Liz Sweigart
Liz Sweigart is a co-founding member of And Other Stuff, a freedom-tech collective building open systems that protect human agency, connection, and creativity. She brings a background in consulting psychology, organizational transformation, human-centered design, and online safety, with prior work spanning corporate leadership, participatory design, and human-computer interaction. As a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab, Liz is especially interested in how decentralized technologies can be designed with and for the people who need them most, including activists, organizers, and communities with limited technical backgrounds. At AOS, she helps bridge strategy, research, engineering, facilitation, and storytelling to support practical, inclusive tools for a more open web.
Sessions
And Other Stuff (AOS) is building a freedom tech collective outside the usual startup and nonprofit models: no VC, no equity, no fees, and fully open-sourced operations. This session shares how we built that model across very different ecosystems, and what it takes to create infrastructure that helps activists, journalists, and organizers build for themselves.
This session explores what it looks like to build the open social web for real-world resilience across mesh, mobile, and peer-to-peer infrastructure. Through examples including BitChat, Agora, White Noise, and Divine, it looks at how freedom tech can connect social, network, and device layers to support communication and coordination in low-resource and anti-authoritarian environments.