[tor-project] Notes from June 1 2017 Vegas team meeting

[Karsten Loesing]

Notes for June 1 2017 meeting:

Nick:
    * Doing huge triage of old tickets. Closing approx 1/3. Labeling the
others.
    * We're investigating and closing bugs in 0.3.0 and 0.3.1.  Maybe
our LTS process for 0.2.9 has made us get less testing on 0.3.0? Needs
investigation and thinking.
    * Blog seems good in spite of initial hiccups.
    * Need to decide whether we're done with sponsor 4 work.
Deliverables are open-ended enough we could declare victory now, or do
more.  Probably there will be bugs discovered, and it would be good to
be able to bill for fixing them. Could use advice.
    A: Do not actually call it done until _at least_ we have metrics and
a writeup. We don't agree about bugfixes.
    TODO: We should get another OTF proposal for core Tor work on our
radar, since Nov 30 is coming up sooner than we think.
    * Transitioning towards sponsor-8 (DRL next) work on mobile
performance: I need to poke my team. I've been putting "sponsor8-maybe"
on old tickets as I go.
    * Question for Shari/Isabela: how is network team hire going?
    * Talking to Museum of Science people today. Discussion: Do we have
a plan?
       A: Biella will lead; Alison has ideas.

Roger:
     At the community team meeting yesterday, I suggested that maybe we
should move closer to having a support portal, without waiting for
sponsor to finish making its decision. I know that would not include all
of the automated search, good website design, etc that we want to do.
But it could help users now. Good idea / bad idea? The plan: we're going
to suggest that the community team set up a wiki page with their current
questions and answers, so they can get some testing with real users and
so they can benefit users. Then we'll see if that's enough and adapt as
needed.
     Question: Have we sent out Montreal invites? Or personalized
save-the-dates? Answer: Alison and Shari are going to do an initial
draft of an invite list, with help after that from Roger, so we can move
things forward. In particular, this time around we should separate "is
invited" from "is offered travel funding", because we can't afford to
fund travel for all the people we would be pleased to see there.
     What is the integration plan for the potential new communications
director? How should we help? Answer: Shari is going to lead making sure
that they get up to speed at the right pace and by talking to the right
people at the right times.

Georg:
    * Tor Browser 7.0 preparations; we got delayed a bit but are still
on track for getting it out in time
    * Discussion regarding sandboxing progress on tbb-dev mailing list;
how do we proceed?

Shari:
    * Hosting lots of people in Seattle this week and next
    * Almost certainly giving offer to new Communications Director
    * Following up with a couple of funders

isabela:
    * In seattle this week - had a meeting on 'state of grants' to
identify what areas should be priority for applying to new grants (at
least during summer)
    * Other things I'm doing in seattle - meeting with erin on the new
hires, meeting with brad to get invoices out. Working with Tommy to get
the metrics updated proposal at the funder form
    * Organizing meeting for Friday to talk about tor launcher
automation.  Friday June 2nd 1800UTC at #tor-project irc channel

Arturo:
    * We did a series of tweets to summarise what we know based on OONI
data related to internet censorship in Egypt:
https://twitter.com/OpenObservatory/status/870066944124366848 (it would
be nice to get a retweet on this) [done]
    * Probe orchestration system is at beta stage and we are testing it
with a test app with Nuke: https://github.com/TheTorProject/proteus/releases
    * Made small improvements aimed at reducing finger-printability of
ooniprobe, namely the randomisation of URL testing:
https://github.com/TheTorProject/ooni-probe/pull/758 and drafted some
text on the measures we currently take on this front and what we can do
in the future
    * Published research report on Internet censorship in Indonesia:
https://ooni.torproject.org/post/indonesia-internet-censorship/
(https://blog.torproject.org/blog/state-internet-censorship-indonesia)

Mike:
    * In Seattle this week
    * Trying to get adaptive padding work usable by researchers before
PETS, or sooner
      (status: the state machine, histogram, and leak-pipe code is all
written, as is negotiation. but I need to support specifying new
machines in torrc and the consensus still. and do more testing.)
    * Helping ASN plan the Guard meeting for the week after next

Alison:
* In Seattle with lots of Tor people this week.
* Continuing lots of work on the IMLS grant -- will be wrapping it up
next week right before I go on vacation.
* On vacation from 8 to 14 June.
* Colin completed a lot of new questions and answers for the support portal.
* Thinking about Roger's feedback above re: support portal deployment.
We should discuss. [this point was answered during arma's time, see his
notes above]
* This week I am beginning to work on the Community Team roadmap.
* Thinking about Montreal meeting todo. We will meet about the schedule
next week.
* Helped EFF activism team work on their train-the-trainer documents.
* Regularly checking in with our Global South contacts. We need to get
them meeting invites asap for visas, and we should think about anything
else we can do to make attending the meeting more seamless for GS folks.
[alison and others in seattle will work on the draft invite list and
send to vegas-leads this week]
* If you gave me feedback on the membership doc draft, I promise I will
look at it and respond soon! We will begin the proposal period after the
network team hackfest.

Karsten:
 * Called Sponsor X deliverable 4 done, despite not having written a
proposal or patch. Simulations of Laplace noise added to dirreq-stats
indicate that this needs more work on the statistics aggregation side.
Otherwise we'd risk breaking user number estimates.
 * Deep into metrics-lib improvements for last remaining Sponsor X
deliverable 2 which will bring runtime improvements that many other
tools will benefit from as well as interface improvements that will
lower the barrier for new users/contributors.

Brad:
* Shari has approved adoption of Harvest but decisions still need to be
made before roll-out
* Use of Harvest is encouraged but not required for May or June
* Usernames will be used for Harvest accounts

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