[tor-relays] Feedback wanted: letter to my university's library

[William Denton]

On 1 October 2017, AJ Jordan wrote:

> However I've just started college at the University of Rochester,
> which obviously presents a great opportunity to set up a relay on a
> really great network. I'm planning to reach out to the library with
> the following email and would love some feedback:

Scott Bennett had excellent advice, and I have a few suggestions along the same 
lines.  (I work in a unversity library.)

Academic libraries can be very experimental in some of their work, but they are 
generally risk-averse.  (This is good, because they're in the business of 
preserving knowledge and cultural artifacts for decades and centuries.)  There 
is, I'm afraid, close to zero chance they would let a non-employee student run a 
server on their network---and running Tor, even a non-exit relay, makes the 
chances even lower.

However, don't give up.  I suggest thinking about this as a long-term project 
that could get you involved with the library, faculty and campus IT.  There must 
be people on campus interested in privacy issues, who know about Tor, and 
perhaps who have been thinking about running a relay.  These people could be 
librarians or they could be professors or grad students in political science, 
communcations, journalism, computer science, privacy studies, etc.  Find out who 
they are and approach them!  Perhaps there is a student club interested in the 
same issues---if not, you could start one.  Students and student groups 
advocating for a Tor relay or exit, while demonstrating the importance of Tor 
and how it fits in with the library's and university's mission, would very much 
help the project be successful.

In other words, your goal is achievable, but I think you'll need different 
methods.  For a long-term Tor relay to run on a library or university server, 
they will need to be the ones running it, but a student could be the one to help 
convince them to do it.

Connecting Tor to ongoing or potential research would also be a big help.  If 
someone's going to run a server, they'll want to do more than just run it as a 
service.

Along the way, you might get a part-time job out of it, which is always a bonus. 
If they do workshops on privacy and online security you could help with them, or 
do peer workshops, etc.  (It's a lot easier to tell people about Tor, and show 
them how to use it, than to run a server, so it's a good first step.)

As for where to start, I suggest dropping by the Digital Scholarship Lab.  The 
digital humanities librarian looks like a good person to chat with.

http://humanities.lib.rochester.edu/

Good luck!

Bill
--
William Denton :: Toronto, Canada   ---   Listening to Art: https://listeningtoart.org/
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