Hello!
We had been talking about potential improvements to our proposal process back at our meeting in Stockholm. We should not drop that topic (even though it looks like we did :) ) and I thought it would be smart to have a further discussion per email.
To recap: Tor Browser proposals are a way to think about large/impactful browser features in a more formal way, including all stakeholders. That is, by describing those new features, what motivates them, the pros/cons, potential security/privacy issues etc. The idea is to both have a proposal to better reason about complex improvements and to document what we actually did. The proposal process started in September 2018[1] borrowing heavily from the Tor proposal process, although adapting it to Tor Browser needs.
Re-reading my notes from our retrospective session it seems folks would like to see that we think differently about proposals and their lifetime and suggested specifically that Tails' blueprint system could help here.
I remember not really understanding the different ways between how we think about proposals now vs. how we should. So maybe we should try to spell those perceived differences out to get a better understanding about what is lacking (it might be helpful to use actual proposals for illustration).
An additional way to move the discussion forward might be to get to a common understanding about how the Tails' blueprint system works and how it could be adapted to our needs.
Georg
[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tbb-dev/2018-September/000914.html
Hi,
(I was not in Stockholm.)
Georg Koppen (2020-01-08):
An additional way to move the discussion forward might be to get to a common understanding about how the Tails' blueprint system works and how it could be adapted to our needs.
I would not say our blueprints are a "system" or anything new that you folks haven't yet.
Our blueprints are a set of wiki pages, possibly with images and attachments, that Tails contributors use in whatever they see fit. There's no formal process attached to it. Some of our teams have used it as a place where they could collaboratively & incrementally build a design (be it code, UX, anything) and share notes.
One example: https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/veracrypt/
(If time allows and if the Tails community agrees, once Tails has migrated to GitLab, I'd like to migrate our blueprints to a GitLab wiki, which should work essentially the same and provide better UX to contributors.)
Cheers!
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Georg Koppen -
intrigeri