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

[isabela]

Thank you. I am also interest if he has anything he can share. Or for
his feedback in general if he has any.

On 04/29/2016 11:50 AM, Paul Syverson wrote:
> 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
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>>>> @isa
>>>>
>>>>
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>> @isa
>>
>>
>
>
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