Background:
During Tor Meeting in Seattle (2016) we had a session to discuss about building a stronger presence in the global south. One of the things that came out of the session was to build partnership with universities in the global south, starting in Latin America, to seek the opportunity to have them hosting Tor relays.
University of Chile meeting:
Isabela and ilv met with Salvador Millaleo, the coordinator of 'Centro de Estudos de Derecho Informático' -- Center of Studies of Computer Law -- or something close to it :) they exist for a long time and one of the people working there too is the founder of Derechos Digitales. We explained why Tor would like to have more servers in the south, how that was important for the network to have geolocation diversity and also how that could be something interesting for them.
We said that beyond helping with our mission, which has to do with their mission as well (freedom of expression and privacy online) it could be a great opportunity for them as a study center in the university for research.
They were very excited about it and said they were going to reach out to the CS department to build a partnership with them on hosting a tor relay. I mentioned that for the CS department that could also be a very good opportunity for the students to learn more about security and privacy online and to do research. We mentioned PETS as it seems one professor from there (Alejandro Hevia) have been part of PETS committee to review papers.
Next steps:
We will follow up with Salvador and try to establish a contact with someone at the CS school there as well to see if we can get them excited about hosting a relay.
We also plan on document the discussion we had at the last Tor Meeting inside the community team wiki (finally) so we can carry on this work in a more organized way :) and in coordination with the community team.
Reach out to other universities in Latin America.
Work with Derechos Digitales to see if we can initiate a campaign for tor relays in the region -- which will be a big help with this initiative.