Hello,
The board is releasing our first batch of Tor Project meeting minutes from July 14, 2016, to April 16, 2018 [1]. After our next reunion, to be held on August 20, 2018, we will release minutes as a single item shortly after we meet.
Before the board made the decision to publish them, I had volunteered to write a report about board work and accomplishments. Now that we are releasing our minutes, there is less of a need to write a detailed report, but I’ve decided to highlight some of things we’ve done and what we are up to in the next few months.
As is probably obvious, board minutes are a fairly conventional genre of documentation for providing an official record of decisions taken by the board. They reference our collective discussions and include other standard information such as the start time of meeting, place or method of connecting, and a list of present and absent members. They tend to contain regular items of business, such as a discussion of pending and current grants and the finance reports, both of which relate to one of the core of duties of a board: fiduciary oversight of the organization. But these notes also provide a limited window into other aspects of the organization, as well as its shifting concerns and priorities depending on unforeseen factors and events. Early in this board’s tenure, we, along with TPI (The Tor Project, INC.) officers (Shari, Roger and Nick) dealt with matters of organizational housekeeping: filling board positions, establishing email voting protocols, clarifying and defining roles around the officers, and approving new policy documents or changes in existing policy documents. (These documents are included with the minutes.) With that in place, we moved on to other tasks that are also typical of boards, such as the ED review, which was carried out in the winter of 2017. As the organization stabilized, we were free to take on more time consuming projects, such as board expansion and diversification, which involved a number of meetings outside of the regular board reunions as we vetted and interviewed potential new members. Another fairly large undertaking for the current board was finding a replacement for Shari after she notified us of her plans to retire. While a search committee was constituted and tasked with the bulk of the initial work—compiling names, reaching out to candidates, scheduling meetings, and holding initial interviews—the entire board and TPI officers were also pulled in at various points to rate the long list of applications, hammer out procedures and timing, and interview and discuss the final few candidates.
While the minutes provide a fairly accurate record of board duties, roles, and accomplishments, board members contribute in ways that are not registered or reflected in our minutes. Shari has reached out to individual board members to help build strategic partnerships, as she did with Mozilla, for instance. Other board members have many informal discussions with members of the Tor community that directly loop back into board discussions, while organization officers like Roger reach out to board members to discuss particular grants. We’d also like to remind everyone that they should feel free to contact us at any time on any matter related to the Tor Project (I've included our contact information below).
Now that we’ve wrapped up the ED search, we’ve returned again to expanding the board, and a few of us are in the process of reaching out to a couple of other candidates, one of whom was recommended by a Tor community member (and we happily continue to welcome recommendations like these). Like everyone else, we are also thrilled to work with the incoming ED, Isabela, who will be joining us for our August board meeting. While there will be period of transition as we work with a new ED, we feel the organization has matured and stabilized under Shari’s careful and skilled guiding hand to the point where we can help Isabela fulfill her strategic vision. We were exceedingly impressed by her plan to make Tor more usable and more technically robust and we felt her wide-ranging experience running projects and teams, her intense familiarity with Tor, and her dedication to the fight for privacy and the people of Tor, made her the ideal candidate to shepherd this organization forward into the future.
Don’t hesitate to contact any of us if you have any questions, queries, suggestions, and/or comments.
Gabriella Coleman, on behalf of the entire board.
ps-- I'd like to thank Linus for formatting all the minutes and putting them online.
[1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/company/policies.git/tree
Gabriella Coleman, biella@riseup.net mailto:biella@riseup.net
Megan Price, meganp@hrdag.org mailto:meganp@hrdag.org
Cindy Cohn, cindy@eff.org mailto:cindy@eff.org
Linus Nordberg linus@torproject.org mailto:linus@torproject.org rsa4096/8C4CD511095E982EB0EFBFA21E8BF34923291265
Ramy Raoof, ramyraoof@riseup.net mailto:ramyraoof@riseup.net
Bruce Schneier, schneier@schneier.com mailto:schneier@schneier.com
Matt Blaze, blaze@cis.upenn.edu mailto:blaze@cis.upenn.edu
Julius Mittenzwei, julius@mittenzwei.com mailto:julius@mittenzwei.com