Vegas Team Meeting Notes OCTOBER 17 2019
++ OLD BUSINESS
+ From Oct 3: "What is our policy on people printing Tor swag for themselves" -> Isa will write a policy w/ Jon
+ From Oct 11: Do we need more git admins? -> Isa will mail "the list" to get us started on asking tor-internal for more git admins.
++ NEW BUSINESS
+ Georg: - Coordinating work for Tor Browser 9 release; Pili picking up this task.
+ Antoine: - What's the next step for the blog? (#32090) — step 1: manually reduce the service level, which will degrade performance, since we'd have less resources allocated to the site, but it should still work fine so long as we don't have any major traffic spikes — step 2: start the plan/implementation of our layer in the front — step 3: we agreed to pick up the conversation about a long term solution for the Blog in January
+ Gus - Drupal freelancer wants more access to our drupal installation. Gus is busy the next while with S9, Outreachy and support, so removing hisself from this task and giving back to TPA; anarcat will followup along with hosting solutions for the blog.
+ Gaba: - Anybody interested in mentoring/guiding/coaching a cybersecurity policy student from June 2020 to November 2020? Perhaps Steph; otherwise, maybe next year.
++ GENERAL NOTES
Georg: 1. Final touches for Tor Browser 9 and prep for first alpha of 9.5 cycle 2. Work on the OTF proposal (thanks to everyone involved getting this proposal written up in such a short timeframe! *crossing fingers*) 3. Spent some time figuring out what we could/should do for the remainder of 2019 in Tor Browser land
Steph: 1. Lots of back and forth with Outreachy applicants 2. community portal review 3. inquiries and podcast coordination 4. EOY campaign prep
Antoine: 1. massive (~20%) trac ticket cleanup in the "trac" component 2. shutdown jabber service (#31700) 3. decomissioned older bacula director server and replaced with new one, I now know how to restore everything from backups (hopefully) (#31786) 4. sudo / LDAP password change (#6367) 5. synced up with Fastly 6. attended blog meeting to figure out next steps (probably varnish?) slightly confused as to where to go next (#32090) 7. usual daily grind (upgrades, reboots, email aliases, reading/responding to emails, etc)
Sarah: 1. Got set up for Brave AdGrants with the Giving Block. We'll have around $10K worth of free ads per month. 2. EOY campaign prep 3. Helped with OTF proposal 4. Connected with Human Rights Foundation and looking into different ways to collaborate 5. Partnering with organizers of Bitcoin2020 conference in various ways
Gaba 1. Updated several roadmaps 2. Keep up to date with Trac 3. Gitlab migration meeting and followup 4. MOSS meeting for metrics proposal 5. Prepared mozfest session for next week (Saturday) in London with Pili 6. Next week: mozfest & redecentralize conferences
Alex: 1. Gitlab meeting: Moved to discussing Wiki transition too and set some deadlines for the upcoming 2.5 months of work on this. 2. Booked flights to Zurich and started writing the new talk outline. 3. Made some progress on the Shadow hire together with Roger. 4. 042 work continued.
Philipp 1. Formalised process for supporting NGOs with private bridges: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam/N... 2. Helped produce quarterly RACE report (snowflake and obfs4 progress from our side) 3. Preparations for OTF summit 4. More BridgeDB progress (deployed language switcher, started thinking about PT bridge test service) 5. Snowflake progress (automation, "open UDP sockets" bug, website localisation) 6. Wrapped up prototype of obfs4 flow obfuscator
Pili 1. OTF Browser Proposal 2. Responding to Outreachy candidates 3. S27 Meeting 4. Finishing off last outstanding bits on Community portal 5. Mozfest prep 6. Next week I'll be afk intermittently for Mozfest and related events.
Nick 1. More network team stuff: 042 seems to be getting more stable and 043 is open. 2. We've changed our merge policy again: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/MergePol...
Antonela 1. EOY campaign was delivered 2. TB9 release 3. I've been invited to join OKThanks to run a session about user-centered design in Taipei. We are meeting next week to coordinate it. 4. prepared material for isa and founders 5. progress on https://community.torproject.org/user-research/ 6. the new OnionShare allows people to create .onion sites so easy; hiro and i joined micah to push this feature and micah's post was #1 in HN this week 7. meeting Adam and Babatunde (OTF Fellow) to check progress 8. SimplySecure + Metrics portal OTF SOW was approved. [gaba: I will talk with Georgia at mozfest next week to confirm timeline]
Karsten: 1. Conducted an analysis of OONI Vanilla Tor bootstrap time, with the goal to add this data and a graph to Tor Metrics: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/32126#comment:1
isabela 1. Met w/ Amber (MDF's ED), following up on my report regarding the training/coach we received. 2. Met w/ folks from Bitcoin2020 conference in SF - they want to promote Tor in their conference again, putting our logo on the sponsors stuff, giving us a booth to showcase our product and other stuff. 3. Met w/ Mozilla foundation program managers 4. Working on a proposal for Corporation Membership program for Tor. Similar to what Linux Foundation does (and Let's Encrypt since they are under one of Linux Foundations non-profits) https://www.abetterinternet.org/sponsor/ https://letsencrypt.org/become-a-sponsor/ 5. Following up w/ the blog discussion, OTF full proposal submission, YE campaign, media requests, personnel stuff, and upcoming meetings w/ major donors. 6. Starting pre-vacation panic mode - will share the plan for while I am gone pretty soon
Roger: 1. We continued the process of bumping out obsolete relays. It has been relatively uneventful, yay. 2. The team to advertise the Shadow simulation developer is making progress: expect a job posting next week ish. 3. OTF has asked us to a "state of censorship circumvention" session at the summit. I'll be starting that thread soon with phw/asn/antonela/arturo/maria. 4. I'm doing a keynote at a CDT "Future of Speech Online" event in DC on Nov 15. [I am registered to attend. - Sarah] 5. git admins question from last week: Nick has said he's not a git admin; hiro said she'd resolve the tickets but didn't; irl said he is a git admin but then no movement. 6. Pili: Are we doing ok with our gsod person? 7. Steph/Isa: Did we send the libreplanet rms mail? 8. No news on Shmoocon booth questions. Getting to be the point where no response is the response. 9. Tufts policy intern question: do we want one? Probably "yes in theory, but in practice it won't fit"? 10. Fastly speaking gig, should pick a speaker 11. Sue: NSF Georgetown contract status?
Gus: 1. Helping Outreachy applicants with their tasks and (still) onboarding new applicants. 2. Collecting Partnership agreements from our training partners. 3. Working on Tor Browser 9 documentation updates for next week. 4. Answering RT/Frontdesk. 5. Drupal freelancer wanted more access to our drupal installation. I don't know what's our policy here and next weeks I'll be busy with S9, Outreachy and support, so I'm removing myself from this task and giving back to TPA. 6. S30 sync with Antonela and Gaba last week about Community tasks
Erin: 1. Making progress on Shadow Dev process 2. General HR/Personnel Stuff
Mike: 1. Finished up Firefox ESR network and feature review 2. Getting back to network team responsibilities
Matt: 1. More team-lead transition and team health 2. Tor Browser releases and getting closer to Tor Browser 9.0 3. Helped with OTF proposal 4. Started laying the groundwork for running Tor Browser long-term measurements (no progress made yet, though)