[metrics-team] Metrics team priorities

[Karsten Loesing]

Hello everyone,

I'm writing this message, because I feel like the metrics team is trying
to achieve too many things at the moment.

Let me give you some context: A few months ago we received a grant to
write some long-needed documentation on how we're processing data, which
started in October 2017 and runs until September 2018.

At the same time we're trying to implement new features requested by
other Tor folks, including adding sanitized web server logs to
CollecTor, showing metrics timeline events underneath graphs, adding
graphs on IPv6 servers to Tor Metrics, adding new Onionoo features to
make it more useful for keeping the Tor network healthy, and so on.

I also have a couple requests in my inbox where folks need more data or
new features to do their job better. All reasonable requests, but they
pile up here.

Oh, and of course we're doing stuff like fixing bugs and keeping
services running.

However, I believe we're currently understaffed for doing all these
things. We currently only have iwakeh and me as paid developers, plus
we'll be adding irl as paid developer, but not before July 2018.

The part where this becomes most apparent is that we haven't started
working on the grant mentioned above, even though we had planned to do
this in January. It's not too late to fulfill our commitment there, but
at some point it will be too late if we keep doing things like now. This
is bad, and it's the main reason why I'm writing this message.

I'm not sure how exactly to resolve this.

One idea is to drop most new things now and prioritize the things that
we promised in the past. This would be the paid deliverables plus a few
other tasks. Basically, what we wrote in our roadmap a few months ago.
However, I'm a bit worried that people will suffer from not having the
tools that they need, or that they'll build workarounds that will be
difficult to maintain in the long run.

Another idea is to add more people now. Obviously, this needs to be done
with great care, because new people require attention, too. But I could
imagine that we'd find tasks for new people that need doing. Maybe those
people would work on existing tasks that we already committed, and we'd
use the newly available time to work on new tasks that help other Tor folks.

Maybe there are other ideas? I'd like to collect some feedback from you
and then discuss this more at tomorrow's team meeting (Thursday, 14:30
UTC in #tor-meeting).

All the best,
Karsten

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