The goal of the project is to support OSS that can replace "free" services that subsist on our data. Interestingly enough the maiden project is tentatively called Tmail (short for torrent mail).
It works somewhat like TOR in that it will depend on volunteers to host nodes that will communicate with existing email providers (outlook, gmail, yahoo, etc) and relay the mail over 80 to RPis preloaded with MDA (mail delivery agent) software.
The goal is be able to expand the service to allow people to sign up for email accounts without running their own software (a la gmail).
It gets way deeper than that, but I'll leave it there. You can follow the project at https://github.com/freedatafound/. I've also bought http://freedatafoundation.org but there's currently nothing there.