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