[Members] Re: Chat of the Future Initiative

On Sun, 11 Jan 2026 at 13:52, E.M. <emus(a)mailbox.org> wrote: I think if you'd simply dropped an email to the members list prior to the announcement, and/or run it past Board, then you'd have received different reactions. In fact, had you just given Board 48 hours notice before you published something unsanctioned to the XSF Blog, none of this mess would have happened. Instead the PR for the blog post was opened and merged in less than that. There's a note on it from Guus, who is both Board and SCAM, saying he was unaware. From an organisational perspective, this is very poor. As I note later, this will require substantial damage control. The Comms Team is chartered to do specific things, as is SCAM. We don't do particularly formal charters in the XSF; perhaps we should. But the Comms Team has this description: https://xmpp.org/about/xsf/comm-team/ Now, that reads to me as being internal and external communication "from" the XSF "to" interested parties. I think organising an event, or series of them, is not what we'd expect - especially when we have a SCAM team which has a charter (an actual one!) of: https://xmpp.org/about/xsf/scam-team/ So, what we're left with is that we have one team specifically designed to do meetups, and a comms team specifically designed to handle informing on news and recent developments. What this is, as best as I can determine, is a series of events to gather inbound information. Whether you argue it's best for the Comms team to run this or not, it's certainly fair I think to suggest that the SCAM team is the one this fits closest, and should have been consulted at the very least. What I find surprising here is that you're saying things like "how far we are allowed to go", and in other messages apparently complaining that the Board insisted you consult with the membership for the di.day initiative. I'm all for autonomy, but the Comms Team taking on things clearly outside its charter without consultation and without even involving the team chartered to run such things seems to me to be a worrying overreach. This is the kind of thing that I would expect the Board to react to by increased oversight and decreased autonomy. This is especially frustrating when the Comms Team has been doing a pretty good job of improving our outreach, and until now has been operating very nicely indeed without any need for this kind of active scrutiny. The problem for the Board is that this is an organisation-level screw-up, and therefore is their responsibility to sort out. I do not envy them. ### Point of critique 2: Unclear purpose I think there are many applications of XMPP at scale. WhatsApp, for one. Fortnite for another. I think our main problem as a community is that these people aren't involved at all (anymore, at least). Anyway, I don't entirely disagree, but a major shift in the XSF like this would be a Board level decision in my view. Again, I'm fine with this as a general statement. However, this is an intentional change to how the community collaborates, which has deep effects throughout the organisation. This would - in my view - be outside the scope of what SCAM could do, and absolutely outside the scope of what the Comms Team is chartered for. Again, this devolves to the Board as a result. Once again, nothing here (or in subsequent points) is unreasonable - but it feels like a Board level project. Getting projects in front of an audience to talk about what they're doing is absolutely 100% in the remit of the Comms Team. Doing that would not require any particular Board oversight at all, in my view. Unfashionable, I know, but I'm not that excited by tooling choices. Whatever works effectively is good by me. Open Source > Open Standard > closed, but not to the extent it detrimentally affects the outcomes. I appreciate others feel more strongly, and have opinions about this specific tool. I'm afraid that "sorry" is not good enough in this instance. The XSF has formally and officially announced a major series of events, but the XSF had no knowledge of this. This is fundamentally broken. We need, as a community and and as an organisation, to do two things: * In the short term, we need to fix the situation. Whatever anyone might have thought, we now have a series of events scheduled. I think withdrawing these will also look awful, so we - the XSF, not just the Comms Team - need to figure out what we do to make best use of these. * In the longer term, we need to ensure that Work team leadership fully understand the scope of their autonomy. Whether that's more formalized charters or Board involvement in the teams I don't know (and mostly don't care), but I think that the Board needs to do something. I don't know what that feedback was, but indeed we do have a Code of Conduct. If you have examples, please do ensure the Board is aware (until they form a specific Conduct Team). Dave.