Hi Guus,
thank you for bringing this up.
On Mon, Feb 3, 2025 at 3:32 PM Guus der Kinderen
<guus.der.kinderen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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).
I agree. The booth should be called: (Jabber) XMPP Standards Foundation
or something close that ideally contains both the words Jabber as well as XMPP.
This is both for discoverability for people that want to find us as
well as for just raising awareness that XMPP is still a thing. I
believe that even if people don’t decide to come by our stand just
reading the name in the booklet or the listing on the website can have
positive effects.
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.
I haven’t been at our FOSDEM stand in a while but last time I have I
made similar observations as Guus. No guest ever comes into the
"lounge" part.
cheers
Daniel