The Tor Project Unveiling the new Tor Community portal

Community is at the core of Tor's success, popularity, and survival. We would not have a network with the security properties it has if it weren’t for the thousands of volunteer relay operators. We would not have Tor Browser if it weren’t for our open source community. People would not know about Tor if it weren’t for our community of trainers and translators who help us make sure educational information about Tor and our tools are accessible to everyone. We also count on a community of researchers, designers, developers, bug reporters, documentation writers, and many more to keep Tor strong.

It's about time that the Tor Project has a dedicated place to help you!

Today, we are officially launching our Community portal. This is part of our continuous effort to better organize all of our different content into portals. The Community portal contains six sections: Training, Outreach, Onion Services, Localization, User Research, and Relay Operations. These resources are organized around existing streams of work, and each one includes ways for new collaborators to get involved. In some sections, you'll find new content. In some sections you'll find resources that already existed but were buried on our website, difficult to find, or outdated. These resources are now refreshed and easy to find.

If you contribute code and are wondering why you don't see a section dedicated to your work, that’s because we are in the process of building and releasing a Developer portal dedicated to all our free software projects. The Developer portal will house information about how to contribute to each of these projects.

Training

Over the past two years, our Community and UX teams have implemented a feedback program designed to provide Tor training for human rights defenders, journalists, and activists in the Global South. Based on this experience, we have created a dedicated training section of the Community portal. Inside of this section, you will find slides, risk assessment templates, and materials to help you organize your own Tor training with your group or organization. There are many ways to explain and teach about Tor and we'd like to hear about how you do it.

Outreach

In the Outreach section, you'll find our events calendar, materials like flyers and pamphlets to spread the word about Tor, and instructions on how to run your own Tor meetup in your city. Outreach and meetups are extremely powerful ways to share knowledge and build local Tor communities.

Onion Services

Onion services operators form a highly technical and skilled community that has grown to include media outlets and businesses that use this technology to provide a more secure service for their users. We have organized the onion services a section to include guides, tools, and explanations about onion services and their privacy and security benefits. You can help decentralize the internet by onionizing your website!

Relay Operators

The Tor network infrastructure is run by thousands of volunteers around the world. The relay operators section is dedicated to explaining the different types of nodes on the network, how to install a relay on different platforms, where to find technical support, and how to be part of the relay operators community. Running a relay is an example of how you can easily help the Tor network and its users.

User Research

Unlike much of the tech industry, the Tor Project does not collect behavioral data on our users to conduct user research. Instead, we have created a workflow that allows us to interact directly with users, with their consent, in order to conduct such research. Our Community portal has a dedicated space where volunteers can learn how to help our UX team run user research on Tor tools with their communities. In this section you will find our Research Guidelines, our reports on previous research and methodologies, and Tor Personas, a tool that helps us to human-center our design and development processes. This section also has information about our team’s mailing list where you can join and be part of this community of design researchers!

Localization

We are a global community, and it's crucial that our tools and portals are available in every language. Volunteers from all around the world help us with this translation work. In the Localization section, you can learn how to plug in to this work and which projects need help. Most of our localization efforts are hosted in the Localization Lab Hub on Transifex, a third-party translation platform.

The Community portal itself is not yet localized. If you would like to contribute to that please check this section out!TagscommunitytraininglocalizationUXtor relay operatorsonion servicesoutreach

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