3 Days of Fun with Tor

After organizing a successful first community gathering last year in Denmark, we were eager to find out: Could we get another productive, community-organized meeting off the ground taking into account what we've learned so far?

Preparations

We decided to do the next community gathering organized by us at the same location we used last year: Hylkedam, in Denmark. We knew it worked well, was sufficiently cheap, and we could likely cut down the overall planning overhead given our past experience there. And, indeed, planning was minimal, re-using much of the "playbook" we developed for our first meeting last year. We spent most of our preparation time on revamping our meeting website. We have a shiny new onionized space now, including a public mailing list!

3 days of fun with Tor

We gathered on the weekend of March 13 - 15 at Hylkedam. Overall we were a little less people this time (around 12) but had, on the plus side, participants with backgrounds not being present at our first Tor community gathering: we got the research angle covered this time (with focus on anti-censorship) and had people from the Reproducible Builds project attending. The latter allowed us to think about potentially doing community gatherings together, which would make collaboration and sharing of ideas easier between our projects. Talking about research on the other hand has been very inspiring as we could see what is currently happening in the research world and help shaping particular project plans by explaining related tools and already exsiting projects and needs within the Tor eco system.

Apart from the new contributions we were happy as well to see that various work started at the previous gathering got picked up and pushed forward again, showing the overall commitment of our volunteers in the community. Notably, we saw further improvements to the network social graph proof of concept project and the relay operator Grafana dashboard. We also continued the discussion around consensus-transparency.

We had the usual structure during our meeting days, following the established cycle of: opening session -> structured sessions -> unstructured sessions -> closing circle, which, again, worked pretty well. Unstructured sessions included general free hacking time and room for getting ad hoc together, thinking through or working on a topic that might have come up during the more structured sessions previously or is just not ready for "prime time" yet. We think that this time without a moderator and a clear session time limit is an essential part of making the whole meeting productive, as it gives the participants the freedom to work on random things they are interested in and might get excited about.

For the structured sessions we made sure we had note takers again, so someone not being able to attend can get up to speed afterwards. We had a set of different topics again, ranging from anti-censorship related sessions to an update on upcoming changes for relay operators and a session dedicated to how the community can get organized itself, so we would have similar gatherings or an 'onion festival' in the future. Check out the session notes on our website, in case you are interested!

What's next?

We plan to have more Tor community meetings in the future. As already said: they don't have to be at Hylkedam (we'd like to see other venues as well!), nor does it have to be the same group of people sharing the organization workload. So, if you are excited about what you read in this blog post and are experiencing a serious case of FOMO or want to help organize future community gatherings, get in touch! Our mailing list[3] is a good starting point for that.

The same goes for providing feedback about this format and how we can make such events more inviting and inclusive in the future. Want to be invited, too? Let us know as well!