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
Megan Price, meganp@hrdag.org
Cindy Cohn, cindy@eff.org
Linus Nordberg linus@torproject.org
rsa4096/8C4CD511095E982EB0EFBFA21E8BF34923291265
Ramy Raoof, ramyraoof@riseup.net
Bruce Schneier, schneier@schneier.com
Matt Blaze, blaze@cis.upenn.edu
Julius Mittenzwei, julius@mittenzwei.com