Fundación Vía Libre celebrated its 25th anniversary on 28 November. The occasion was a great opportunity to reconnect with our long-standing allies and friends, with whom we share views, perspectives and an interest in technology and its impact on people’s lives. With two celebrations, one in our hometown of Córdoba and another in Buenos Aires, we were able to take stock of 25 years of work dedicated to defending fundamental rights in the digital environment.
The last few years have shown that this mission we set ourselves 25 years ago is more important and relevant than ever. We hope to be up to the challenges we face on a daily basis, especially in the current context in Argentina, where the scientific system is being virtually dismantled. Increasingly, we rely on the work of our universities and public research centres to make a difference in the message and actions we carry out.
We close this year of important celebrations with some achievements that fill us with pride. Our projects in the area of AI ethics have gained global visibility, with notable experiences in various fields. Our work and academic output was selected by a very demanding jury for presentation at EMNLP2025, the world’s most important natural language processing conference, which this time was held in China. Our academic work is having a major impact internationally.
At the same time, the Mozilla Foundation selected us for its first cohort of project incubators to support our mission beyond the progress we had already made. We crowned that achievement with the public vote for the most impactful project at the Mozilla Festival in Barcelona.
We continue to build networks with projects in the feminist AI community, now from a position of supporting new projects that approach technology from a perspective of inclusion and human rights.
But AI is not the only focus of our agenda. Throughout the year, we devoted considerable effort to maintaining our participation in WIPO, attending both meetings of the Copyright and Related Rights Committee held during the year. What is more, for the first time, Fundación Vía Libre organised a side event at WIPO, which was a resounding success in terms of participation and impact.
We ended the year amid very serious news about data leaks affecting all Argentinians. Data that should be protected by the State is in the hands of private companies with limited protection capabilities. Tax, social security and vehicle ownership databases are freely available on the Internet as we write these words.
Once again, privacy, information security, and data protection issues are back at the top of the agenda. Our public policy team did outstanding work participating in events, building capacity, conducting research, and raising awareness about the urgent need to properly protect personal data in Argentina. In addition, our work with the Citizen Initiative for Intelligence System Control (ICCSI) sought to strengthen a roadmap to reverse the setbacks of recent months in this area. Obscurantism, concentration of power, secrecy around spending, and the purchase of surveillance technologies are and will continue to be priority issues in our work.
Information security is one of the central issues on our agenda. We are currently preparing a work programme on security in machine learning, a development that aims to promote good practices in the adoption of AI systems at various levels.
We would like to express our gratitude for the enormous satisfaction of being recognised with the first lifetime achievement award presented by Ekoparty as part of its event celebrating 25 years of the most important security conference in the region. Thank you, Ekoparty, for this tremendous recognition that fills us with pride.
By 2026, we will be making a significant return to our historical roots in the Free Software community: we are part of the organisation of a new Debian conference in Argentina.
It is essential to mention once again that none of what we do would be possible without a community of constant support and encouragement, friends of the Foundation who collaborate and orchestrate actions, partnerships with public universities, especially our second home, the Faculty of Astronomy, Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science at the National University of Córdoba, without whose researchers much of our work would not be possible. We are also grateful to the ecosystem of Latin American civil society organisations with whom we work side by side on common agendas.
The Vía Libre team has grown, as evidenced by the wonderful record of events and activities featured in this yearbook. To that great team, thank you very much!
Finally, we have received support from donors who make our work possible: the Ford Foundation, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, the Luminate Foundation, IDRC through Derechos Digitales and the fAIr Network, American University, and New Venture Fund through the Spyware Accountability Initiative. To all of them, thank you very much for trusting in our work.
Thanks to a great team, we have many plans for the next two years. We plan to expand our team and capabilities in the area of policy and governance, expand our communications team in cooperation with the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, and scale up the work carried out within the framework of the AI programme with agreements with other universities and research centres in Argentina and the region. We know that the challenges are immense and that Vía Libre is expected to do rigorous and sustained work. We end 2025 with enormous satisfaction and look forward to a 2026 full of new challenges, learning, and positive impact on the Human Rights and Technologies agenda we are building.
To all of you who accompany us, thank you very much!
Beatriz Busaniche