[tor-talk] Plans about Askbot?

[Lunar]

Hi!

For the record, I share the concerns Moritz have raised about the move
to Stack Exchange.

Andrew Lewman:
> It came down to the decision of spending money on fixing and modifying
> askbot and making a better tor. We chose the latter.
>
> If some community wants to improve askbot, we'll consider using it in
> the future. Right now, we have limited resources and had to choose
> between more tor or askbot. Again, we're always going to choose tor in
> these decisions.

I think this is a wise choice when it comes to money. But I also think
that the broader Tor community should specifically be given the chance
to work on these peripheral needs.

From what I have seen, when Runa goes to EuroPython to advertise Tor
projects to Python developers [1] or when an hour is not long enough
for Jake and Roger to present all of the Tor ecosystem at 29C3 [2],
these talks result in people that really would like to help! Yet, they
often fail to find room to do so, because the tor daemon is a huge code
base, because the network problems are hard, because other issues
require a lot of expertise.

I have seen a few times people showing up and asking “I would really
like to help Tor, but I only know about web development, is there
something I could do?”. So far, it's been hard to answer. Atlas/Compass
are not necessarily easy to get into. But that wishlist for AskBot feels
just like the right way to engage web developers familiar with Python!

What I have in mind is not huge: a call for help on the blog, some
Twitter buzz, and some welcoming people on IRC. Given that AskBot has
an active upstream, the cost of interacting with volunteers should even
be pretty low for the Tor project.

One of the concern that was raised by Moritz is export capabilities of
Stack Exchange. How likely are we to switch to a self-hosted application
if it means losing data that had taken a lot of energy to assemble in
the first place?

[1] https://ep2013.europython.eu/conference/talks/tor-project
[2] http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5306-en-the_tor_software_ecosystem_h264.html

-- 
Lunar                                             <lunar at torproject.org>
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