Goal 1: Grow relationships between partners and build community in Latinoamerica and East Africa

In this goal, we will continue building community relationships between partners in Latin America and East Africa. In the previous phase we organized meetups and saw how powerful it was for our partners to meet each other and learn from each other. We want to continue holding these gatherings and organizing them in ways where everyone gets a chance to share their experiences.

We aim to foster community between our partners in each region, and to help create space for our partners to support each other and conduct projects together. We also hope that this work will bring new organizations from the region to our network of contacts in order to expand and strengthen the digital security work in both regions.

To achieve this goal we will:

• Organize regional meetups with partners for them to network, share experiences, promote local events, and build partnerships to drive local events and training.
• Provide coordination assistance and financial support for partners to organize their own trainings.

Goal 2: Continue usability research and improve partner support

In this goal, we will continue conducting usability research and translating this information into suggested product improvements for the Tor engineering teams. Throughout this project, we have engaged our partners to help execute usability research with their networks, and during this goal, we want to understand how this process is working for our partners and improve the flow by updating our support materials. The result of this goal will help us collect even more information about Tor usability with target populations, which we use to inform improvements to our tools.

To achieve this goal we will:

• Conduct usability research in target countries.
• Collect feedback from participants and partners on the pain points associated with our current methodology for conducting remote, online usability research.
• Expand our research to include other kinds of activities, such as tests for low-bandwidth users in addition to traditional product usability testing.
• Improve the materials and guidance we provide to partners who conduct usability research for Tor.
• Coordinate with and onboard partners who are facilitating usability research.
• Analyze the information gathered from user feedback and translate the results into product improvements the engineering team can execute.

Goal 3: Increase capacity to meet user support needs

The work weʼve completed as a part of this project so far–teaching people about Tor and improving Torʼs usability for target populations–has led to more people using Tor and requesting user support. In this goal, we want to focus on increasing our user support capacity to meet the needs of this growing user base.

Right now, we use tools to organize user support questions and requests via email. We want to evaluate and migrate to an open source technology that lets us organize our user support via messaging apps like Telegram, which is quite popular in the Global South. We know messaging apps like Telegram work well for user support because of our experience with users from Russia during the censorship case at the end of 2021 and early 2022.

The Tor forum, launched during the previous project phase, has been a great success; we have learned how important it is to facilitate good communication with the user base and to have tools and resources to do so. As part of this goal, we will look into self-hosting the Tor forum, which is currently hosted by a third party. By self-hosting, we will have more control over the forum, be able to customize it in new ways, and be able to implement features like an .onion address to offer more privacy for our users. We will also update our documentation and investigate the integration between the documentation and the new Tor forum.

To achieve this goal we will:

• Increase our capacity to answer user questions.
• Improve our frontdesk tool by exploring the possibility of migrating to a better tool that can manage messaging apps with our users.
• Integrate the Tor forum with the Tor support portal.
• Update user support documentation.
• Self-host the Tor forum (currently hosted by a third party).
• Keep torproject.org webpage up-to-date.

Goal 4: Use an open source platform for translation

It would be impossible to reach all the communities we are reaching in the Global South if Tor Browser, our main website, community portal and training materials were not localized. During the previous project phase we worked on improving the localization process at the Tor Project. We automated the process of extracting strings from websites and other applications for them to be localized, which improved our workflow allowing us to increase the localization coverage of projects. We also implemented a step that allowed the translators to preview their translations on a staging server, this way they can quickly see their translations in context and fix any mistakes.

Itʼs important for us to improve the workflow for our volunteers and provide better tools for them since translation/localization is key for us to be able to reach users in the Global South.

For this upcoming period, we want to improve the translation experience for our volunteers by migrating to an open source platform called Weblate. By using Weblate instead of Transifex, we will have more control of the features to better manage our translators community. Contrary to Transifex, Weblate does not use trackers, which is something that our volunteers have complained about while using Transifex.

To achieve this goal we will:

• Ask for a project in https://hosted.weblate.org/ for the Tor Project.
• Update our localization scripts to work with this instance.
• Migrating our translation memory out of Transifex to Weblate.
• Include onboarding trainings to translators during the Localization Hangout we already host monthly.
• Migrating translation memory out of Transifex to Weblate.
• Reimplement translations preview to work with gitlabCI (previously implemented with Jenkins).