Joining the board
Gothenburg seen from Skansen Kronan. Photo by Florent Pécassou, cropped, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Stiftelsen The Unigrid Foundation (802482-2408) is the Swedish foundation in Gothenburg that stewards the Unigrid network and publishes Hedgehog as open source.
Why the foundation exists
Its statutes start from what has gone wrong with the Internet. A handful of companies own most of its resources, steer its traffic and sell their users’ data, and when a provider goes offline, access and data go with it. Surveillance keeps growing, anonymity layers such as Tor fail once one party controls a whole chain, and the servers it all runs on sit underused, full of idle cycles and empty storage. The foundation exists to develop and promote a redundant, anonymous and decentralized communication network over the Internet that counters this, by:
- supporting the operation of the network
- developing data storage and anonymous communication, and supporting others who do
- research and development
- building software and releasing it under license
- teaching blockchain, distributed and anonymous communication
The board holds the keys
Hedgehog trusts the network keys of the foundation’s board. A change to the network’s shared settings, from the coin supply to the storage rules the gridnodes follow, takes effect only once two different board members have signed it, so no single person can change the network alone. The Hedgehog documentation explains who may change a spork, how board members co-sign a change and how gridnodes keep network storage alive.
A network for the whole world
The goal is not another service but a shared layer of the Internet itself: storage, compute and communication that anyone can run, nobody can own, and no company, state or single failure can switch off. We believe this is a movement more than a project, one that grows with every person who runs a node, writes code or carries the idea further.
Join us
The foundation is always looking for talent that can further its purpose and statutes: engineers, researchers, educators, lawyers and organizers. To join the board, write to info@unigridfoundation.se and tell us who you are and how you would help.