Privacy Guides Fund Committee Minutes from 2024-08-03

Attendance

Present: Jonah Aragon, Niek de Wilde, Daniel Gray, Freddy, Olivia

Justin Ehrenhofer (MAGIC President) joined meeting as non-voting advisor.

Agenda

  1. Jonah: Staff position proposal
  2. Justin: Meeting scheduling

Proposal: Establish Staff Position

We decided to budget $600/week to establish a part-time Project Director position [Appendix A], which will allow us to act quicker as an organization and respond to current events more rapidly. We acknowledged a generous anonymous donation making these plans possible earlier than expected. Justin advised that he would check into the legal side of some minor details and report back at a future date, which would not affect our decision. Freddy wants to establish specific, measurable criteria for the 9 month review point, which we will discuss at our next meeting.

Affirmative votes (5):

  • Jonah
  • Niek
  • Daniel
  • Freddy
  • Olivia

Proposal: Project Director Hire

We moved to hire committee member Jonah Aragon to the newly established Project Director role. We considered the possibility of searching for external candidates, but decided that the most efficient use of funding at this current time would be to have someone with direct Privacy Guides experience take on these responsibilities. We acknowledged the need to have a conflict of interest policy for board members, we determined that MAGIC's existing policy should be sufficient, but we will consider adopting stricter policies on top of it in the future. Justin requested unanimous approval for this decision.

Affirmative votes (4):

  • Niek
  • Daniel
  • Freddy
  • Olivia

Recused/Abstained (1):

  • Jonah

Meeting Schedule

Justin advised we meet monthly at minimum. We agreed to set the next meeting date for September 7th.

Appendix A: Project Director

A proposal to establish a part-time Project Director position at Privacy Guides, which would be responsible for expanding our educational content and keeping up with most day-to-day tasks. The position reports directly to the executive committee.

  • Start date: August 12 at earliest
  • 20 hours / week
  • $30 / hour
  • 1 year contract term, option to renew at 9 months

Responsibilities

  • Research, writing, and reviewing changes for the main website.
  • Creating dedicated product review articles for tools we recommend.
  • Community interaction on Discourse, Matrix.
  • Fundraising
  • Creation of course curriculum for learn.privacyguides.org based on existing site resources.
  • Research and writing for This Week in Privacy show.
  • Training and supervision of all employees.
  • Onboarding, training, and being generally available for new volunteers.
  • Executing the overall vision of the executive committee.
  • Daily social media posting/engagement.

Special Privileges

The committee would agree to delegate these privileges to the project director:

  • Blog publications without prior review
  • Social media postings without prior review

Other work (e.g. changes to the main website) would continue to fall under the standard change review process which applies to all contributors.

Short-Term Goals

There is a backlog of tasks that should be completed before moving on to regular/day-to-day activities.

  • Expanding Privacy Guides content in multiple categories:
    • Health & Fitness
    • Phone/VoIP Providers
    • Browser Fingerprinting KB article
    • Abuse Defense/Privacy Info
    • Government Resources KB section
    • Self-Hosting Guides
  • Reviewing all existing content to add academic/scholarly sources where appropriate
  • Publishing a 2024-2025 roadmap for Privacy Guides to the blog
    • This would essentially consist of the plans outlined in this proposal

Medium-Term Goals

These are the general tasks we expect to achieve over the next year.

  • Expanding our knowledge base
  • Completing full-length reviews for products we currently recommend
  • Reviewing new tool suggestions as needed
  • Creating course content based on website information
  • Restarting This Week in Privacy

Long-Term Goals

  • Fundraising
  • Exploration of a membership program