[global-south] CryptoRave 2018

[intrigeri]

Hi,

newcomer on this list speaking. I'm working with Tails. One of the
top-priorities for Tails in the next 2 years is to reach out to
communities that are under-represented in the Tails contributors
community and in the Tails userbase.

Personally I want to work more *with* these under-represented
communities and less "for" them (i.e. crappy colonialist approach, if
you ask me). I'm focused on Brazil because I have good connections in
activist, PET advocates & trainers there already, which provides solid
foundations I want to build on top of as opposed to starting from
scratch elsewhere.

I think CryptoRave (that I attended last year) is a great place to
work on this topic as it gathers lots of people (1-3k depending on the
year) and they are very diverse: random people who heard they should
pay attention to their privacy/safety online, free software and PET
advocates & trainers, activists, IT students, software developers etc.
⇒ impact is potentially great, and cost/benefit is interesting.
In 2018 CrytoRave will happen on May 4-5.

What I'd like to do there, for ethical reasons I prefer formats where
I'll be mostly listening or interacting in a group, as opposed to me
talking to a large audience (but if it seems a talk is a good way to
approach the problem, I can also do that):

1. Regarding current and potential users, advocates & trainers

   Ask, listen, try my best to understand the needs and give our
   projects useful data to better prioritize our work.
   
   For example, last year I conducted a number of "intercept
   interviews" there with Tails users:
   https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/intercept_interviews/

   This helped us understand better what people use Tails for, why
   they don't use it for other things, what works well and what is
   problematic. I would like to do the same again both for Tails and
   Tor. I'm not a user research expert so I'd welcome help wrt.
   the methodology and phrasing of the questions. I would also love to
   have a team-mate to do this there.

   I would like to better plan this in advance than what I did last
   year, e.g. reach out to my contacts there so we arrive with
   a (non-exhaustive) list of people we know we should interview, and
   work with the organizers of the event to ensure whoever else we
   should interview knows about it and can find us.

2. Regarding current and potential contributors

   I want to understand better what the stumbling blocks are on the
   path to contributing to Tails and Tor. I also want to help
   interested people get started with their first contribution: in my
   experience having someone, right next to you, who you can ask
   questions creates a tremendously better new contributor experience
   than having to look up all the needed info online. I'm not sure
   what's the best format for this would be and I would be happy to
   design it with other people, and to share this work with other Tor
   attendees once we're there.

I acknowledge people who live in Brazil are better placed to know what
the best approach would be so we should discuss this with them.
I would start with asking my contacts there, the Tails pt-br
translation team and the events organizers. But perhaps people on this
list have some insight?

I don't speak Portuguese so I may not be the best person to do this
work there; sadly, we have nobody who's very active at Tails speaks
Portuguese or lives much closer to Brazil (yet!). Interestingly, last
year some Tails users expressed they were happy to meet a Tails
developer in person and happily surprised I would care enough to
bother traveling that far in order to meet them, which alleviates the
cons a little bit. Also, I can easily find good translators to smooth
interviews and session I would facilitate. Still, if we have enough
people better placed than me to do what we want to do there, I'll be
totally in favor of directing our resources to them.

Regarding costs, if booked sufficiently in advance, sending me there
would cost ~800€. Tails could probably pay some of it but it would be
nice to pool resources with Tor and/or find funding for this. I'll be
hosted for free at friends and I can pay for my food & other
expenses there.

What do you think?

Cheers,
-- 
intrigeri