to do more.
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We want more help with our new DNS infrastructure. Currently we’re using
knot-resolverfor DoH and DoT. e’re also experimenting with DoQ, and also beginning some stuff with ODoH. This is cutting edge stuff. -
We want more help managing and developing the network. BGP, anycast, peering, IPv6, Wireguard, post-quantum crypto (crypto means cryptography). From 2017-2020, our POPs only existed in the United States. In 2021, we deployed our first international POP in Berlin, Germany. We’re still struggling with edge routing so we’ve been playing around with XDP and VPP using Linux to try and speed things up while also maintaining basic firewall rules.
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We want to do other cool stuff. What things don't we do that you could help us get started with?
Emerald Onion Advisory Board Members are from all around the world, have interesting backgrounds, and we hang out in end-to-end encrypted messaging services like Keybase or Signal where we talk about privacy and security projects. We expect volunteers to join us in these spaces, advise on direction, help with new or existing projects, all on your time. Because all of us are volunteers, none of us expect too much from any other as far as time commitments. If you want to run with your own project, you’re welcome to spend as much time on it as you would like and we’ll do our best to help.
You should expect to be welcomed and empowered. We are all students and teachers with every interaction. Like the Tor network, we are more powerful with our diversity. We encourage women, black, foreign, PoC, non-binary, LatinX, LGBTQ+, and everyone in between to apply.
Please email a résumé and cover letter to volunteer at emeraldonion.org. Tell us about the kind of internet that you want, and how you're going to help Emerald Onion help get everyone else there.