Hey Everyone,
Apologies for the delay in getting Vegas meeting notes out — I just recently took over the responsibility from Karsten and I needed a minute to get up to speed. :)
I have pasted the notes from two meetings below, July 25th and August 1st. Please note that starting with the August 1st notes, in response to feedback from readers of these emails who want a bit more information, we’re trying a new approach. The top of the notes will include the main topics discussed in the meeting, followed by a brief synopsis of each issue. The rest of the notes will be similar to past formats, with team leads' bullet point notes.
We hope you find the new format helpful!
Cheers, Erin
Notes for July 25 2019 meeting:
Roger: - Ola is still under essentially house arrest in Ecuador, and Chelsea is still in jail. - OFTC is getting our support requests because our contact page sends people there. Let's change the contact page to stop doing that.
Gus:
- State of Onion (2019) - Community Team - Going to CCC camp (August 16th - 26th) - Working in Community Portal and Sponsor9 phase 3 (remote training)
Nick: - Many network team members are taking PTO in August; others are recovering from Stockholm. We've tried to roadmap accordingly. - Another alpha release should come out late this week or early next. - Continuing to try to increase my role in 1:1 fundraising
isabela: - Working on giving feedback to everyone (already did with some of you) - if I don't have weekly 1:1 w/ you, Jon will contact you to schedule time for us to go over your feedback - Organizing upcoming meetings related to fundraising and preparing for the ones we had last week and are having this week - Getting Bug Smash Fund campaign organized (together with our presence at ccc-camp and defcon) - Will be in DC next week for training (30 and 31st, offline all of 31st for sure)
anarcat: - post-stockholm scramble in progress, trying to figure out how to prioritize all the things on my plate that came out of the meeting - still struggling to find time to take a step back and do long term plans, considering prioritization through the "ops report card" as a stopgap http://opsreportcard.com/ http://opsreportcard.com/ (also part of the sysadmin book - will be missing next meeting (and thu-friday this week and next week)
Mike: - R&R after Tor and PETS marathon - Pondering Research Director roles list - Will complete Feedback by next week
Sarah: - Working on mapping connections to major donor wishlist. - Preparing for DEF CON. Will be afk August 3 - through DEF CON (August 11) but will be checking in and reachable via email and Signal. - Preparing for fundraising meeting in DC next Wednesday. - Reseaching attendees of cryptocurrency dinner Isa will attend Friday. - BTCPayServer campaign has raised $17,663 and we should do a push to try to get to $20k in the last few days.
Philipp - Anti-censorship team will attend OTF summit in Taipei (plus a pre and post event) and Citizen Lab Summer Institute - Moving forward with pluggable transport spec, BridgeDB metrics, and Snowflake + In sponsor-speak: trying to make good progress with sponsor 28 and preparing for a running start with sponsor 30 - Working with bridge operators who had troubles setting up obfs4 (refining setup guide in parallel)
Steph - Preparing for the bug smash campaign. - Preparing for Def Con. Will be talking at the blockchain village on a panel about privacy. Getting printed materials ready. A volunteer is finalizing our badges. - Reviewing a post on vpns. - Preparing a pitch on Tor’s vision. - Responded to several inquiries about the FSB leak. - Finalizing the next newsletter. - Published a reflective Stockholm blog post. - Social media, social media, social media. - Will be in DC the 30 and 31, offline most of 31.
Erin - Taking over Vegas meeting reminders and notes
Karsten: - Handing over Vegas meeting reminders and notes. - Fighting with code dependencies related to Debian buster being declared stable.
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Notes for August 1:
MAIN DISCUSSION ITEMS:
Nick: +I need to offload responsibility for being our admin on the Apple development world. Logically that should go to Admin, or be shared between Browser and OONI. It will require an apple device for 2FA, which is why I would like to quit. It is tied to the execdir@ account. - Looking for trusted person to take over; trying to decide which team is best suited/most appropriate to take over or decide who will (OONI/Browser/Admin). TBD.
Georg: + Our CCCamp presence in the About:freedom cluster is a thing and our talk got accepted. We need to organize that. - Hoping to get Tor shirts from Berlin, Sarah/Jon sending patches; Gus assisting with organizing; Geko organizing talk, will be asking what people want to talk about.
Steph: + Where are we with Pierre's guest post? Should I get back to him or are you doing that? Anything else we need here? - GeKo is picking this up for now trying to move this forward
+ Getting someone from Tor to the browser vendor meetup in September - Need to put them in touch with Microsoft person and Arthur
Antonela: + Arturo: how much UX capacity OONI needs the next semester? -To be determined/coordinated by Isa and Arturo
Pili: + We're thinking of adapting OONI's partnership agreement for our training partners but would like some advice with regards to legal language -ewyatt will have a look and will see if we can have it reviewed by an attorney; Isa will run it by SIDA.
+ The blog comments layout has been broken for a while and we don't currently have Drupal expertise to fix. Should we consider moving to another blogging platform? Started writing a document on this. - It can wait until January; Gus might know some people who can fix the template in the meantime, will look into it; Pili will tt hiro when she's back from being afk.
Antoine: + WIP: A how-to-get-help page (part of https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30881) https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30881) Notes:
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TEAM LEAD NOTES:
Nick: 1) 0.4.1.4-rc released; waiting for any bug reports or feedback. Please let us know ASAP if something is broken! 2) Expect slow network team progress in August; many folks on vacation.
isabela: 1) almost done w/ all feedback review 2) training in DC w/ coach and money machine team 3) getting ready for the bug smash fund campaign that we will launch on August 1st 4) still have some feedbacks to finished (folks were away) will ping everyone on that
Sarah: 1) training in DC Wednesday 2) prepping for bug smash campaign to launch 8/1 3) prepping for DEF CON 4) BTCPayServer campaign finished and raised $18,892 5) meeting with board members and others to find connections to potential major donors 6) met with OTF to discuss next funding proposal 7) beginning to prep for YE campaign 8) afk from the 3-13th but will be checking email periodically and available on Signal
Georg: 1) digging out of backlog 2) done with feedback review so far (good stuff!) 3) moving forward with getting esr68 into shape (we'll hopefully have first nightly builds early next week)
Antoine: 1) weasel worked on creating a new virtual machine cluster to replacing our aging machinery 2) started working on reviewing our infrastructure, details in https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30881see https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30881see in particular https://help.torproject.org/tsa/doc/how-to-get-help/ https://help.torproject.org/tsa/doc/how-to-get-help/ :)
Antonela: 1) Back from vacs. Juggling with the backlog. 2) We ran a survey during the dev meeting about Tor Browser usage. We got 30 responses. Working on sharing the results with the lists. 3) Regular work with the anti-censorship, browser, OONI and community teams.
Erin 1) Insurance renewals 2) handbook 3) HR stuff
Gus: 1) Working on community portal - relay operations section 2) Joined rt this week (thanks Pili!), recruiting more volunteers to answer frontdesk and organizing an emergency plan (Cy is answering this week). 3) Helping Jon/Sarah/Steph on defcon preps 4) Writing Partnership Agreement based on OONI draft for S9 phase3 (remote training) 5) Following up with CCCamp and About:freedom cluster - https://events.ccc.de/camp/2019/wiki/Village:Tor_Project https://events.ccc.de/camp/2019/wiki/Village:Tor_Project
Philipp: 1) Published 24 hours worth of BridgeDB metrics on tor-dev@ and got useful feedback 2) Cecylia is attending the Citizen Lab's Summer Institute in Toronto 3) Reviewed a Tor Research Safety Board submission 4) Trying to focus more on RACE (PT spec improvements and obfs5 brainstorming/experimenting)
Pili: 1) S27: Monthly report and first work completion report 3) Playing with gitlab - created a number of repos and projects for UX and Community team 4) Community Portal 5) Hoping to help out with some funding proposals before the end of the week 6) Last week: Google Season of Docs candidate selection
Steph: 1) Training in DC Wednesday 2) Preparing for bug smash campaign launch - tor-project announcement, press release, blog post, social media 3) Preparing for defcon next week - materials, security, coordination 4) Responding to press inquiries
Gaba 1) training in DC w/ coach and money machine team 2) get up to speed from last week of being offline 3) getting the roadmap into gitlab and adjusting/testing how I think it should be used 4) we got a session about Tor accepted at the descentralized space at the mozilla festival in London at the end of October
Karsten: 1) Added Tom's bandwidth file archive to CollecTor (#30219) which concludes our efforts to archive bandwidth files (#21378).