Roger:
- Roger is giving a short summary on things we did last time (see: 202209MeetingCoreContributors to get up to speed)
- How is the current situation:
- we used to identify good people and then invite folks to meetings and then folks got nominated. Problem due to lack of dev meetings; that pipeline is broken currently
- process for nominating: any core contributor can propose someone but maybe a better structure would allow Tor in a better way as some teams might be busy
- tor-internal@ is not the solution as folks are floating around, feeling unattached and thus a losing interest
- We could reuse the membership-advisors@ group to organize the process better
- Roger gives an overview of benefits one gets from being a core contributor
- e.g. a @torproject.org
- important ideas from last time:
- cross-team working group and getting core contributors better integrated that way
- getting carved out some time from our "booked" time for integrating and helping new core contributors
Gus:
- improving our core contributor processes should mean filing tickets in tpo/community/policies
- we need a new nomination process as going to conferences and events to meet new people needs some changing
- cross-team work did not happen because of emergencies, like Iran censorship
- roadmap work was preventing to spend time on cross-team work idea
- how can we have an emergency fund for that or how can we create more capacity on teams to deal with emergency?
- Moritz from Torservers did great work wrt relay operators in the past but that is currently not really happening that way; we need to get more Tor relay operators involved
- we don't have space inside the team work to deal with volunteers and meetings changed within Tor towards BBB meetings; makes things harder
- Gus's plan: to have a set of contractors we could hire fast
Feedback from participants in the session:
- wrt crisis: we might miss tapping into diaspora communities; it's not about more money only; solution: crisis outreach through the community channel
- should employee apply being a core contributor?
- do i spend my time doing deliverables or do i spend time growing Tor and how do we balance that?
- we need to make sure folks in different time zones can participate in meetings
- core contributors have repeatedly the problem: there is a funded project which started 8 months ago and is related to what I am doing but I did not know about it
- vouch system helps connection to individuals, it gives transparency which is great; it still sort of self-selects for self-motivated people; maybe we could have a buddy-style system, having someone new contributors could talk to and get familiar
- gsoc or outreachy people join but then folks finish university or life comes in, how do we keep those folks around as we have otherwise e.g. maintenance burdens for projects they started?
- for the buddy system: folks bringing the people in should be the buddy; formalizing might not being a bad idea
- what are emergencies and what could that mean, we should and could plan for emergencies way ahead (folks to reach out to etc.); we need to have a larger structure for emergencies
- tor-assistants@ list existed with a somewhat related purpose before the core contributors idea
- DDoS as an example of an emergency; when we have emergencies we need to have a megaphone to ask the world can you tell us what is going on? What specific DDoS e.g. do you see? And THAT would be empowering those groups to be feeling as part of the Tor community
- there might be never a not-emergency situation, so what do we count here?
- we won't solve the issues with the core contributor process/issues if we only spend like 1 hour every 6 months; we should have an ongoing discussion about these issues; maybe some new policies and those new policies provisional for the first X months so we can amend them to find bugs in them
- we should not leave this meeting without committing to some specific way to continue the discussion
- we should remove people as well as adding people; it's not really clear when people are in which category
- maybe not getting more people into secret core but at the same time making more internal things public
- how do we raise objections to additions properly? route those through the community council?
Gus:
- we abandoned tor-internal@ discussions and things got more public but that might be risky for contributors like those in China; how can we grow community in other spaces; integrating them in sponsored BBB meetings might not be the right thing; maybe the emergency fund could be a good way here
- next steps and final thoughts:
- think about Tor having a fund for whatever we want to define as an emergency
- emergency plan should have a facilitator; involves finding new people, contacting teams that need to fix things, getting back to folks we reached out for help
- we need changes in our membership related documents; folks should start filing tickets in the community/policies project
- due to folks helping bypassing censorship in Iran we have like a ton of folks that helped growing Tor (by running snowflake bridges); no new core contributors but still a lot of volunteers helping out