On Thu, Nov 16, 2023 at 07:29:27PM -0500, Roger Dingledine wrote:
This topic of broadening participation reminds me of another email I wrote recently about revamping the Core Contributor process, which I will save for a future email so I don't make this one too long.
Here is that other mail, transcribed here for transparency:
""" I think it is fair to say that the concept and role of Core Contributor in Tor is in crisis. As Tor has grown in terms of employees and budget, and as we moved more into 'team' silos, and especially as the pandemic shut down in-person meetings and pushed us and the rest of the world into zoom culture, it has been tougher to keep the Core Contributors feeling relevant.
The impacts vary, from projects in Tor getting a different diversity of perspectives than they used to, to not having as close relationships to neighbor projects in our community, to not making space in our in-person dev meetings for as many volunteers as we used to. Not having as many volunteers at the dev meetings has especially disrupted the pipeline of how we used to identify and integrate Core Contributors.
We had sessions on the core contributor concept in the last two in-person dev meetings. You can read the notes here: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/202209MeetingCoreContributors https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/2023-Tor-Meeting-Costa-Rica-W...
They raised some good ideas, such as
* "Cross-team working groups", focused on a theme like "Russia" or "Brave" or something, to pull in people from Tor teams working on the area alongside area experts in our broader community.
* Having Tor employees explicitly allocate a percentage of their paid time to coordinating with and supporting volunteers in our community, so we can get away from "my job is only to do these technical tasks."
I also imagined restructuring how we handle the "funnel" part of identifying new Core Contributors, to add people in a coordinated intentional way with the global picture in mind rather than just growing organically from the edges. But I'm unconfident to make any changes to the process, because I'm not sure that anybody feels this topic is in-scope for their job.
Ultimately we should also remember that we invented the Core Contributor notion in 2017, which (a) is really not that long ago in Tor's history but also (b) I think might be way before the median current employee joined. Before that, it was just a mailing list called tor-internal@ that I added people to when I thought it appropriate. So there is nothing particularly sacred about the way we manage community membership currently, and maybe it's time for another change (or to better acknowledge existing change). """
--Roger