[tor-project] Board Minutes from July 14, 2016, to April 16, 2018

[Tom Ritter]

Thank you for this, I've been hoping this would happen!



On Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 8:12 AM biella <biella at riseup.net> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> The board is releasing our first batch of Tor Project meeting minutes from
> July 14, 2016, to April 16, 2018 [1]. After our next reunion, to be held on
> August 20, 2018, we will release minutes as a single item shortly after we
> meet.
>
> Before the board made the decision to publish them, I had volunteered to
> write a report about board work and accomplishments. Now that we are
> releasing our minutes, there is less of a need to write a detailed report,
> but I’ve decided to highlight some of things we’ve done and what we are up
> to in the next few months.
>
> As is probably obvious, board minutes are a fairly conventional genre of
> documentation for providing an official record of decisions taken by the
> board. They reference our collective discussions and include other standard
> information such as the start time of meeting, place or method of
> connecting, and a list of present and absent members. They tend to contain
> regular items of business, such as a discussion of pending and current
> grants and the finance reports, both of which relate to one of the core of
> duties of a board: fiduciary oversight of the organization. But these notes
> also provide a limited window into other aspects of the organization, as
> well as its shifting concerns and priorities depending on unforeseen
> factors and events. Early in this board’s tenure, we, along with TPI (The
> Tor Project, INC.) officers (Shari, Roger and Nick) dealt with matters of
> organizational housekeeping: filling board positions, establishing email
> voting protocols, clarifying and defining roles around the officers, and
> approving new policy documents or changes in existing policy documents.
> (These documents are included with the minutes.) With that in place, we
> moved on to other tasks that are also typical of boards, such as the ED
> review, which was carried out in the winter of 2017. As the organization
> stabilized, we were free to take on more time consuming projects, such as
> board expansion and diversification, which involved a number of meetings
> outside of the regular board reunions as we vetted and interviewed
> potential new members. Another fairly large undertaking for the current
> board was finding a replacement for Shari after she notified us of her
> plans to retire. While a search committee was constituted and tasked with
> the bulk of the initial work—compiling names, reaching out to candidates,
> scheduling meetings, and holding initial interviews—the entire board and
> TPI officers were also pulled in at various points to rate the long list of
> applications, hammer out procedures and timing, and interview and discuss
> the final few candidates.
>
> While the minutes provide a fairly accurate record of board duties, roles,
> and accomplishments, board members contribute in ways that are not
> registered or reflected in our minutes. Shari has reached out to individual
> board members to help build strategic partnerships, as she did with
> Mozilla, for instance. Other board members have many informal discussions
> with members of the Tor community that directly loop back into board
> discussions, while organization officers like Roger reach out to board
> members to discuss particular grants. We’d also like to remind everyone
> that they should feel free to contact us at any time on any matter related
> to the Tor Project (I've included our contact information below).
>
> Now that we’ve wrapped up the ED search, we’ve returned again to expanding
> the board, and a few of us are in the process of reaching out to a couple
> of other candidates, one of whom was recommended by a Tor community member
> (and we happily continue to welcome recommendations like these). Like
> everyone else, we are also thrilled to work with the incoming ED, Isabela,
> who will be joining us for our August board meeting. While there will be
> period of transition as we work with a new ED, we feel the organization has
> matured and stabilized under Shari’s careful and skilled guiding hand to
> the point where we can help Isabela fulfill her strategic vision. We were
> exceedingly impressed by her plan to make Tor more usable and more
> technically robust and we felt her wide-ranging experience running projects
> and teams, her intense familiarity with Tor, and her dedication to the
> fight for privacy and the people of Tor, made her the ideal candidate to
> shepherd this organization forward into the future.
>
> Don’t hesitate to contact any of us if you have any questions, queries,
> suggestions, and/or comments.
>
> Gabriella Coleman, on behalf of the entire board.
>
> ps-- I'd like to thank Linus for formatting all the minutes and putting
> them online.
>
> [1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/company/policies.git/tree
>
>
> Gabriella Coleman, biella at riseup.net
>
> Megan Price, meganp at hrdag.org
>
> Cindy Cohn, cindy at eff.org
>
> Linus Nordberg linus at torproject.org
> rsa4096/8C4CD511095E982EB0EFBFA21E8BF34923291265
>
> Ramy Raoof, ramyraoof at riseup.net
>
> Bruce Schneier, schneier at schneier.com
>
> Matt Blaze, blaze at cis.upenn.edu
>
> Julius Mittenzwei, julius at mittenzwei.com
>
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> _______________________________________________
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>
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