Hi,
newcomer on this list speaking. I'm working with Tails. One of the top-priorities for Tails in the next 2 years is to reach out to communities that are under-represented in the Tails contributors community and in the Tails userbase.
Personally I want to work more *with* these under-represented communities and less "for" them (i.e. crappy colonialist approach, if you ask me). I'm focused on Brazil because I have good connections in activist, PET advocates & trainers there already, which provides solid foundations I want to build on top of as opposed to starting from scratch elsewhere.
I think CryptoRave (that I attended last year) is a great place to work on this topic as it gathers lots of people (1-3k depending on the year) and they are very diverse: random people who heard they should pay attention to their privacy/safety online, free software and PET advocates & trainers, activists, IT students, software developers etc. ⇒ impact is potentially great, and cost/benefit is interesting. In 2018 CrytoRave will happen on May 4-5.
What I'd like to do there, for ethical reasons I prefer formats where I'll be mostly listening or interacting in a group, as opposed to me talking to a large audience (but if it seems a talk is a good way to approach the problem, I can also do that):
1. Regarding current and potential users, advocates & trainers
Ask, listen, try my best to understand the needs and give our projects useful data to better prioritize our work.
For example, last year I conducted a number of "intercept interviews" there with Tails users: https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/intercept_interviews/
This helped us understand better what people use Tails for, why they don't use it for other things, what works well and what is problematic. I would like to do the same again both for Tails and Tor. I'm not a user research expert so I'd welcome help wrt. the methodology and phrasing of the questions. I would also love to have a team-mate to do this there.
I would like to better plan this in advance than what I did last year, e.g. reach out to my contacts there so we arrive with a (non-exhaustive) list of people we know we should interview, and work with the organizers of the event to ensure whoever else we should interview knows about it and can find us.
2. Regarding current and potential contributors
I want to understand better what the stumbling blocks are on the path to contributing to Tails and Tor. I also want to help interested people get started with their first contribution: in my experience having someone, right next to you, who you can ask questions creates a tremendously better new contributor experience than having to look up all the needed info online. I'm not sure what's the best format for this would be and I would be happy to design it with other people, and to share this work with other Tor attendees once we're there.
I acknowledge people who live in Brazil are better placed to know what the best approach would be so we should discuss this with them. I would start with asking my contacts there, the Tails pt-br translation team and the events organizers. But perhaps people on this list have some insight?
I don't speak Portuguese so I may not be the best person to do this work there; sadly, we have nobody who's very active at Tails speaks Portuguese or lives much closer to Brazil (yet!). Interestingly, last year some Tails users expressed they were happy to meet a Tails developer in person and happily surprised I would care enough to bother traveling that far in order to meet them, which alleviates the cons a little bit. Also, I can easily find good translators to smooth interviews and session I would facilitate. Still, if we have enough people better placed than me to do what we want to do there, I'll be totally in favor of directing our resources to them.
Regarding costs, if booked sufficiently in advance, sending me there would cost ~800€. Tails could probably pay some of it but it would be nice to pool resources with Tor and/or find funding for this. I'll be hosted for free at friends and I can pay for my food & other expenses there.
What do you think?
Cheers,