Blizzard: A Postmortem

Maybe we have an infrastructure issue and not a resource issue

A few years ago my colleage and I were awarded a small grant to create a compatible plugin with Snowflake. Our reasoning was this: mutual aid. We know that people rely on both Tor and I2P, so what if we could provide scaffolding between the projects?

We did our best to promote the plugin, and received a moderate amount of feedback. Here is what I wish would have happened in the process, and where I feel that good footing in building censorship circumventing infrastructure was lost.

I really wish that our small project would have been given a usability and integration review by people who have knowledge of the situations where it may be needed. What would a stress test reveal? Could we provide focused context on use cases? Where could we improve the marketability of the solution?

Where do we take a moment to honour not just the code maintenance burden, but also the product development burden? What sort of feasible thing can we create without market strategy or research? I understand that some funding channels can only go so far, however, how would the impact of our efforts be greater if investments were made for more? How about if it was done using known partners in the community who would be provided with funds to support assessments and outreach? Imagine the possibilities for longterm partnerships and knowledge sharing if we could do this.

In my city, there is talk about labour shortages. There was just the threat our city transportation workers ( TTC ) going on strike. The truth is that that there is a shortage of people who can afford to work low paying jobs in an expensive city. The TTC workers are protecting what they care about and the ability to continue to work. When I think about conversations where we talk about limited resources I try to find the source of the issue. There are many people who I have met who seem to have limited time to work on maintenance issues because their project received funding that led to moving people to a tight deployment schedule for something else.

Maybe we have an infrastructure issue and not a resource issue.

Maybe we need advocates for the importance of maintenance and infrastructure building strategies. I am very sure that otherwise people are burning out, communication is breaking down, and we are competing instead of being neighbours. That is all fuelling fragmentation at a critical part of the stack, and it is only going to blow back on the people who depend on our work the most.

The more we communicate and work together, the better chance of ensuring that we are co-developing not just tools, but partnerships that can and will be able to react to and absorb threats.

To turn this back to Blizzard now, I do hope that anyone who found it was able to make use of it. I encourage people in the community to help create better compatibility between our tools.

sadie