Hello Tor Community,
I'm happy to announce that the Tor Project Community Policies have a new website! You can visit our Policies website here: https://community.torproject.org/policies. The website hosts the Tor Project Community governance policies, including our Code of Conduct, Social Contract, Relay Operators docs, and other important documents.
The website was generated using Onion MkDocs[1] and was part of our project at Tor Hackweek[2]. We've also updated all links directing to the old repository (gitweb.tpo) to the new website.
If you find any issue or have suggestions for improvements, please feel invited to open a ticket in the Community/Policies repository: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/policies.
A special thanks to Rhatto and Lavamind for their support and assistance with the deployment. I'm very happy to have a more accessible and user friendly page for the Tor Community.
Best regards, Gus
[1] Onion MkDocs: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/onion-mkdocs [2] Tor Hackweek: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/hackweek/-/issues/13
Hi Gus, Good to see all policies are now available in a central location. Some remarks: * The Social Contract deals mainly with tools and such, however it does not include anything specific about the governance of the Tor Community and how the Tor Project will safeguard users/contributers rights during times of "stress". How are policies changed, who will be able to participate etc it is all missing. * The Code of Conduct specifically references Dir-Auth operators, but does not reference the Relay operators, but references "other valued participants". Who are these, and who are these explicitly not? Why are dir-auths listed and relay operators not? * Statement of Values: it references Core Contributors, however does not define them. * Membership does reference core contributers, so these should either be included or SoV should reference the MP. * Membership Policy does list relay operators as Community Members so do they suddenly fall under the Code of Conduct? users are also part of the (wider) Tor Community, so they are also bound by the CoC? * Community Councel, does require "The Community Council needs to represent the breadth of the Tor community to function effectivly", this means gender is part of 'breath', wouldn't it be more logical to ensure the different "sub-communities" (ie dir-auths/relays/network/advocacy etc are represented at the TCC (so a functional 'breath')? * The TCC is also limited to 'contributers', as the CC has a say over the Tor Community it would be more logical to widen the pool of potential CC members? (democratise the Tor Project instead of a handful 'in-crowds' making decisions?) Users are/are-not part of the Community (depending on the document you read) having those onboard could give a fresh perspective on the needed direction of the Tor Project, maybe?Food for thought ...
Cheers, Alex -- IDGARA | Alex de Joode | alex@idgara.nl | +31651108221
On Thu, 16-11-2023 19h 33min, gus gus@torproject.org wrote:
Hello Tor Community,
I'm happy to announce that the Tor Project Community Policies have a new website! You can visit our Policies website here: https://community.torproject.org/policies. The website hosts the Tor Project Community governance policies, including our Code of Conduct, Social Contract, Relay Operators docs, and other important documents.
The website was generated using Onion MkDocs[1] and was part of our project at Tor Hackweek[2]. We've also updated all links directing to the old repository (gitweb.tpo) to the new website.
If you find any issue or have suggestions for improvements, please feel invited to open a ticket in the Community/Policies repository: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/policies.
A special thanks to Rhatto and Lavamind for their support and assistance with the deployment. I'm very happy to have a more accessible and user friendly page for the Tor Community.
Best regards, Gus
[1] Onion MkDocs: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/onion-mkdocs [2] Tor Hackweek: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/hackweek/-/issues/13 -- The Tor Project Community Team Lead
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On Thu, Nov 16, 2023 at 08:51:33PM +0100, Alex de Joode wrote:
- The Social Contract deals mainly with tools and such, however it does not include anything specific about the governance of the Tor Community and how the Tor Project will safeguard users/contributers rights during times of "stress". How are policies changed, who will be able to participate etc it is all missing.
The way that policies are changed is described in https://community.torproject.org/policies/voting/
and who can participate (vote) is described both there and in https://community.torproject.org/policies/membership/
We put together many of these core policy documents in the 2017-2018 timeframe when we were trying to add structure to our community. I don't want to say that we did them perfectly, but I think they are at least self-cohesive and they have helped us get this far.
- The Code of Conduct specifically references Dir-Auth operators, but does not reference the Relay operators, but references "other valued participants". Who are these, and who are these explicitly not? Why are dir-auths listed and relay operators not?
The new language that got added recently seems to be ", that is the entire Tor Community. The Tor Community consists of a diverse group of contributors, including the Tor Board of Directors, Tor Directory Authorities, network operators, trainers, translators, researchers, employees, contractors (regardless of their employment status with The Tor Project, Inc.), and other valued participants. This policy is applicable to all of them."
I believe that 'network operators' was intended to include not just relay operators but bridge operators, people who run Snowflake proxies, etc.
I can't speak authoritatively for what the words mean, but to me they sure seem to be claiming as much ground as they can. That is, anything you are uncertain about, words like 'entire' are trying to make it in-scope.
- Statement of Values: it references Core Contributors, however does not define them.
- Membership does reference core contributers, so these should either be included or SoV should reference the MP.
Right, there is one notion of Core Contributors, and it is described in Membership, and used in other docs.
Part of the challenge there was the order in which we created and agreed on the various docs. At first, folks doing the drafting hoped they could just write it all down and we would agree on it all at once, but it quickly became clear that e.g. without an agreed-upon way to decide whether we have agreed upon something, it is hard to proceed.
Over the years people have worked on collecting minor bugs with the policy documents, with the goal of doing a "version 2" of them all to fix things like consistency. But, those people seem to always get distracted, and then not pass their collection to the next person, so... I don't know of anybody who still has a set of proposed updates at this point.
- Membership Policy does list relay operators as Community Members so do they suddenly fall under the Code of Conduct? users are also part of the (wider) Tor Community, so they are also bound by the CoC?
I think you're right that this line is not precise in terms of how broad we can really make its scope. But the CoC uses the word "contributors" which I think is a good word to start from here. To me it is hard to imagine a relay operator who thinks of themselves as not contributing to Tor or the Tor Project or the Tor Community.
I think users who are using Tor with intent or awareness of the fact that their use contributes to better safety for other users... you could call them contributors? But I could also see a person who uses an app that has Tor embedded in it wondering how anybody could consider them in-scope.
If (or rather, when) edge cases like this turn out to actually matter in practice, and we can't sort out which way it ought to be, this is what the Community Council is for. But in my opinion it would be smart to look for ways to not let it get to that point, that is, try to use common sense before needing to escalate to using The Process.
- Community Councel, does require "The Community Council needs to represent the breadth of the Tor community to function effectivly", this means gender is part of 'breath', wouldn't it be more logical to ensure the different "sub-communities" (ie dir-auths/relays/network/advocacy etc are represented at the TCC (so a functional 'breath')?
Fortunately, the process of creating the Community Council imagined and documented exactly this question. Here are the two paragraphs:
"""The Community Council needs to represent the breadth of the Tor community to function effectively. As such, the Community Council must include at least one female-identified person. If we lack a female-identified person before the councilmembers are voted on, the vote can be delayed up to one month and another call for volunteers will be sent out.
We recognize the need for other kinds of voices that were not well represented in our community at the time these guidelines were ratified -- namely, a diverse set of racial, geographic, linguistic, and technical backgrounds. Since we currently lack enough current contributors to make representation of those identities a requirement for this council, we will acknowledge here the priority of getting better representation in our community as a whole."""
So, yes, and we started with one because we didn't think it was practical to start with all.
- The TCC is also limited to 'contributers', as the CC has a say over the Tor Community it would be more logical to widen the pool of potential CC members? (democratise the Tor Project instead of a handful 'in-crowds' making decisions?) Users are/are-not part of the Community (depending on the document you read) having those onboard could give a fresh perspective on the needed direction of the Tor Project, maybe?Food for thought ...
Yes, I think it would be great to look for ways to broaden the opportunities for participation. For the Community Council in particular, we want people not only that we trust to make good choices and to understand our community, but also that we trust to simply still be around and make time for Tor when the need arises. So I think there are some real practical barriers for broadening participation too quickly there, and it would be smarter to start somewhere else.
This topic of broadening participation reminds me of another email I wrote recently about revamping the Core Contributor process, which I will save for a future email so I don't make this one too long.
--Roger
On Thu, Nov 16, 2023 at 07:29:27PM -0500, Roger Dingledine wrote:
This topic of broadening participation reminds me of another email I wrote recently about revamping the Core Contributor process, which I will save for a future email so I don't make this one too long.
Here is that other mail, transcribed here for transparency:
""" I think it is fair to say that the concept and role of Core Contributor in Tor is in crisis. As Tor has grown in terms of employees and budget, and as we moved more into 'team' silos, and especially as the pandemic shut down in-person meetings and pushed us and the rest of the world into zoom culture, it has been tougher to keep the Core Contributors feeling relevant.
The impacts vary, from projects in Tor getting a different diversity of perspectives than they used to, to not having as close relationships to neighbor projects in our community, to not making space in our in-person dev meetings for as many volunteers as we used to. Not having as many volunteers at the dev meetings has especially disrupted the pipeline of how we used to identify and integrate Core Contributors.
We had sessions on the core contributor concept in the last two in-person dev meetings. You can read the notes here: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/202209MeetingCoreContributors https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/2023-Tor-Meeting-Costa-Rica-W...
They raised some good ideas, such as
* "Cross-team working groups", focused on a theme like "Russia" or "Brave" or something, to pull in people from Tor teams working on the area alongside area experts in our broader community.
* Having Tor employees explicitly allocate a percentage of their paid time to coordinating with and supporting volunteers in our community, so we can get away from "my job is only to do these technical tasks."
I also imagined restructuring how we handle the "funnel" part of identifying new Core Contributors, to add people in a coordinated intentional way with the global picture in mind rather than just growing organically from the edges. But I'm unconfident to make any changes to the process, because I'm not sure that anybody feels this topic is in-scope for their job.
Ultimately we should also remember that we invented the Core Contributor notion in 2017, which (a) is really not that long ago in Tor's history but also (b) I think might be way before the median current employee joined. Before that, it was just a mailing list called tor-internal@ that I added people to when I thought it appropriate. So there is nothing particularly sacred about the way we manage community membership currently, and maybe it's time for another change (or to better acknowledge existing change). """
--Roger
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