organizing new speakers-bureau list
In Seattle, I spoke to a bunch of people about a "Tor speakers bureau" idea -- basically a central group on the Tor side who keep track of what speaking things Tor people are doing, and learn about new speaking things (both proactively and by being the funnel where we send all the ones that invite us somewhere), and track what opportunities we're missing, and generally prioritize to make sure we're doing our conference outreach effectively.
Then I spoke to David, who said a "somebody should" sentence very close to a "Roger, you should delegate more" sentence.
So, I hereby put David in charge of moving this idea forward. :) With a supporting cast of Roger, Kate, Shari, and Alison.
Among the next steps:
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We probably want some public address for receiving speaker requests; and we should list that public address somewhere public.
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We may or may not want a separate internal discussion list. Maybe not yet?
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We should probably make a simple wiki page to explain what the list is for, so people can read about it and get up to speed if they weren't in Seattle.
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We should try to extract the list of currently known talks that Tor people are doing, so it is in one place.
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We should figure out good ways to make a public list of these talks, and keep it updated regularly. The old way was "on the Tor blog calendar" but that is non-ideal.
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We should accumulate a list of good Tor speakers, and what they're good at speaking about. These can come first from inside our community, but I think we'll all be happier if we start learning about external people who are great at speaking about Tor -- especially if we want to get good global coverage to be able to e.g. answer Campus Party invites from Brazil.
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One of our many goals there should be to match up speaking experience with how public or high-profile the event is, so we can get more Tor people out there talking about Tor, while still getting the right people in the most important places.
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Later, we should tell the world that we want to go explain Tor to them, and here's the contact address if you want one of us. We should expect to get many "I can't pay travel but I'd love to have you", and a smaller number of "I can pay travel". We should find the right balance, since sometimes the places that can't pay are the places we most need to be represented.