[tor-project] Notes from April 21 2016 Vegas team meeting

Tue Apr 26 06:50:41 UTC 2016

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See this posting for context:

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2016-April/000223.html

Notes from Apr 21 2016 meeting:

Big takeaways:
1) Eight people in one hour just doesn't fit. We should think about
how to be more efficient, how to triage topics, how to arrange for
more time for this team, etc.
2) We all raised the topic of Tor Browser security and the recent
angles around it; but we didn't get to this topic.

Roger:
1) Should each of us add our lines to this notes page ourselves, so we
know what we added and have more of a say in what goes out to the
tor-project mailing list? Answer: yes.
(But we screwed this one up this time, because I should have said "Ok,
that means you all write down what we discussed and what we concluded
please" but nobody did. Next time maybe!)
2) Should we have an intermediate stage between this pad and
tor-project, so more internal people can help vet notes? Answer: no
need for this yet, but let's make the notes review period "until
Monday" rather than "overnight", so people actually can review it.
3) When will we pick dates for the Seattle dev mtg? Answer from Shari:
"It will be one of the last two weeks of September.  We won't finalize
the dates until we finalize the venue, and we won't finalize the venue
until we have an administrative assistant on board to do so.  Jon
Selon has accepted our offer, and he starts on Monday.  Yay!  So
hopefully we'll be able to nail down these dates soon.  See my notes
below for info on the February Tor Dev meeting!"
4) Making a donate@ alias for humans, so donations@ can be for
machines? Answer: Shari thinks that would be so incredibly awesome!
5) When do we get our admin assistant? Shari says: Monday!!!  :)
6) Inviting Kate back to the Vegas team meetings? Answer: yes, let's
do it.
7) I've been talking to Isa about getting a project leader for our
circumvention side: making the balance right between academic
research, implementation, and operation/deployment.
Things from last week that still want attention:
8) tor blog contract details (no progress today either)

Shari:
1) Isa and I talked with Pepe, who organizes IFF.  He was very
concerned to hear from Laura at DRL that we were considering the
option of uncoupling Tor Dev from IFF and basically promised us the
moon if we'd hold Tor Dev at the end of February in Valencia again
next year.
Conclusion: "If DRL wants us there, we should make it clear to DRL the
cost that it presents to us."
2) Please look at the writing sample from grant writer candidate Cass
Brewer and let me know next steps.  I'd love to get her hired soon, or
figure out someone else if necessary.  If anyone else wants to join
Kate and Isa interviewing her today, let us know.
Conclusion: we are all fine with the hire so long as Kate and Isa
think it's a good move.
3) Isa and I met with Laura and Steve from DRL about our SOI.  They
were really quite frank about what they wanted from us, which is
mostly a better job of tying our work to their goals.  We should
probably do that with all proposals.
4) Glad I don't have any more travel for a while.  Planning a trip to
San Francisco mid-May.

Nick:
1) Not much to report this week. Trying to get my team's work done for EOM
2) Waiting for personnel thing from Shari.
3) Waiting for TB to go out with a tor release in it. It turns out
nobody is using the nightlies, so I have no very little user feedback
on the most recent 0.2.8 alpha
Conclusion: Nick will mail tor-talk and ask people to run them, and
report issues, and be aware that they're not on the standard upgrade
track.
GeKo will open a ticket for "updates" for nightlies (right now they
don't do updates).

Georg:
1) Switched our nightlies to ESR45.
2) Getting as many things into ESR45 as we can before releasing an
alpha next week.
3) Where do we want to have the OSX SDK we need for our OS X builds?
Answer: leave it where it currently is and open a ticket in our bug
tracker that helps thinking about a different solution. GeKo is doing
that.

Alison:
1) Community team met yesterday and discussed our user-facing
Cloudflare strategy. We agree that multiple approaches will be most
successful. Right now we've got three big ideas: mrphs's petition
(either officially endorsed by Tor or not, but organized by one of our
allied organizations eg EFF), shiro's creative campaign (starting in
Berlin, then we hope going elsewhere), and then collecting more unique
user stories (using petition platform, twitter, etc, sending to
Alison). We will continue to use the hashtag #dontblocktor for all
community efforts.
2) Extreme levels of busy have gotten in the way of completing the
social contract, but this week Alison will finish her last edits and
send them to sysqrb and Lunar, and then it'll go on to the rest of
tor-internal for review.
3) Alison and phoul continue to work on the Tor Browser Manual.
4) Still recruiting team members and still need to define scope of the
team. CF stuff got in the way this meeting, but hey, people showed up!

Isabela:
1) Met with Laura and Steve about our SOI's -- they will send someone
to the office in the summer and we will apply their feedback and
submit new SOIs in September.
2) Did DRL grant writing training (more or less useful).
3) Worked on OTF full proposal - deadline now is first week of May,
but 2/3 of it is done and I will try to finish it asap because I also
need to work on DRL Q1 2016 report.
4) Juga finished her work on Trac - she emailed the list about it.
Things looks good.
5) DRL implementers meeting was useful for me to understand how they
think and their portfolio -- but now I am dead.

Karsten:
1) I'm planning to shut down Tor's copy of Globe. Will that make
people in this group unhappy for reasons I didn't think of?
Conclusion: Let's first create tickets for all Globe features that are
missing in Atlas.
2) What's the plan for monthly reports? Should people keep writing
them, should teams do that, should we stop writing/requiring monthly
reports, ...?
Conclusion: A) We no longer pretend to demand monthly reports from
individuals. B) We, led by Isabela, continue doing the funder reports
for funders. C) We encourage Shari to keep doing her "how to make sure
people actually do work" work (since "see if the person mailed
tor-reports that month" is a crummy substitute anyway). And D) Nick is
going to experiment with doing report-out summaries from the network
team meetings, because we do want better answers for how to keep all
the teams informed, at the right levels, of what's going on in the
other teams.

Mike:
1) Finished up the Tor Browser sections of the OTF proposal. I looked
over the Tor section, and it may need some more tweaking, along with
our need to complete the budget. I am thinking of meeting Isabela next
week to help finish that.
2) Still have not heard from Kevin about the blog contract. I am not
sure what the holdup is. I will try calling him.