[tor-project] Notes from Vegas team meetings September 12 and 19

Erin Wyatt ewyatt at torproject.org
Tue Sep 24 05:11:24 UTC 2019


SEPTEMBER 12 2019
Items Discussed

+ Gus:
- Update torproject.org/about/people page
	Discussion generally centered around who is maintaining people page and what is/should be our procedure for removing people from it (and tor-internal); future plan is for several people to share the access and responsibility for keeping the people page updated.

+ anarcat:
- need help with services inventory cleanup, https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31261 in particular i wonder what to do with https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/operations/ProductsandAssignments and https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/operations/Infrastructure/Hosts seems like a dupe of a survey i did recently - how do we organize this?
	Discussion: these pages are essentially obsolete so closed ticket; future hope is to have a broad map of the tor ecosystem, what projects and who is responsible for each, but now there is no one to maintain that and keep it from becoming outdated/obsolete.

- email update: we're go with giving people LDAP accesses, but it means we need support from Vegas (or HR?) for training people to use it https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30608
	Discussion: We will need some training and documentation on how to use it and a set of supported configurations; we are retiring jabber.

+ gaba:
-  We checked with Gitlab to see if we could get a license for the ultimate tier (https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed)and we could get it for free because we are an open source project. thoughts? Features comparison: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-comparison/  [no decision being made. conversation will continue next week]
	Discussion: generally centered around the considerations of using the paid/proprietary version vs. free/open

Roger:
- I need help sorting out future Tor talk invites: Mongolia, Austria, Austria, Rome, Phoenix, and an onion services advocacy phone call. [Discussion: more generally, we need to figure out if our plan to grow more Tor speakers is working as originally intended. The original idea was to get a bunch of Tor people more experience at smaller speaking gigs, so they can work their way up to the 5k+ audiences rather than just try to replace Roger directly. But I think we aren't thinking broadly enough, or people aren't prioritizing this sort of growth, or in any case we're not effectively using our talk invites.
	Discussion: Alison made a list previously, Gaba will take it over and update it;

--------------->8

General Notes:

Gus
1. DocsHackathon was awesome! There are some work to do: send email to participants, scoring PRs, merge PRs from last days, and, of course, the onion awards.
2. Writing blog post about our security training program with human rights defenders; to be published very soon.
3. This Friday going to talk with Bitcoin Magazine podcast folks
4. Sponsor9 phase 3 status: launched program with partners from visited countries in phase 1 and 2. Receiving confirmations this week.
5. Working on DRL funding with Tails and Guardian Project
6. Update torproject.org/about/people

Sarah
1. Major donor - Champions of Privacy - page about to launch and first round of invitations to be sent.
2. EOY planning.
3. Planning visits for Isa.
4. Organizing donor party in Boston in October.
5. Working on securing additional matching funds for campaign.

Steph
1. EOY planning
2. Blog posts: relay upgrade, bug smash wrap up, climate
3. Talking with artist to possibly make a comic book about Tor
4. #RunTorBridges campaign
5. Got office space at NYU!
6. Coordinating a podcast
7. Submitted a project for Outreachy https://www.outreachy.org/communities/cfp/tor-project/. Mentorship round begins Oct 1
8. Joined the banfacialrecognition.com campaign

Anarcat
1. need help with services inventory cleanup, https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31261 in particular i wonder what to do with https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/operations/ProductsandAssignments and https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/operations/Infrastructure/Hosts seems like a dupe of a survey i did recently - how do we organize this?
2. email update: we're go with giving people LDAP accesses, but it means we need support from Vegas (or HR?) for training people to use it https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30608
3. we should discuss SVN again eventually, but i'll bring it up next time
4. got my plate full again after vacation, lot's of non-visible work, but trying to respond to quick tickets in a timely manner as well
5. first phase of Puppet cleanup over, very happy about that 6-months project finally giving results
6. made a nice little dashboard to provide metrics alongside our monthly meeting minutes see https://help.torproject.org/tsa/meeting/2019-09-09/#index9h1 for a preview
7. nextcloud will be hosted and managed by riseup for now, in a separate instance

Nick
1. I've taken on some extra stuff for folks, so please let me know if I am dropping anything.
2. Tor 0.4.2.x will enter feature-freeze on Sep 15.
3. Hoping to put out  0.4.2.1-alpha next week, and maybe also a new 0.4.1.x.
4. Alexander Færøy is now team lead for organizing network team stuff: I'm still doing design lead, technical lead, and release management stuff.
5. Worked somewhat on summarizing gitlab proposal; found some missing points in doing so; gaba is revising proposal.

Gaba
1.	nextcloud next steps. checking with riseup on having a nextcloud instance with them.
2.	migrating from trac. discussing with people and will include feedback into proposal. We checked with Gitlab to see if we could get a license for the ultimate tier (https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed) and we could get it for free because we are an open source project. thoughts? [discussion will happen again next thursday]
3.	sponsor 31 report and next 3 months
4.	sponsor V preparing report for roger to complete
5.	scalability funding proposal moving ahead

Roger:
1) I have finished my travel burst -- Tor dev, PETS, Defcon, FOCI, Usenix Security, Leuven, Underground Economy. So if you need something from me, this week is a good time.
2) I need help sorting out future Tor talk invites: Mongolia, Austria, Austria, Rome, Phoenix, and an onion services advocacy phone call. [Discussion: more generally, we need to figure out if our plan to grow more Tor speakers is working as originally intended. The original idea was to get a bunch of Tor people more experience at smaller speaking gigs, so they can work their way up to the 5k+ audiences rather than just try to replace Roger directly. But I think we aren't thinking broadly enough, or people aren't prioritizing this sort of growth, or in any case we're not effectively using our talk invites. The plan is that Gaba is going to get the original list of speaking volunteers from Alison, and we're going to revamp our approach to trying to match speakers to speaking invites.]

Georg:
 1) First alpha based on Firefox ESR 68 is out and nothing exploded
 2) Focus on getting Tor Browser 9 into shape and everything compatible with the upcoming macOS 10.15

Antonela
1.	OONI Explorer v2 will release this week, helping on what is needed
2.	working with Narirral on user research material for communities
3.	user research section content for community.tpo
4.	meeting with Fundraising about DRL proposal, EOY Campaign, next funding for Onion Services
5.	met Justin Cappos, put him in contact with anarcat and phw - NYU office is cool!
6.	running a design review over the new Orbot
7.	TB9 Onboarding, Net Settings, New identity & S27 Onion Services

Erin
1. Handbook substance done, Al is reviewing and we'll issue it soon
2. General HR stuff

Philipp
1.	Collected private obfs4 bridges (and distribution instructions) for NGO
2.	Set up a private monitoring system to monitor these bridges
3.	Updated obfs4 docker image to Debian buster
4.	RACE meeting to coordinate progress on obfs4 improvements
5.	GetTor deployment and documentation improvements
6.	More work on broker/proxy protocol improvements for Snowflake

Pili
1. Mostly afk this week
2. Spoke at API Days Barcelona today on "How to use Onion Services to secure APIs"
3. Catching up with email backlog tomorrow and any urgent items


———————>8 ———————>8 ———————>8


SEPTEMBER 19 2019
Items Discussed

+ Sarah:
- The theme for the EOY campaign is Take Back the Internet. We are looking for ideas of items (books, t-shirts, tech-related items) from famous people working on internet freedom that we can use for drawings throughout the campaign. Any ideas of items we can solicit for this?
	Discussion: We need an item that people really want and would share the opportunity to win it on social media; discussion of what items from internet-freedom-related and/or tech famous people would be cool

+ Gaba:
- Bringing back this issue from last week: We checked with Gitlab to see if we could get a license for the ultimate tier (https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed) and we could get it for free because we are an open source project. thoughts? Features comparison: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-comparison/
	Discussion: tabled until next week.

+ Georg:
    -Planning for Mozilla All Hands, FOSDEM, ShmooCon. Where are we and how do we coordinate that?
	• Pili is coordinating FOSDEM (we are submiting a stand and looking for somebody to give a talk in the main track)
	• Gaba sent a mail to Moz people to see how we are going to be at Mozilla All Hands (not reply yet)
	• Roger, Sarah and Steph may be coordinating ShmooCon?
	Discussion: tabled until next week.

+ Pili:
- Should we participate in Hacktoberfest (https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/) as project maintainers
	Discussion: tabled until next week.

+ Anarcat:
- SVN: do we still need it? can it migrate into Nextcloud? we (tpa) want to shutdown the server, see #17202
	Discussion: We need it until we can replace it; we can’t replace it until we clean it up; accounting still has files on there; waiting to have NC be the official plan and have a start date, will make a plan to clean up and migrate then.

———————>8

General Notes:

Steph
1) Blog posts: Climate strike published, Tor trainings almost ready (created an infographic), localization and relay posts in the works
2) Responded to media inquiry
3) Seeing if we can have a Tor comic book
4) Helping draft a presentation on onion services
5) Reviewing the community portal
6) Preparing for EOY campaign

Sarah
1. Taking three training classes this week on different functionality of CiviCRM to maximize our usage as we grow.
2. Attended event on China and Russia exporting surveillance technology sponsored by OTF.
3. Met with The Giving Block to share ideas about fundraising and cryptocurrency.
4. Managed influx of donations of Stellar Lumen following Keybase airdrop. Everyone can sign up for future drops and donate to Tor: https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019.
5. Working with Jon on moving to a fulfillment company for swag.
6. The theme for the EOY campaign is Take Back the Internet. We are looking for ideas of items (books, t-shirts, tech-related items) from famous people working on internet freedom that we can use for drawings throughout the campaign.

antoine
1. SVN: do we still need it? can it migrate into Nextcloud? we (tpa) want to shutdown the server, see #17202
2. organized the move from ooni.tpo to ooni.io with hellais, transition should start in two months (because of key pinning)
3. helping with the gitlab migration somewhat
4. sent the jabber shutdown announcement, no response

Philipp
1. Provided NGO with private obfs4 bridges for their users. Hopefully we can learn from their experience and work with more NGOs in the future
2. More talking to new bridge operators
3. Merged pull requests that improved our setup guides and updated our obfs4 docker image
4. More progress on updating BridgeDB's libraries, also drafted BridgeDB metrics specification
5. More progress on pion WebRTC library and client/server snowflake protocol

Nick
1. Released 0.4.2.1-alpha and 0.4.1.6
2. Working on S31 issues
3. Wrote some comments on employee manual
4. Working to try to stabilize 0.4.2.x series

Gaba
1. Scalability proposals for funding
2. Gitlab meeting and discussing how to resolve a few issues with it
3. Sponsor V report starting
4. Sponsor 30 is finally on the way
5. Coordinating 1:1s in the network team
6. Events follow up

Georg
1. Work on stabilizing Tor Browser based on ESR68
2. Thinking about network health part for the scalability proposal

Pili
1. Helping with Outreachy organisation
2. S27 meeting and roadmap review
3. Tor Browser september roadmap wrangling
4. DRL Community SOI
5. S9
6. Docs Hackathon wrap up

Antonela
1. S9
 1.1 regular website maintenance
 1.2 community.tpo.org/user-research is ready for content review
 1.3 support.tpo.org FAQ's were updated
2. S27
  2.1 working on .onion errors in browsers
3. TB9.0
 3.1 new network settings are about to reach an alpha
 3.2 working on new identity UI
4. Regular design deliverables: Gus blogpost cover, fundraising EOY needs, outreach material updates
5. Regular sponsor proposal review
6. Doing some clean in trac to have a lighter dip migration

Karsten
1. Started archiving snowflake statistics, resumed archiving BridgeDB pool assignments, and prepared archiving BridgeDB request statistics.

Erin
1. Handbook v1 issued! :D
2. Reminder: Tea Time w/ Isa Monday September 23 at 2200 UTC in #tor-internal


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