Volunteers and Tor

Abstract: How can we be nicer to potential volunteers who come up to us?

The issues

The current volunteer page is very long and confusion for new people. New people come to us all of the time and get lost on the page or finding their way through tor to being productive.

Hopeful outcomes

• prioritized list of things new people can do

Brainstorms

• facilitate tor user groups
• inventory of events where tor could be represented by volunteers
• better volunteer page with less info
• Code languages
  • Python
  • C++
  • C
  • Haskell
• match skills to mentor into organizations
• Hold booth at conferences
• list of what people can do, and prioritize the list

what could volunteers do?

• input for CRM system
• respond to t-shirt requests
• respond to sticker requests
• staff a booth at a conference
• run a relay
• do press interviews
• report to tor weekly news
• train/help tor user groups
• write documentation; text and videos
• do UX research
• distribute flyers
• code/patch bugs (listed by various levels of difficulty)

challenges to new volunteers

• process to train and empower volunteers
• look at the code commit process, others lack a process
• damian manages the code ideas for the volunteer page
• new volunteers take a lot of time
• org map of what products exist and how you can help
• perhaps this is a solved problem, look at Mozilla' s get involved section of their site
• see Tails' contribute pages
• focus on task area instead of products

steps to a solution

• need a volunteer coordinator to handle new volunteers
• redesign the web page
• derive categories for the page (strengthening the network, user groups/community building, research, software dev, outreach, documentation/training)
• determine points of contact for each category