Hello everyone!
The Network Health team is best known for its work in the bad-relays area and being concerned with providing metrics + keeping an eye on the health of the Tor network. While that involves doing analyses to answer our own questions it was not clear so far what we should do with questions about the network or available data which got raised by other teams (i.e. you). Should we do those analyses as well or should we just provide the necessary data and each team then tries to answer their questions by themselves? This got raised a bunch of times in the past[1][2] and I am happy to announce that the Network Health team is stepping up and helping you with your analyses, if desired.
The idea would be that we'd do the analysis work in those cases, alone or together, and accumulate/improve a set of scripts and tools over time at a single place, so that both we and other interested parties can do those analyses faster and better in the long(er) run. The tools should be open so that other folks can help improving and shaping them according to their needs.
We have a dedicated analysis project[3] where we track all analysis related issues and which contains tools and documentation about how to use them for our work. If there is any analysis work you would like us to get done, please file a ticket in that project. If you did a similar analysis in the past by yourself we'd love to hear about it as it might speed up our work and we could build documentation out of it and add available code to the analysis project. Additionally, please assume we are no experts in your area of work, but don't hesitate to file tickets because of that. We'll ask if things are unclear. :)
To get your analysis questions answered in a timely manner it would greatly help if they were attached to some sponsored work as that makes it usually easier to justify picking them up among all the other things on our plate. Additionally, emergencies (like new blocking events in country X) should be easily justifiable as well, in particular as we have a "surprise 'anomaly analysis' on the network as needed"-item on our roadmap throughout the year. I plan to make sure that we have sufficient spare cycles available for that work should it be needed. If your desired analysis does not fall into either of those categories don't despair, we'll try to find a way to get it done nonetheless.
Thanks, Georg
P.S.: If you are not part of any of our teams but want to do an analysis by yourself or just note an analysis idea somewhere, feel free to start by filing a ticket in the analysis project as well. Others might just jump on it and get it done because they might be curious about the answers themselves. :)
[1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/metrics/relay-search/-/issu... [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/team/-/issues/250#note_2863... [3] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/analysis