On Mon, Mar 06, 2023 at 07:49:47PM +0100, nusenu wrote:
gus:
On Fri, Mar 03, 2023 at 11:26:07PM +0100, nusenu wrote:
I've got some practical experience with how things are (not) handled by the Tor Project in this space which discourages involvement. The past has also shown that proposals in this area are not handled as tor proposals in the sense of [1].
I believe some proposals about relay operators were not handled as people had different opinions about the Tor Community governance and its process.
I actually had something else in mind (see geko's reply) but if you say that people had no clear understanding or different opinions about community governance than it might also be a good time to start clarifying it.
The point "clarify and describe the different involved roles" as mentioned on Saturday's relay meetup is a good start in this specific context and I agree that it will be useful.
We're not in the process of approving any of them.
a few questions:
Can you describe the process these proposals will undergo after they got collected?
Who "approves" / rejects them?
Will it be a public and transparent process?
Who will be involved in the process?
How are relay operators included and to what extend?
Will "approved" proposals be enforced?
How will they get enforced? New tor release or directory authority vote?
Will directory authorities be formally required to enforce "approved" proposals?
Great questions.
- Yes, it will be a public and transparent process;
When geko highlighted the sponsor in the meeting something along the lines of "sitting down with our sponsor and defining criterias" (if you haven't been at the meeting don't take this too serious) it made me wonder: If this is a public and transparent process, who is financing this work? (dubbed S112)
If you're not familiar with project management practices at the Tor Project, it's important to note that Sponsor+code is simply a numerical code assigned by the operations/grants team to a particular funded project. It is not a cypherpunk "scramble box" as some may mistakenly assume.
The sponsor name, DRL (Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor - US Gov), can be found in the linked milestone that was previously shared, during the meetup, and is also publicly listed in our GitLab instance.
Milestone: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/44#tab-issues
S112 activity tracked with the label "S112" in our GitLab: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/issues/?sort=created_date&sta...
You can find all the current Tor Project sponsors, projects and reports here: - Project wiki page: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/sponsors-2023 - Current Sponsors: https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/ - Fiscal year reports: https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/
For those interested on learning more about S112 work, the Network Health team meet every Monday at 16 UTC, on #tor-meeting (irc.oftc.net), and we've been adding the relevant topics on the relay operator meetup agenda.
Our goal is to build this governance process.
Do you have a timeline for building and defining the governance process which probably should be the first thing to do so people can make up their minds on whether they like the process and want to be involved or not?
Sure, here is the timeline: October 2022 - January 2024
- We called for proposals from the community (March 3 2023) - Work on proposals (TPO) (like meta proposal about the process and governance and different stake holders) (March/April) - Proposal evaluation (May/July) - Events and offline discussions with community (August/September) - Approving proposals after feedback from the community and figuring out the details of enforcement/adhering to them (September-December) - Proposals go live (January 2024)
adopted by a meaningful fraction of the Tor community (e.g. providing valid contact information).
Can you elaborate on how you define "valid" in this context?
From the Expectations for relay operators:
"Be sure to set your ContactInfo to a working email address in case we need to reach you."
Since that document says nothing about verifying that string "hopefully valid" is in my opinion a more accurate description for it than "valid", no?
kind regards, nusenu
hm, for the scope of that document (Expectation for relay operators), I don't think we need to describe a verification process of "working email". For other proposals, it could be important to define the process, though.
But you can suggest a better phrase here: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/relays/-/issues/18
Gus