Freedom! Sweet GSoC-less freedom! Ok, lets ruin it.
Between newhires and new volunteers Tor is growing quite a bit right now and a common complaint I've heard for years is that our community makes it maddeningly hard to figure out who's who. Yes, for many of us this is intentional but for others it's not...
"Who's that arma guy I was talking with on irc? He seemed nice. Ok, thanks. Now which of these people is Roger? Great. And, what does he do?". Multiply that by ninety dev meeting attendees and it's no wonder we drive our lovely hair-pulling newcomers to early baldness.
For much of our community this anonymity is intentional and we definitely don't want to muck with that, but I suspect some opt-in information from those of us ok with it could make our community a lot easier to join. As such I'd like to run the following questionnaire among our tor-internal@ membership...
* Would you like to be listed on the 'core people' webpage [1]? If so...
* What name or alias would you like to be called? * Provide a description for the page of what you do. * Would it be ok to list your IRC nick? If so, what is it? * Would it be ok to list your OpenPGP key? If so what is your public key? * Is there a photo or image you'd like to have displayed?
Many folks will say 'heck no' to much of this and that's perfectly fine. The last question is a bit of an experiment where I'm curious if we can pattern ourselves after the EFF's page [2]. Maybe this won't pan out but here's my thoughts...
* Newcomers first come to know us by cryptic irc nicks that look akin to truncated sha256 digests. Pictures may make our community feel friendlier and more approachable. Note this *doesn't* need to see a photo. For example see Mark Burdett and Ben Burke on the EFF page.
* Maybe a page of smiling faces and cartoon turtles will be helpful to Shari for her upcoming fund raiser?
Maybe this'll work, maybe it won't. My hope is that folks will have fun coming up with a picture to represent them, but maybe too few people will to make it work. Who knows - worth asking. ;)
Thoughts? This dovetails nicely with my role maintaining tor-internal@ so I'd be happy to keep it up to date as we continue to grow our community.
Cheers! -Damian
[1] https://www.torproject.org/about/corepeople.html.en [2] https://www.eff.org/about/staff