On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 11:55 PM, Roger Dingledine arma@mit.edu wrote:
On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 09:37:46AM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:
Deliverable 5 is totally doable, says Runa. This deliverable involves a few substeps which we might derive milestones from: rewriting parts of the website is something we can do ourselves; planning some kind of campaign around the videos to be created and not just putting them out there is something we can do, too; writing screenplays for videos is something we'll have to do together with a partner; creating videos is something we'll have to find a partner for; starting the campaign is something we can do.
We should involve Karen in this discussion, since she's already doing some sample videos, and she's a plausible fit for parts of the "tech writer" role we describe. The question for Karen is how much of a distraction it will be for her relative to her fundraising work.
We should figure out what Runa had in mind by "partner", and how much of that we can do ourselves; there is currently no money in the 2012 budget for said partner.
I'd love to see Karen create the videos as she's done a great job so far. I only said "partner" because we've previously worked with other organizations on similar projects.
Deliverable 6 is doable. Runa thinks she could either be the community manager by extending her tasks, or we could hire a new person. She also has an idea who to hire for English, Farsi, and Arabic; there was a brief discussion between Runa and Nick about making an open call for these hires vs. only asking people we know. Runa thinks that the trick for paid support is to find a way to let anonymous users pay for support and still make sure they get a reply in time according to the service level agreement we have to create.
Andrew is hoping to use this as an opportunity to explore "hire people who will do great work and not charge American prices". Apparently our current Farsi translator is one such person, and Andrew hopes we find more.
Yep, shouldn't be too hard.
We have four separate directions in mind for this "community manager" notion (not all funded by SponsorL, mind you):
- Relay operator coordinator. Somebody to keep relay operators happy
and in touch with us, encourage people to set up new relays, organize recommended configurations, etc. Especially important in tandem with our "network diversity" work at #6232. 2) Volunteer-developer coordinator. Somebody to take incoming volunteers and help them find good existing projects to work on. Likely involves making our volunteer page more usable. Should also include knowing enough about every project to recognize and identify good low-hanging fruit, and knowing enough about our priorities to make smart decisions. 3) Blog/forum/mailinglist coordinator, to make sure our users have useful answers, and ultimately to manage and organize the volunteers who make sure our users have useful answers. 4) Social media person, to be our face on twitter, etc.
Which ones are funded by SponsorL?
I believe the plan is for Runa to cover #4, and for us to contract somebody in our relay operator community part-time for #1 to start. I think there is no plan for #2 and #3 yet; but I'd love it if we could get somebody part-time for #2.
Like I've told Andrew already; I am willing to extend my tasks to also include #2 and #3.
Runa is wondering why we want funding for languages no one has emailed us in (Spanish and French); though nobody has emailed us in Arabic, either.
Countries like Venezuela are likely to be on more peoples' radar in the coming years. As for French, a lot of North Africa can do French better than they can do English. I bet that's at least partly the case in Vietnam too.
Makes sense.
Deliverable 7 is doable. Runa is somewhat unhappy that funding doesn't include Arabic. She says a large number of our users speak either Farsi or Arabic, so not having funding for Arabic translations (and thus relying on volunteers) seems silly; if we have funding for Arabic support, we should also include Arabic translations. Runa has an idea of who to hire for Farsi and Arabic translation, no idea about Vietnamese and Chinese (but can't be too hard to find someone).
There's totally time to write 'Arabic' into the list if we want. Note that just because we promise more languages doesn't mean we get any more money though.
Here's a list of languages the funder thought we might want to put on the contract: "Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Burmese, Spanish".
Sounds good!