[tor-bugs] #10013 [Website]: Better Reflect Existing Sponsorship Information on the Website

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#10013: Better Reflect Existing Sponsorship Information on the Website
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 Reporter:  cypherpunks                          |          Owner:
     Type:  enhancement                          |         Status:  new
 Priority:  normal                               |      Milestone:
Component:  Website                              |        Version:
 Keywords:  transparency, sponsors, financial,   |  Actual Points:
  disclosure                                     |         Points:
Parent ID:                                       |
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 The Tor Project is pretty strong when it comes to financial transparency,
 but three trivial-to-implement suggestions might make information
 disclosed by the Tor Project on its 'Sponsors' page more useful to users
 and other stakeholders:

 1) Linking directly to the most recent IRS 990 form on the 'Sponsors' page
 ( https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en ) could make details
 easier to access. Users outside the United States, for example, might not
 know that IRS 990 forms contain certain details they might not otherwise
 be interested in.

 2) By listing what might otherwise look like end dates on the 'Sponsors'
 page above, users who don't notice that the information is only current as
 of 2012 might think that all of Tor's sponsors have left it. Making the
 "current as of" date more visible on the page and listing something like
 "2006 - present" instead of "2006 - 2012" might be less confusing. For
 sponsors offering grants, it seems easiest to just list the expected
 duration of current grants, where applicable.

 3) If a user only reads the 'Sponsors' page, they could be looking at
 information up to almost two years out of date (1 year and 10+ months as
 of today) without checking other sources. To offer users more current
 information, adopting a policy of disclosing all large grants (above an
 arbitrary threshold, perhaps $200,000 or 20% of Tor's total operating
 budget for any given year) on the 'Sponsors' page within a month could
 make the information users might care about most (who sponsors the project
 now) more timely and relevant. Relatedly, updating the 'Sponsors' page to
 reflect the specific date (rather than the year) the page was last updated
 would better inform users in terms of how recently sponsorship information
 was updated.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10013>
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