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I heard that Tor has a tracking system where all requests for help land. Assume that someone has some time over the day and want to help to answer those requests. What specific knowledge does one need to have and what processes exist to join the RT team?

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I am going to assume that the question is "How can volunteers be added to the Tor support team?" and give you a general answer. If this is more of a personal request, i.e. "How can Jens be added to the support team?", please contact me directly.

Everyone can contribute to the Tor Project with something, regardless of whether they are employees, contractors, or volunteers. We really appreciate the hard work put into Tor by volunteers all over the world.

If you want to help people better understand what Tor is and how to use it, I suggest you start with one (or more) of the following:

  1. Sign up on one ore more of our mailing lists, such as tor-talk, tor-dev, and tor-relays.
  2. Join us on IRC (#tor and a number of other channels on irc.oftc.net).
  3. Contribute with questions and answers on our Stack Exchange page.
  4. Review and comment on how we can improve the short user manual.

The Tor Support Team (aka "Support Team" and "RT Team") is a group of people who reply to support requests sent directly to our help desk. Most of the people in this group were hired as contractors earlier this year, but some of them started out as volunteers.

I am not against adding volunteers to the Tor Support Team, but I do want to ensure that the people we add are long-term volunteers known by The Tor Project. If you feel you fit into this category, and you want to be added to the Tor Support Team, please contact me directly.

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  • thx. I reformulated my question a bit to make it clear that I'm talking about volunteers in general.
    – Jens Kubieziel
    Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 20:01
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Responding to support requests is not a volunteer role. In 2012, the Tor Project received funding for support assistants and hired some volunteers in early 2013 to fill that role. This resulted in an expanded help desk that supported multilingual support requests. The Tor Project announced this change on the Tor blog.

Even though the support assistant positions have now been filled, new open positions are generally listed on the Tor Project website.

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    Everything in Tor can be done by volunteers or paid people. The support team should not be special and deny volunteers for no good reason. In this case we'd want volunteers to integrate with the Tor community first before adding them to the semi-private world of support. But there's no reason that only paid people can do support. I'd be glad to know that Jens is part of the support team.
    – karsten
    Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 12:24

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