Dear all,
the XSF will planning to apply this year again for the GSoC 2025.
If we will be accepted as an umbrella organisation, that acts as supervising/reference organisation for your XMPP projects we recommend to act quickly and start preparing your project if you want to participate with your project. This means usually:
- Read the guidelines: https://google.github.io/gsocguides/student/
- Read the setup and what you need to provide for last year: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Google_Summer_of_Code_2024
- Collect feasible ideas for newcomers (!) (they unlikely will implement A/V or MUC, not even close)
- Promote and search for potential contributors (even if you are not participating you can help)
Remember that this is not just a great opportunity for your project and project community. It's also a good chance for XMPP as a whole network, ecosystem as well as inspiring people around open-source development.
If you want to help me organising and promoting for this you are also very welcome!
I'm general, reach out to me by next week if you have interest and can think of ideas. The earlier the better.
If I don't hear back, I will not consider to apply this year.
(Remember that the XSF has not yet been approved to participate in GSoC 2025.)
Kind regards,
Eddie
___________________________
XSF Org Admin, GSoC 2025
I have created the membership application page for Q1 2025 at:
https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Membership_Applications_Q1_2025
The following XSF members have to reapply:
* Mario Sabatino
* Ludovic Bocquet
* Jan-Carel Brand
* Dave Cridland
* Nicola Fabiano
* Alexander Gnauck
* Daniel Gultsch
* Tim Henkes
* Ali Mattouk
* Edward Maurer
* Jérôme Poisson
* Jonas Schäfer
* Florian Schmaus
* Winfried Tilanus
* Trần H. Trung
* Arne-Bruen Vogelsang
* Matthew Wild
* Heiner Wolf
Regards,
Alex
Hi all,
Most of us have by now returned home from this year's Summit and FOSDEM
(except perhaps poor Goffi, who seems to be on an involuntary quest to
obtain very, very, very detailed know-how about much of the European
railway system).
I had a wonderful time. I huge thank-you goes out to everyone that was
involved in organising every aspect of the events of last weekend! It was
great seeing many familiar faces, as well as some new ones. I hope to see
you again soon!
I really enjoyed many of the conversations I had with visitors of our stand
at FOSDEM. It was good to see that the room in which the only talk on XMPP
was completely full. From that, I conclude that there is quite a bit of
interest in our protocol.
If the term "XMPP" attracts such attention from the FOSDEM crowd, we should
consider using it more explicitly during FOSDEM. Specifically, I'd like us
to consider renaming the name of our stand "the Realtime Lounge" into
something that contains the letters "XMPP". I believe that this would help
a lot for recognition with the public.
People that now look through the list of stands on FOSDEM's website, or on
the printed maps at the venue itself, do not see "XMPP" anywhere. I believe
it would be helpful if they would. For the years that I've visited, I
cannot recall having a non-XMPP presence in our stand, so I don't think
that we would be excluding projects or people by implementing a rename (but
please do correct me if I'm wrong).
A secondary, but to me separate, change that we might consider is moving
away from the "lounge" concept. Although it's nice to have a place to chill
out, those bean bags also take up a lot of space. From what I've seen in
the past few years, the lounge is almost exclusively used by people manning
the stands (myself included), and not so much by visitors. I don't believe
it's doing much these days to help us engage in conversations with FOSDEM
visitors. Maybe we can find a better use for that space in future editions
of FOSDEM.
Please share your thoughts on this. I'm conscious that much of what we do
is rooted in tradition and history, and I certainly don't want to trample
on that - but if there is generic consensus that some changes may be
desirable, it's something that we can consider for 2026.
Kind regards,
Guus
Hi everyone,
Going through the CoC again, I notice that it has a few gaps we should
probably address.
While the current wording explicitly prohibits racist language, there are a
lot of other *-isms which are unfortunately quite present in various spaces on
the XMPP network and which sometimes roll into XSF rooms.
I do not think that we want to be perceived as, for instance, an anti-LGBTQIA+
community, so we should extend the CoC to:
a) send the clear message to the world that we won't tolerate behaviour that,
and
b) give our moderators (that includes me in some places) the necessary holding
to enforce when necessary
Concretely, I propose that we add to 2.4 Be respectful, the following items on
the list of things to avoid:
> - Use of racist, misogynistic, anti-trans, anti-gay, ableist slurs, or other
> derogatory pejoratives for oppressed identity groups against such groups.
>
> - Blatantly racist, casteist, ableist, sexist, anti-trans, or otherwise
> offensive and bigoted discourse.
In addition, before the list of things to avoid, I would like to add:
> Respect others requests for space. That includes to disengage from a
> discourse if your partner(s) indicate that they do not want to discuss a
> topic any further. It is not easy to let someone be "wrong" on the internet,
> but boundaries are there to be respected.
To section 2.5 ("Be friendly and supportive"), I would like to add after the
first paragraph:
> This includes being mindful of the abilities of others; nobody is born an
> expert in anything and we all had to learn at some point. Be supportive of
> newcomers and learners. Do not be patronizing or condescending.
I may propose a PR against XEP-0458, but before doing so I wanted to offer
this for discussion on this list.
kind regards,
Jonas
Good news everybody!
It will come as no shock that we will have a Summit in Brussels, just
before FOSDEM. As is tradition, this includes the XSF dinner, which is
hosted by the XSF for its members, friends, and sponsors to thank them
for their hard work and support for the foundation and its mission. To
quote Ralph: "it's great fun."
The dinner will take place on Thursday 30 January, at restaurant
L'Auberge Bretonne (Brussselsesteenweg 670 – 3090 OVERIJSE). This is, of
course, also tradition. We would love it if you could make it. Please
let us know by filling in the form at https://forms.gle/S9i3wD6dmePHnovK6.
Timely as we are with organising this, you'll get plenty of time, just
as long as you'll fill in the form by Wednesday 18:00 UTC. That's a full
24 hours, who needs that much time to pick things anyway?
If you're not a member or sponsor, feel free to join us, but we'll ask
you to cover the costs of food, drink and transport yourself.
Hope to see you in Brussels,
Edwin
Hi everyone,
I've been wondering for some time if it wouldn't make sense to establish a
sister non-profit foundation in the European Union, given that many projects
and active people in our community are based there, and our annual summit is
held in Brussels. It seems more practical and could simplify potential legal
conflicts.
Additionally, current geopolitical circumstances make this seem even more
sensible.
We should also consider having a backup option in case things become untenable
in the US.
What are your thoughts?
Best,
Goffi
Dear all,
I just want to inform you that I am back from my long absence and vaccations in the nice sphere of South America.
I will try to scrape through the correspondence asap. I have seen that I have the honor to be Board member again and wanted to say thanks for this, too.
If there is anything of urgency, please let me know. I hope you all are good, too.
A happy new year,
Eddie
According to my records the following XSF members have voted via proxy
in the current voting period:
* gnauck (at) conversations.im
* jabber (at) larma.de
* jabberjocke (at) jabber.org
* lbocquet (at) jabber.org
* martin (at) mdosch.de
* mathieui (at) mathieui.net
* msavoritias (at) macaw.me
* p42ity (at) eversten.me
We have no quorum yet!
If you have not yet voted, please send a message to
xmpp:memberbot@xmpp.org.
If you have problems with memberbot please contact me directly by email
or xmpp.
Thanks,
Alex
Entirely true story: This year, I fumble-fingered my votes on Board, and
realised I was just as happy with the outcome as if I had not. Great
candidates, and if the final board doesn't include me, I'll be happy that
the Board is made up of some really good people who'll do a lot for the
XSF. I mean, vote for me, of course, but actually if you vote for other
people we'll have a great Board anyway, so really just vote if you haven't
already.
Council also has great candidates, and I'm particularly happy that not only
have most of the existing (very good) Council continued, but the "new" slot
will be filled by Jerôme, who should have run for Council years ago. But
it's a massive disappointment to see that we, as members, don't have a
choice - this has been the case for a couple of years. It's nice that the
choice we don't have is a great choice, of course. But it'd be better if we
had multiple great choices.
So, two questions:
- If you're a "technical" XSF member - written XEPs, write code, review
stuff, active in the technical discussions - what stops you from running
for Council?
- How can we encourage and enable people to run for Council?
My answer to the first is actually simple enough - I've been out of the
loop for a couple of years, and now I'm laser-focused on the server-side
(and Metre barely counts as a server). Plus, been there and done that. And
finally, I worried about the commitment level - Council needs timely,
detailed, responses to things.
My answer to the second mostly depends on everyone else's answers to the
first, though...
Anyway, it'd be good if in a year's time, there's 7 or 8 people
volunteering for Council, like Board (bewilderingly) is now.
Dave.
