How to organize?

Posted on Oct 4, 2025

Schedule:

20 min brain storming
20 min structure the outcome
20 min profit

Structured notes

Brain storming

Categories:

Meeting people in-person
How to work between physical meetings
Fund raising and funding

Meeting people in-person

Valuable outcomes:

Building awareness (of Tor to the rest of the world)
Integrating people into Tor
TPI learning what is important to the community/the world

Meeting types:

community gatherings
1-hour (relay operator) meetup
village
spread Tor in other meetups related to Tor values (more local and accessible)
speaking at confrerences like DEFDON or computer science association meetups

How to work between physical meetings

event calendar

Fund raising and funding

Scope: Funding of meetings, development projects and everything else

outreach in .eu and maybe getting TPI to be a fiscal sponsor?
funding for community-driven projects and ideas

Next steps

Meeting people in-person

open call at some point for next Tor community gathering

How to work between physical meetings

shitposting is a good way of staying in touch (maybe get folks into #cakeorpie)
get connected on social media
event calendar (giulio/bic)
- maybe we even need a calendar policy (what goes in and who does it)

Fund raising and funding

exploring the space of options both for meeting-/project-based funding

Appendix (unstructured notes)

Brain storming

Scope, what would you like to hear or not hear?

not:

how can we convince tpi to care more about relay operators

want:

is having meets like this good, how to have them, how can they be useful, what are their value, etc.
- “twice a year we used to meet everyone”, i.e. meet the ppl you work with online
- we met ppl, got energized, talked about topics you want to work on, etc
- after 6 months, we could decompress and become friends and re-energized
- this is also about building trust; how do we get ppl involved and how do we build trust with others
- so what of this can be applied in a similiar – or different – way?
how do we organize stuff between meetings? (If we have meets)
- projects?
- working groups?
- spin offs that do stuff and then reconvene together
- maybe we have a project thing – what needs to be done, who works on what, etc.

Comment: at WHY 2025 relay ops meetup, related.

about distributing what tor is so it’s not self contained in company
ppl were keen on our thoughts on current political situation, centralization of tor as a US company. Can we do things to get funding from and do things via EU?

Funding?

This (TCG 2025) is the first time we try this meeting organization and format.

Initial idea: just to get it running would be a success
Down the line: could be other orgs (not necessarily TPI) that could fund meetings, e.g., so students can afford to attend

Comment: what to get out of meets like this

awareness; teaching the whole world what tor topics are, what we want etc.
integration: more ppl around the world doing tor things
help ppl inside TPI (and not here) to understand what the actual users, community and other human beings want Tor to be – a feedback loop.

Also social part, but that’s kinda part of “integration” above.

Challenge with this kind of meet, some ppl inside TPI would never think to go.

So basically, won’t meet the user.
But we won’t fix this here.

Approachability

I told a friend I work at tor
“can ppl work there?”, friends were surprised…
So this falls under “awareness” above.

Everyone here (at TCG) is already aware of what tor is. We didn’t reach anyone else for this first meeting. Next time, maybe a goal would be to get new people into this.

Or maybe Bornhack / WHY, etc., where compatible ppl are present. Maybe it’s not an operator meetup. Maybe it’s a Tor interesting meeting.

Operating a relay is not what most ppl want to do as their first thing
+1, community meetup where some ppl will be sitting and saying they run relays, and someone else “i just hacked on arti and it was fun”

CCC, BH, as such are good way to spread awareness, because probably ppl who know what Tor is and would probably like to get more involved.

Three ways of meeting people:

Physical meets like this.
1-2h meets we piggy-back on other events
Village idea (stretches all of an event), also similar to our Defcon booth

We could probably come up with more meet types where we will reach people that would/should know about Tor. For example Tor keynotes.

Satellite meeting: Many times we go to smaller events where we bring tor relay content. Meeting lots of people that are in a way interested in Tor or related work.

Interesting to find a way for feedback, e.g., our experience “in italy we do a lot of stuff”.
Interconnect more local events? CCC is expensive, it’s on holidays, excluding some set of ppl

For making it easier to present at other events, maybe we should have a slide deck that you can start from, or start from and adapt. Ready to go for a 10m slot, 30m slot, or whatever time we get. See ahf’s oniontex slide repository for many examples.

Talks we do in big conferences (satellite events or not), creates interest but not the same as a meet like this (TCG).

A 4th type of event? Targeting more university students?

Germany: student body is more or less self organized
CS students at each uni; organize by students for other students
Often on whiteboards you find onion addresses with old exams hosted, ie they know about Tor
They have some get togethers / conferences
Maybe we could offer to speak / meet here
Our old dev meeting model was to get hosted by a university and part of the meeting was doing outreach to that community. Free hosting and also audience-provided!

We have (had) a defcon booth and started building something like that for Europe too since shipping from us to eu is expensive.

stickers, tshirts, hoodies, …; want to get them produced/available in eu
and will probably keep outside of tpi to get them produced/stored in eu

communication

we’re here now
at WHY, we had only a mailing list
we could do better here
what is our communication channel after we leave here?
(a lot of people struggle with using mailing lists)

Scope: what is our target audience for meetups?

exit relays (relay operator meetup)
government outreach (has been done in the past)
here we’re talking about: reaching ppl that want to be part of tor: doing development and/or doing outreach about why it’s important etc. We need to do better on this as a community.

Tor relay meetup at WHY (?) felt a bit fragmented.

signal chat, had to find somebody and join
many people didn’t manage to get into the group
so basically: missing a forum, in broader sense, for finding each other; and knowing when and where there are events (ie a calendar)

crypto party in the old way?

there was a wiki with a calendar and you could add your event
the value it had while it was working, could be applied for relay operators or tor community at large

got involved in tor originally?

met a current member, went to business conference and ran into each other. Ended up talking about tor. After, had a system where I got tshirt for running a relay. The timing of interactions brought me in: got email about tshirt. “Hey i’m in $country, wanna get a tshirt and grab a beer”?
so basically, this human connection and reach out was what got me interested in tor

framing: why aren’t we doing this via TPI, and without coming off as a rogue group.

a lot of the events tpi go to are very unaccessible to people, e.g. congress expensive and difficult to get in
those who work in tpi can pay for themselves probably, but would be nice to have funding to also help others come

note funding not only about meetings, also doing things in between meets, like hacking on dev topics we discuss at meets.

but we need a place to learn about how to do it.

What is our plan for follow-up after meets? Important since we can’t just organize and then assume something will happen next.

someone find a meetup and go there
then what?

Sort and next steps?

Focusing on short-term next steps is probably the most valuable right now. What is hard to do offline, and valuable to do while we’re here face to face.

(Let’s not create issues on tpi gitlab etc for next steps.)

Staying in touch between meetups.

good next steps?
we have irc channels and stuff
we have the website

datapoint from BH

80 ppl volunteer, mostly from europe
around 50/50 danish / non danish
ppl are getting close where you have relationships and ppl become partners, and even get married and have kids by now, ten years in
we organize using a website with news, write when there are events coming up
also two signal groups always running, most ppl mute them
one for volunteers and one for attendees
- active all year round
- really nice to have this communication channel, “i’m planning to do this”, “just did this thing”, “planning to show this on bornhack next year”, etc.
- Why two? Because one for volunteers with things like “food for volunteers now”, “please remove this thing over at $foo”, etc. I.e. practical things during the event and social the rest of the year

shit posting is a good way to stay in contact! people send memes back.

less formal, more public? or send this kinda stuff in signal?
sometimes there’s not much to talk about!

#cakeorpie is a tor IRC channel where the only thing that’s off topic is tor!

we can add people to cakeorpie from here!

as an example, take today’s ipv6 session

don’t think we get all the things done
but would be nice to keep in touch about if we do any of it
should we have a project group for that, or spam in a more general group?
is it a good or a bad idea to organize working groups?
let’s start with a single channel, then add structure if needed? (To not over-structure.)

Anyone that can’t live without wiki / issue tracker?

we’ll get it when it is needed

calendar would be nice though, an event calendar.

tried to have this in tpi, but then tpi stopped those tickets.

so anything we do will be an improvement right now

there is a nice federated calendar where someone moderates it

works really well for community events
giulio will give it a go to set up
might need to draw a line for: what kind of events goes here
- “tor or place where ppl connected with tor community”, scope?
- scope also: public event?
- predictable way of getting in touch with tor ppl?
comment: would be nice to have something like “i’m going to be in taipei between date A and B, anyone want to talk about tor”?
- e.g. would have been cool if people could figure out where they can meet a core Tor contributor.
- or “i hoped someone would go, and i would like to tell ppl to go if they’re not already”
- can easily become noisy

few types of funding

buy the relay hardware and bootstrap
recurring funds, need this to survive for two months
run an event

problem with funds wrt. legal stuff?

not until you get (a lot) bigger

other open source projects, open funding

e.g. some org organized an annual conference; we have this amount of funds. Top 100 committers get funded to come.
this could maybe be organized with tpi, because they are a legal org, have book-keeping etc. already set up
- risk: we collect money towards spending in europe, and then the non profit has its own priorities

us/eu difference, sometimes important for the funding “most go to eu country” for example. And in the US there already is an org (tpi) that can do things in the US.

opencollective.com and probably others does this (taking a cut)

PETS has stipends for attending PETS.

They aim to get activists to integrate with the PETS researchers
maybe gathering places want to get tor people, that’s one way to get there

Consider this option: not doing all the money side at all. Upside: simpler. Downside: not as much diversity. But at the scale of 15k euro (like TCG 2025), an organizer can pretty much do it. Starting small and building over time.

if a thing grows to a size where 1-2 ppl can’t handle it, perhaps with the help from a company they know, maybe the thing is too large? Until proven otherwise, we could decide to keep things small enough for being manageable.

esp. it will be decentralized so $foo is not organizing it everytime.

next of this event?

one year from now?
if ppl enjoy the format and we (all) think its worthwhile to do in a year or sooner, then i think we (someone) should do it. ahf/ln5 are happy to be involved!
now we have a signal group where we can talk to people
different locations, and integrate with other things located in cities?
- e.g. can invite ppl from local hacker space, local university, etc. Not only tor people, but people who are interested in the topic

historical meetings,typical schedule

days 1-2: company side (core ppl attending)
day 3: rest, someone giving a talk at a university or similar
days 4-5: open hack days open to the public

didn’t scale – why would i stay when i need to go home to the family, going home end of day 2.

tor has grown so much that there are both “professtional tor ppl” (working 9 to 5) and ppl who are interested in spending time going to these kinda things (TCG2025).

hamburg good location, centrally located

maybe a community week together with internet archive? next one – “community do we have a place?”? Broader idea, attach a Tor Community Gathering to some ally org’s existing meetup.

it’s a next one, not the next one; i.e. this is a gathering, not the gathering. We don’t have to push for doing something like this within 12 months and otherwise we’ve failed. It can also be smaller than this.

this is meant as a complement to tpi, not a replacement. it’s more of a peer-to-peer thing – let’s spawn more of these

risk; spreading people too thin at some point. If there are many many small gatherings with 2-3 people. Have problem of reaching critical mass to get things working.

i.e. at this point would like to try to avoid this failure mode

Idea: event calendar is about upcoming events, but we also want to document past things that have happened. What were the sessions, where are the sessions notes, what did we learn

having a history that other ppl can see could help with momentum and transparency.