[community] Tor Community Vision Brainstorm

[Alison Macrina]

Thank you for this follow up Pili! Looking forward to continuing the
discussion at our next meeting on 2/25.

Alison Macrina
Director
Library Freedom Project

Pili Guerra:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Sorry this is a bit late, but I just wanted to follow up on the Vision exercise that we ran on Monday with a quick recap. 
> 
> First of all we went through the reason we need a Community team at Tor. This is some of what we came up with: 
> 
> - To present a human face to our technology so that non-technical people and communities feel welcome and empowered to use Tor. 
> - To maintain a healthy community of volunteers and relay operators to support users in accomplishing their goals of preserving their privacy and anonymity online, not to acquire more users in order to further our own existence.
> - To encourage people to join our community and do their own outreach to help us normalise the use of Tor and achieve wider acceptance. This is a positive feedback loop which in turn helps the whole community of Tor users obtain crowd anonymity. 
> - To act as a bridge between the UX team and Technical teams to reach out to end users and let them know that we exist as well as ensuring that we are meeting their needs as well and offering the right resources to them. 
> 
> Next we shared some challenges that we have, the idea behind this being that if we are aware of our challenges, they can inform what we want to overcome and where we want to be in future.
> 
> - We feel that there is a lack of funding for the community team to hire key staff such as a dedicated support person, volunteer coordinator and tech writer as well as attending a more diverse set of conferences to widen our community and in particular our number of relay operators.
> - We also feel that we struggle to keep volunteer engagement and long term retention and that we could benefit from the relay advocate role model for volunteers. 	
> - We would like to have more non-technical people embrace Tor in the same way that they embraced the internet and to engage young people but understand that this can be challenging to approach from educational institutions as this can help them evade firewalls and web filters set up in these institutions. 
> - We would like more human rights defender organisations in the global south to understand the difference between a VPN and Tor and embrace the protections that Tor can bring, both to their work and lives, instead of being wary and scared of it.
> 
> I have paraphrased slightly and combined what was shared, so feel free to correct any details and help me keep refining these points. 
> 
> You can find the full meeting log here: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-02-11-15.59.log.html <http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-02-11-15.59.log.html>
> 
> Feel free to continue the discussion here and come up with any others that we can add to this list! We’ll have another follow up session during the next Community Team meeting (2/25) to finish off this exercise. 
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Pili
> —
> Project Manager: Tor Browser, UX and Community teams
> pili at torproject dot org 
> gpg 3E7F A89E 2459 B6CC A62F 56B8 C6CB 772E F096 9C45
> 
> On Tuesday, Feb 05, 2019 at 5:49 PM, Pili Guerra <pili at torproject.org <mailto:pili at torproject.org>> wrote:
> Hi Team,
> 
> Let’s do a brainstorm next week about where we see the Tor Community and the Tor Community Team going and where we want to be in the near future. This will help us both to prioritise our work and decide on the best funding opportunities for us. 
> 
> I propose that we do this during next week’s Community Team meeting (Monday 11th February @ 16:00 UTC) after everyone is done with their updates. I hope you will all be able to attend.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Pili
> —
> Project Manager: Tor Browser, UX and Community teams
> pili at torproject dot org 
> gpg 3E7F A89E 2459 B6CC A62F 56B8 C6CB 772E F096 9C45
> 
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