Twenty contributors, three days, one goal: Bringing the Tor community together

Tor, in no small part, runs on the many contributions from our community of global volunteers. Since we all collaborate remotely, it was important to us to make time to see each other face-to-face and socialize. Having regular real-world meetings is especially crucial for integrating new volunteers into and maintaining existing relationships in our community.

It's been a while since we last had such a meeting and therefore a bunch of Tor folks stepped up trying to get one organized. We wanted to figure out whether we as a community can actually get such a meeting off the ground, what it would cost and what lessons we could draw for similar gatherings yet to come. This blog post is a report back from our experiences and will hopefully inspire the community to set up similar meet-ups in the future.

Before the meeting

The Tor meetings in the past have typically been organized by the Tor Project, Inc., focusing on staff while some community members were invited to join. Coordination for those events happened via Tor project channels, using Tor infrastructure.

How would it work not using any of those means to get our meeting off the ground? That was one of the questions we asked us when we thought about the meeting idea in spring this year. It turned out it was not that hard using a mix of a dedicated website, a form for collecting information about folks who wanted to join and finally a mailing list and Signal group for communication among attendees. On the invitation list were all of the Tor Project's core contributors and a list of people provided by the community team, given that we thought it was easier to organize a successful first community meeting if it would be invite-only including individuals and groups we already have some kind of relationship with.

The other important question was related to how we could keep the budget low so that as many people on our invitation list as possible could make it. To that effort we used the same venue, Hylkedam in Denmark, where the annual BornHack hacker camp is happening. Bringing along tents was optional as there was a reasonable amount of bunkbeds available. Vegan breakfast, lunch and dinner was prepared together. All in all we ended up at 200$ per person for 3 days of connecting, meeting and socializing.

I liked how everyone had the chance to speak up and influence the schedule each day during our opening and closing circles. Personally, I also enjoyed cooking dinner with some fellow Tor folks. It helps with bonding on a different level! - rgdd

But getting people to show up was one thing. Creating an engaging, productive three day program was another challenge entirely.

3 days of excitement about Tor

Preparing the structure of our gathering followed models we saw at previous meetings and events: we polled potential session topics and interests on our form and created structured sessions for the 3 days between breakfast and lunch and kept the afternoons open for ad hoc unstructured sessions and hacking time. Thus, the days followed the following cycle: opening session -> structured sessions -> unstructured sessions -> closing circle, which worked pretty well. We made sure we had note-takers for the structured sessions available so that folks interested could follow along from home by reading the notes on our website

Had we not gotten into the same room, our conversations about how to make the Tor consensus more robust with transparency probably wouldn't have happened. I'm looking forward to see what happens next---a few people are prototyping! - rgdd

We were a bit hesitant as to whether we could provide an inclusive and productive gathering for everyone given the different backgrounds of our participants. However, we got a good mix of Tor staff, relay operators and other volunteers working on Tor and in related areas at our gathering, which made the collaboration on different topics easy: the Tor staff was able to provide context on planned future work and missing pieces which we then could think through and work on together, which made a productive meeting for everyone. That way we were able to work on a wide range of topics quickly, from policies related to Directory Authorities over improving Grafana dashboards for relay operators to Tor and IPv6 and starting the Tor consensus transparency efforts, to name just a few.

What's next?

This community meet-up was (hopefully) not a one-off event, but rather the start of a series of similar ones. 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. Thus, if you are excited about what you read in this blog post and want to help out with future community gatherings, get in touch! We'd be happy as well to get 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!

A good next opportunity to get in tough will be a at the upcoming Chaos Communication Congress. We'll have a relay-operator and community meet-up. Please drop by if you are around and interested!