On 7/11/12 12:20 PM, Karsten Loesing wrote:
The meeting will happen
July 18, 15:00--17:00 UTC in #tor-dev.
Hi everyone,
here's a summary from talking about sponsor L deliverables in #tor-dev yesterday.
To quickly recap what what the meeting was about: Sponsor L is very likely to happen, but the contract is not yet signed. The contract is supposed to run from October 2012 to August 2013 and would have quarterly milestones. The purpose of the IRC meeting was to get some developer feedback on the deliverables before negotiating and signing the contract. The sponsor L wiki page is here:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorL
Note that I'd like to add the (possibly revised) paragraphs below to the wiki page, so that they don't get lost in everybody's inboxes. Please somebody let me know if that's a dumb idea.
The phrasing of deliverable 1, which explicitly mentions "DNS" and "HTTP", is problematic. George thinks that DNS and HTTP are hard transports to write properly. George is okay with doing a stupid attempt at an HTTP transport, but he's not prepared to promise a "good" HTTP/DNS transport. We should try to take out the words "DNS" and "HTTP" from the deliverable text. If it's too late to do that, we should make sure that we can replace them with better transports, maybe after writing down why we think the transports we picked are better. If the focus of this deliverable isn't just on building and deploying transports, George would prefer to take care of the pluggable transport ecosystem for future deployment: develop and deploy pyptlib and a Python transport or two; develop (and potentially deploy) obfs3; keep an eye out (and help) on academic research; help Zack with Stegotorus, especially if he is interested in porting it to Python. We didn't talk about milestones, because the question of deliverable phrasing or internal interpretation needs to be answered first.
George and Nick say that, in order to complete deliverable 2, we'll have to finish #5040 which depends on #4773 (which overlaps with deliverable 3). Nick thinks we can promise "progress towards" these two tickets for December, and aim to implement them in December, with a possibility of slipping to a March deliverable. Then we'll have some time for obfsproxy bridges to report stats, so that Karsten can make graphs for June or August at the latest.
The remaining part of deliverable 3, minus #4773 which is part of deliverable 2, is to implement the safe-cookie authentication mechanism. The same milestones apply here as to deliverable 2, so "progress towards" in December and "done" in March.
Deliverable 4 will already be done before the sponsor L contract would start. It's promised for sponsor G for September 2012. Aaron says that BridgeDB is ready, minus any tweaks we want to make, and a Tor 0.2.4 build that people can run. Aaron would like to get some public obfsproxy bridges running Tor 0.2.4 listed in bridges.tpo before end of September 2012. We'll probably have to promise something else for deliverable 4.
Deliverable 5 is totally doable, says Runa. This deliverable involves a few substeps which we might derive milestones from: rewriting parts of the website is something we can do ourselves; planning some kind of campaign around the videos to be created and not just putting them out there is something we can do, too; writing screenplays for videos is something we'll have to do together with a partner; creating videos is something we'll have to find a partner for; starting the campaign is something we can do.
Deliverable 6 is doable. Runa thinks she could either be the community manager by extending her tasks, or we could hire a new person. She also has an idea who to hire for English, Farsi, and Arabic; there was a brief discussion between Runa and Nick about making an open call for these hires vs. only asking people we know. Runa thinks that the trick for paid support is to find a way to let anonymous users pay for support and still make sure they get a reply in time according to the service level agreement we have to create. Runa is wondering why we want funding for languages no one has emailed us in (Spanish and French); though nobody has emailed us in Arabic, either.
Deliverable 7 is doable. Runa is somewhat unhappy that funding doesn't include Arabic. She says a large number of our users speak either Farsi or Arabic, so not having funding for Arabic translations (and thus relying on volunteers) seems silly; if we have funding for Arabic support, we should also include Arabic translations. Runa has an idea of who to hire for Farsi and Arabic translation, no idea about Vietnamese and Chinese (but can't be too hard to find someone).
We didn't talk about deliverable 8 at the meeting. Maybe Mike can reply here and give some quick feedback on this deliverable with respect to phrasing/interpreting the deliverable text and possible tasks to promise for the four milestones?
Deliverable 9 substantially overlaps with Sebastian working on Thandy in Q3. Sebastian is unclear whether his work will be funded by sponsor L money, and if not, what work remains to be funded by sponsor L. Sebastian's plan for Q3 is that Thandy bundles should exist and work at the end of Q3, which is probably the hardest part of deliverable 9. Deliverable 9 further requires coordination between Vidalia and Tor with respect to updating config options. Sebastian suggests to complete deliverable 9 by March 2013. December 2012 would give us just three months of testing which may not be sufficient to make Thandy the new default distribution mechanism, but we also shouldn't push it back further than March 2013. Aaron is also interested in working on Thandy and will talk to Sebastian about it.
We didn't talk about deliverable 10 at the meeting. Maybe Erinn or Jake can reply here and give some quick feedback on this deliverable with respect to phrasing/interpreting the deliverable text and possible tasks to promise for the four milestones?
Thanks to everyone at the meeting for taking the time. Hopefully this feedback will help negotiating the final contract.
Best, Karsten