Notes from April 21 2016 Vegas team meeting
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 See this posting for context: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2016-April/000223.html Notes from Apr 21 2016 meeting: Big takeaways: 1) Eight people in one hour just doesn't fit. We should think about how to be more efficient, how to triage topics, how to arrange for more time for this team, etc. 2) We all raised the topic of Tor Browser security and the recent angles around it; but we didn't get to this topic. Roger: 1) Should each of us add our lines to this notes page ourselves, so we know what we added and have more of a say in what goes out to the tor-project mailing list? Answer: yes. (But we screwed this one up this time, because I should have said "Ok, that means you all write down what we discussed and what we concluded please" but nobody did. Next time maybe!) 2) Should we have an intermediate stage between this pad and tor-project, so more internal people can help vet notes? Answer: no need for this yet, but let's make the notes review period "until Monday" rather than "overnight", so people actually can review it. 3) When will we pick dates for the Seattle dev mtg? Answer from Shari: "It will be one of the last two weeks of September. We won't finalize the dates until we finalize the venue, and we won't finalize the venue until we have an administrative assistant on board to do so. Jon Selon has accepted our offer, and he starts on Monday. Yay! So hopefully we'll be able to nail down these dates soon. See my notes below for info on the February Tor Dev meeting!" 4) Making a donate@ alias for humans, so donations@ can be for machines? Answer: Shari thinks that would be so incredibly awesome! 5) When do we get our admin assistant? Shari says: Monday!!! :) 6) Inviting Kate back to the Vegas team meetings? Answer: yes, let's do it. 7) I've been talking to Isa about getting a project leader for our circumvention side: making the balance right between academic research, implementation, and operation/deployment. Things from last week that still want attention: 8) tor blog contract details (no progress today either) Shari: 1) Isa and I talked with Pepe, who organizes IFF. He was very concerned to hear from Laura at DRL that we were considering the option of uncoupling Tor Dev from IFF and basically promised us the moon if we'd hold Tor Dev at the end of February in Valencia again next year. Conclusion: "If DRL wants us there, we should make it clear to DRL the cost that it presents to us." 2) Please look at the writing sample from grant writer candidate Cass Brewer and let me know next steps. I'd love to get her hired soon, or figure out someone else if necessary. If anyone else wants to join Kate and Isa interviewing her today, let us know. Conclusion: we are all fine with the hire so long as Kate and Isa think it's a good move. 3) Isa and I met with Laura and Steve from DRL about our SOI. They were really quite frank about what they wanted from us, which is mostly a better job of tying our work to their goals. We should probably do that with all proposals. 4) Glad I don't have any more travel for a while. Planning a trip to San Francisco mid-May. Nick: 1) Not much to report this week. Trying to get my team's work done for EOM 2) Waiting for personnel thing from Shari. 3) Waiting for TB to go out with a tor release in it. It turns out nobody is using the nightlies, so I have no very little user feedback on the most recent 0.2.8 alpha Conclusion: Nick will mail tor-talk and ask people to run them, and report issues, and be aware that they're not on the standard upgrade track. GeKo will open a ticket for "updates" for nightlies (right now they don't do updates). Georg: 1) Switched our nightlies to ESR45. 2) Getting as many things into ESR45 as we can before releasing an alpha next week. 3) Where do we want to have the OSX SDK we need for our OS X builds? Answer: leave it where it currently is and open a ticket in our bug tracker that helps thinking about a different solution. GeKo is doing that. Alison: 1) Community team met yesterday and discussed our user-facing Cloudflare strategy. We agree that multiple approaches will be most successful. Right now we've got three big ideas: mrphs's petition (either officially endorsed by Tor or not, but organized by one of our allied organizations eg EFF), shiro's creative campaign (starting in Berlin, then we hope going elsewhere), and then collecting more unique user stories (using petition platform, twitter, etc, sending to Alison). We will continue to use the hashtag #dontblocktor for all community efforts. 2) Extreme levels of busy have gotten in the way of completing the social contract, but this week Alison will finish her last edits and send them to sysqrb and Lunar, and then it'll go on to the rest of tor-internal for review. 3) Alison and phoul continue to work on the Tor Browser Manual. 4) Still recruiting team members and still need to define scope of the team. CF stuff got in the way this meeting, but hey, people showed up! Isabela: 1) Met with Laura and Steve about our SOI's -- they will send someone to the office in the summer and we will apply their feedback and submit new SOIs in September. 2) Did DRL grant writing training (more or less useful). 3) Worked on OTF full proposal - deadline now is first week of May, but 2/3 of it is done and I will try to finish it asap because I also need to work on DRL Q1 2016 report. 4) Juga finished her work on Trac - she emailed the list about it. Things looks good. 5) DRL implementers meeting was useful for me to understand how they think and their portfolio -- but now I am dead. Karsten: 1) I'm planning to shut down Tor's copy of Globe. Will that make people in this group unhappy for reasons I didn't think of? Conclusion: Let's first create tickets for all Globe features that are missing in Atlas. 2) What's the plan for monthly reports? Should people keep writing them, should teams do that, should we stop writing/requiring monthly reports, ...? Conclusion: A) We no longer pretend to demand monthly reports from individuals. B) We, led by Isabela, continue doing the funder reports for funders. C) We encourage Shari to keep doing her "how to make sure people actually do work" work (since "see if the person mailed tor-reports that month" is a crummy substitute anyway). And D) Nick is going to experiment with doing report-out summaries from the network team meetings, because we do want better answers for how to keep all the teams informed, at the right levels, of what's going on in the other teams. Mike: 1) Finished up the Tor Browser sections of the OTF proposal. I looked over the Tor section, and it may need some more tweaking, along with our need to complete the budget. I am thinking of meeting Isabela next week to help finish that. 2) Still have not heard from Kevin about the blog contract. I am not sure what the holdup is. I will try calling him. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJXHw/BAAoJEC3ESO/4X7XBEVUIAIvLQSQT2getabf71sgbdov1 grGuSOk+F5xYolXa3U38jC4b50tDPiHMYV5h85UpRutsNBXTfDkrlLs0y1Jor2cj pUqH5bpM+1PED4MXVu9rBKvJlZlSz7YT1ZUoC4eoCPZ73Kit31JBoDGXHAyWv6tH /G+J2EOrBW2Lyuc+rNCACeUibJqy7lleuZDX3QfoqQEXOfTVye54TY06/Zrcmjqd ijygXcLBKYXFWwdhjzdYv7trGNIYgxBAOXBLYzBVs8Jyl6PM0tfeQ+Re+O9srwWt HHZWxR13X6H7nIoMXAxOAf96rddTqr7KgS0n28Jb/AdL5yH9bUKmqapFLuMO+Go= =FtUM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 08:50:41AM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:
4) Making a donate@ alias for humans, so donations@ can be for machines? Answer: Shari thinks that would be so incredibly awesome!
Can you clarify? Machines make donations? Donations of machines? Machines receive the email to that address? Thanks, - Ian
On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 09:24:24AM -0400, Ian Goldberg wrote:
On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 08:50:41AM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:
4) Making a donate@ alias for humans, so donations@ can be for machines? Answer: Shari thinks that would be so incredibly awesome!
Can you clarify? Machines make donations? Donations of machines? Machines receive the email to that address?
Currently donations@ gets (what feels like) hundreds of mails a day in the form of automated paypal emails, letting us know about donations, letting us know about other paypal stuff, etc. At the same time, we tell people on the contact page that they can reach us at this address if they want to chat about how to donate things to us. Because of the volume of automated stuff, it has turned out to not be an accurate statement that people can reach us at donations@. So the idea is to make a separate address which is hopefully lower volume and which hopefully people can pay more attention to. (In an ideal world we have a person or people who keep track of all the donation related emails, and send happy responses to all the donors, and there's no need for a separate list. We don't live in that ideal world yet.) Hope that helps explain, --Roger
Roger Dingledine:
On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 09:24:24AM -0400, Ian Goldberg wrote:
On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 08:50:41AM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:
4) Making a donate@ alias for humans, so donations@ can be for machines? Answer: Shari thinks that would be so incredibly awesome!
Can you clarify? Machines make donations? Donations of machines? Machines receive the email to that address?
Currently donations@ gets (what feels like) hundreds of mails a day in the form of automated paypal emails, letting us know about donations, letting us know about other paypal stuff, etc.
At the same time, we tell people on the contact page that they can reach us at this address if they want to chat about how to donate things to us.
Because of the volume of automated stuff, it has turned out to not be an accurate statement that people can reach us at donations@.
So the idea is to make a separate address which is hopefully lower volume and which hopefully people can pay more attention to.
(In an ideal world we have a person or people who keep track of all the donation related emails, and send happy responses to all the donors, and there's no need for a separate list. We don't live in that ideal world yet.)
Hope that helps explain, --Roger
Even if we lived in an ideal world, it's hard to distinguish the one actual personal email from the hundreds of automated requests, which, though machine generated, are not all the same. I'd vote for a separate email address for human beings to contact us. It would be a shame if someone emails us wanting to donate $5,000, or $100,000, and we miss the email for three weeks. Under the current system, that is possible. I know because I was on the email list for the automated emails. It is crazy. My 2 cents, -Katie
_______________________________________________ tor-project mailing list tor-project@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project
On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 03:10:39AM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote:
On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 09:24:24AM -0400, Ian Goldberg wrote:
On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 08:50:41AM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:
4) Making a donate@ alias for humans, so donations@ can be for machines? Answer: Shari thinks that would be so incredibly awesome!
Can you clarify? Machines make donations? Donations of machines? Machines receive the email to that address?
Currently donations@ gets (what feels like) hundreds of mails a day in the form of automated paypal emails, letting us know about donations, letting us know about other paypal stuff, etc.
At the same time, we tell people on the contact page that they can reach us at this address if they want to chat about how to donate things to us.
Because of the volume of automated stuff, it has turned out to not be an accurate statement that people can reach us at donations@.
So the idea is to make a separate address which is hopefully lower volume and which hopefully people can pay more attention to.
(In an ideal world we have a person or people who keep track of all the donation related emails, and send happy responses to all the donors, and there's no need for a separate list. We don't live in that ideal world yet.)
Makes sense; thanks for the clarification! - Ian
Right now the donations alias is used for too many things. For example, whenever someone makes a Paypal donation, Paypal sends a note to donations@torproject.org. At the same time, when someone has a question about a donation, or is having trouble with our donate pages, they also send a note to donations@torproject.org. This results in a ridiculous amount of mail to this address, some important, and some not so much. Sorting helps, but for those of us on using pop, we’re actually downloading all of those machine-generated messages and then sorting and deleting them. A more elegant solution would be for humans asking us things to write to a different address than the one receiving the auto-generated messages. Then those of us only interested in the human-generated messages can be removed from the other alias. Shari On Apr 26, 2016, at 6:24 AM, Ian Goldberg <tor@cypherpunks.ca> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 08:50:41AM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:
4) Making a donate@ alias for humans, so donations@ can be for machines? Answer: Shari thinks that would be so incredibly awesome!
Can you clarify? Machines make donations? Donations of machines? Machines receive the email to that address?
Thanks,
- Ian _______________________________________________ tor-project mailing list tor-project@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project
I think the problem will have different solutions depending on who is answering those emails. If we will have one person who will answer questions from humans, send thank you emails to donors etc. Having emails for different things going to a same address, could not be a problem, if you are filtering the different subject lines to different queues in the ticket system. For instance all paypal donations has the same head line that you could filter out into a different queue. Cheers, Isabela On 04/27/2016 08:05 AM, Shari Steele wrote:
Right now the donations alias is used for too many things. For example, whenever someone makes a Paypal donation, Paypal sends a note to donations@torproject.org. At the same time, when someone has a question about a donation, or is having trouble with our donate pages, they also send a note to donations@torproject.org. This results in a ridiculous amount of mail to this address, some important, and some not so much. Sorting helps, but for those of us on using pop, we’re actually downloading all of those machine-generated messages and then sorting and deleting them. A more elegant solution would be for humans asking us things to write to a different address than the one receiving the auto-generated messages. Then those of us only interested in the human-generated messages can be removed from the other alias. Shari
On Apr 26, 2016, at 6:24 AM, Ian Goldberg <tor@cypherpunks.ca> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 08:50:41AM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:
4) Making a donate@ alias for humans, so donations@ can be for machines? Answer: Shari thinks that would be so incredibly awesome! Can you clarify? Machines make donations? Donations of machines? Machines receive the email to that address?
Thanks,
- Ian _______________________________________________ tor-project mailing list tor-project@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project
_______________________________________________ tor-project mailing list tor-project@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project
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participants (6)
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Ian Goldberg -
Isabela -
Karsten Loesing -
Kate -
Roger Dingledine -
Shari Steele