[tor-project] Measuring Tor's impact in the world?

[Paul Syverson]

Sure. This is all public so I can just point anyone at the
archive. Nonetheless I just thought I'd ask partly as a courtesy, but
primarily so, once you had the context, you could craft a different
message in case you thought that more appropriate. I'll go ahead
and forward to him.

aloha,
Paul

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 11:40:23AM -0700, Isabela wrote:
> Hi Paul!
> tbh I don't know how to answer your question. From my point of view I
> think it should be fine. I don't know if anyone here has a different
> opinion tho. Either way, I emailed tor-project for a reason, because I
> thought it's a public conversation.
> 
> :)
> 
> On 04/29/2016 11:24 AM, Paul Syverson wrote:
> > Hi Isa,
> >
> > Roger, David, and I have just concluded the latest Sponsor R meeting.
> > As Roger and David can tell you, the technical SETA [0] for this
> > program, Brian Sandberg, has been excited about some related ideas.
> > In particular he's been writing scripts to develop analysis of
> > correlation between fraction of Tor usage in countries and ratings
> > of those countries as free or non-free etc., plus looking
> > at various events such as you describe.
> > We were helping him and when some of his numbers looked funny, as a
> > side benefit this led David earlier this week to uncover and fix some
> > bugs in metrics.
> >
> > Anyway, would you be OK if I just forwarded your message to him?
> > Or if not simply forwarding, could you give me a message you would
> > be happy for me to forward? (Or tell me if you just aren't sure
> > what you want shared and so will get back to me about this at
> > some future date.) If you say OK, I'll cc tor-project on the forward.
> >
> > aloha,
> > Paul
> >
> >
> > [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_Engineering_and_Technical_Assistance
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 10:14:11AM -0700, isabela wrote:
> >> hello tor,
> >>
> >> yep, that's right :) I spent some time with our sponsors last week and
> >> at the end of the day, the question of 'how to measure tor's impact in
> >> the world' seems to be something that would be useful for us for things
> >> like:
> >>
> >> 1. grant proposal - impacts we could demonstrate
> >> 2. reports to sponsors - as a metric we could report
> >> 3. in general when we talk with people (journalists, users etc)
> >>
> >> So I thought of the following question: 'What happens to the tor network
> >> when there is an event happening in the world?'
> >>
> >> Is an easy way to do as an one off but super hard if you want to keep
> >> track of it so you can build stories around more than one event here and
> >> there.
> >>
> >> Then I thought of what world events are predicable that we could check
> >> for Tor's impact? elections...
> >>
> >> So I looked at all elections for Q1 2016, then looked at the number of
> >> direct connected users and number of users connected via bridges during
> >> those events...
> >>
> >> There were some correlation of events, you can check them here:
> >> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MKntWAoZOcRB8rBbxl3P-VKAvyH8jf0RmqlsB2lejyU/edit#
> >>
> >> Of course we should also take a look for the same thing when
> >> unpredictable events happens.. like the Egyptian revolution or a
> >> shutdown of services for whatever reason (whatsapp in Brazil).
> >>
> >> Why I am sharing this? Because there are tons of smart people in this
> >> list and maybe someone has a different way to measure tor's impact in
> >> the world.
> >>
> >> Or maybe someone knows how I could automate such a thing :) (api somewhere?)
> >>
> >> Or maybe ideas of other points of data for reference. For instance, I am
> >> now thinking if x users connected on Tor means a lot or a little in a
> >> country.. that will depend on how many people are online, the number of
> >> internet penetration for that country.
> >>
> >> Yes, I know this is very simplistic way of talking about something as
> >> big as 'impact in the world'. But I have seem this information being
> >> useful in other scenario, and it did helped a lot to pass the message of
> >> what value people should think of when thinking of the product.
> >>
> >> For a long time twitter had the problem of being seeing only as a short
> >> text social media platform. But twitter wanted people to think of it as
> >> 'the platform to know what is happening now'. A platform where if an
> >> event happened in the world, twitter was the place where people would
> >> talk about it. And for a while the data science team did only this,
> >> publish correlation data of what happened at twitter during global
> >> events. I believe it did worked because that information was what people
> >> (media, mouth to mouth etc) start to pick up when anyone would talk
> >> about twitter.
> >>
> >> here is an example of the work twitter did that i am talking about:
> >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SybWjN9pKQk
> >>
> >> cheers,
> >> Isabela
> >>
> >> -- 
> >> PM at TorProject.org
> >> gpg fingerprint = 8F2A F9B6 D4A1 4D03 FDF1  B298 3224 4994 1506 4C7B
> >> @isa
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> tor-project mailing list
> >> tor-project at lists.torproject.org
> >> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project
> > _______________________________________________
> > tor-project mailing list
> > tor-project at lists.torproject.org
> > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project
> 
> -- 
> PM at TorProject.org
> gpg fingerprint = 8F2A F9B6 D4A1 4D03 FDF1  B298 3224 4994 1506 4C7B
> @isa
> 
> 



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