Chat of the Future Initiative
Dear all, the XSF Communication Team is pleased to announce a new initiative to help evolving the XMPP ecosystem in a broader and aligned perspective. This should cover discussions, development but also extended public communication and presence. As this is being setup in an iterative way its participants will be able to form and steer the collaborations direction over time. You can read the full blog post here: https://xmpp.org/2026/01/chat-of-the-future-initiative/ After a number of questions let me elaborate a bit more. So, when you join the session(s) we will have a interactive collaboration board present where we will conduct different exercises. We start with basically exposure and a discussion of the networks status quo is as everyone sees it from their corner. If you have ideas of what you would like to change, you can just propose those. Ideas could be for example that members from the XMPP community are interest in an organised (regular?) interoperability meeting on certain XEPs. Others think of more engagement along encryption or building a better landing page for developers. In the end, all those great ideas and constructive feedback can be brought to the first session, but also at a later point. Out of this, the round will form a collaborative direction that anyone interested can join, commit and contribute to. There are more and other directing and hopefully fun exercises of this nature and we will collect, review and discuss ideas that could be worth moving on within a couple of months. Ideas, to be shaped in smaller activities, with no long time frames but effective outcomes that the ecosystem benefits at user or (new) developers level. We hope this is a motivating opportunity for the XMPP network and help us to step ahead all together. We also believe that such a collaboration can enable the network to evolve and gain new momentum and result in strong benefits for all actors. Feel free to comeback with your thoughts already. Best regards from the Communication Team, Eddie
Dear members of the XMPP Community, this week the XSF Communication Team, with me as driver and the one taking full responsibility here, announced the "Chat of the Future Initiative". It's true that this might have come to most of you without much of a further notice. So, after numerous confusions and negative reactions, I would like to mend things up by trying to elaborate, apologize, while, at the same time, see if we can turn this into a more suitable proposal for everyone. There are one or two proposals. First of all, I would like to apologize if this came out of nowhere to many of you. Just because one has best intentions, it doesn't mean it's executed in the best possible way. I certainly take away that you would have rather be informed earlier and filled up with more details as to have a better understanding of the concept. To make things better and help reassure everyone I will now try to elaborate on the points most heavily criticized. ### Point of critique 1: Members have not been involved * In the past we were, often times, under the impression that we received few feedback on the work we did as well as reactions in the mailing list or chat. When preparing this, I don't intended to put efforts on anyone when it comes up to extensive work on pure organization. Now, with a better grasp and understanding about the sensitivity and expectations within the organization and community I will try to improve. * In addition here my question if you would have expected this to be organized by e.g. SCAM team or so? To us, as the Communication Team, then it's also a question about how far are we allowed to go with the ambitions we see. ### Point of critique 2: Unclear purpose * Intentions: I believed for a long time that we, as an ecosystem, can and need to do more beyond single projects and developing a technology, that is, to my impression, at risk of becoming more and more niche. We can build the best RTC protocol and technology in the world, but if there is few application to a significant scale - well... * Adding a new holistic space for collaboration with the community: This posses no harm nor threat to other spaces we actually have, and furthermore, I believe this will provide them with more value. It is also conceived to happen more frequently and the invites are simply a first shot in the calendar. * This is an offer for a talk: Online, with options to include more people to join, and bring with them their different backgrounds and views and ideas. People, that may struggle to participate in other contexts. Those talks are planned to be guided by your interaction in a collaborative space. It's for example planned to ask you about your perspective on the status quo of the XMPP ecosystem. What are we getting right, what are we not? Where is it that we see room for improvement? Can we formulate any activities out of this? Where is it that we concur a common ground to act? Over the sessions we will get a more clear picture here and steer it together. * Potential areas to act that have been told me as an example: * Interoperability sessions * Encryption (of the Future?) * Onboarding of Developers * XMPP Myths (you folks mentioned that two years ago) * XMPP on iOS (or other platforms) * ? * (Here is already the chance for you to mention more) * Opportunity to form and organize beyond our common horizon: Far thinking from here, this can help us formulate more strategic thinking and act accordingly thorough on the entire XMPP ecosystem. Building momentum around this can also allow us to gain more interest in the technology as well as provide us more resources etc. That is also why its called "Chat of the Future Initiative". * Communication: This is not barely discussions and activities on the ecosystem in general, it should also come with benefits to your projects. In that regard its planned with presence in the media channels we have (and are expanding to) and offer >explicitly< participating actors and projects. This is an opportunity for you to take advantage out of it. ### Point of critique 3: Choice of tooling * Without going into discussion regarding Mural again, I will try to migrate to Draw.io (yes!), but due to performance issues, we'll use it in an asynchronous way. Though, if you want to add your perspective, that requires you to take the time in advance now. Thinking of it, it might also be helpful actually. The session(s), will be the place to discuss and focus about it. I hope this helps to close the gap and gain your interest and curiosity. Last point as critique back: I made mistakes here. Yes, and I'm sorry. But some of the feedback received was certainly out of line on how we want to communicate, at least from where I am standing. This is not the first time that this happens and if we do not react to this as community we will stay where we are. With best intentions, Eddie On 05/01/2026 22:58, E.M. wrote:
Dear all,
the XSF Communication Team is pleased to announce a new initiative to help evolving the XMPP ecosystem in a broader and aligned perspective. This should cover discussions, development but also extended public communication and presence. As this is being setup in an iterative way its participants will be able to form and steer the collaborations direction over time.
You can read the full blog post here: https://xmpp.org/2026/01/chat-of-the-future-initiative/
After a number of questions let me elaborate a bit more.
So, when you join the session(s) we will have a interactive collaboration board present where we will conduct different exercises. We start with basically exposure and a discussion of the networks status quo is as everyone sees it from their corner. If you have ideas of what you would like to change, you can just propose those.
Ideas could be for example that members from the XMPP community are interest in an organised (regular?) interoperability meeting on certain XEPs. Others think of more engagement along encryption or building a better landing page for developers. In the end, all those great ideas and constructive feedback can be brought to the first session, but also at a later point. Out of this, the round will form a collaborative direction that anyone interested can join, commit and contribute to.
There are more and other directing and hopefully fun exercises of this nature and we will collect, review and discuss ideas that could be worth moving on within a couple of months. Ideas, to be shaped in smaller activities, with no long time frames but effective outcomes that the ecosystem benefits at user or (new) developers level.
We hope this is a motivating opportunity for the XMPP network and help us to step ahead all together. We also believe that such a collaboration can enable the network to evolve and gain new momentum and result in strong benefits for all actors.
Feel free to comeback with your thoughts already.
Best regards from the Communication Team, Eddie
Hi Eddie, I think having a conference call¹ to bring developers, users and other community together, to collectively discuss what they want from the XMPP ecosystem is an excellent idea. If you had brought this idea to the list earlier my only feedback would have been to make the announce closer to the sentence above and not write pages upon pages of corporate jargon and marketing slang. cheers Daniel ¹: Using some open source tools like jitsi or BBB.
On Sun, 11 Jan 2026 at 13:52, E.M. <emus@mailbox.org> wrote:
### Point of critique 1: Members have not been involved
* In the past we were, often times, under the impression that we received few feedback on the work we did as well as reactions in the mailing list or chat. When preparing this, I don't intended to put efforts on anyone when it comes up to extensive work on pure organization. Now, with a better grasp and understanding about the sensitivity and expectations within the organization and community I will try to improve.
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.
* In addition here my question if you would have expected this to be organized by e.g. SCAM team or so? To us, as the Communication Team, then it's also a question about how far are we allowed to go with the ambitions we see.
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/
The Communication Team’s mission is to inform the XMPP community and interested parties on news and recent developments within XMPP ecosystem.
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/
The Summits, Conferences And Meetups work team is responsible for supporting XMPP-related summits, conference activity, and meetups.
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
* Intentions: I believed for a long time that we, as an ecosystem, can and need to do more beyond single projects and developing a technology, that is, to my impression, at risk of becoming more and more niche. We can build the best RTC protocol and technology in the world, but if there is few application to a significant scale - well...
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.
* Adding a new holistic space for collaboration with the community: This posses no harm nor threat to other spaces we actually have, and furthermore, I believe this will provide them with more value. It is also conceived to happen more frequently and the invites are simply a first shot in the calendar.
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.
* This is an offer for a talk: Online, with options to include more people to join, and bring with them their different backgrounds and views and ideas. People, that may struggle to participate in other contexts. Those talks are planned to be guided by your interaction in a collaborative space. It's for example planned to ask you about your perspective on the status quo of the XMPP ecosystem. What are we getting right, what are we not? Where is it that we see room for improvement? Can we formulate any activities out of this? Where is it that we concur a common ground to act? Over the sessions we will get a more clear picture here and steer it together.
Once again, nothing here (or in subsequent points) is unreasonable - but it feels like a Board level project.
* Communication: This is not barely discussions and activities on the ecosystem in general, it should also come with benefits to your projects. In that regard its planned with presence in the media channels we have (and are expanding to) and offer >explicitly< participating actors and projects. This is an opportunity for you to take advantage out of it.
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.
### Point of critique 3: Choice of tooling
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.
Last point as critique back: I made mistakes here. Yes, and I'm sorry.
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.
But some of the feedback received was certainly out of line on how we want to communicate, at least from where I am standing.
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.
Hello, first of all thanks for taking the time to respond. Below, I ask three questions to everyone on my role and responsibility. @Daniel: Thanks for the supporting the idea in general. That helps for sure. And yes, I took my lesson already. @Dave: Same here, I took my lesson and agree with most points. In general, acting like this is not my common behavior as you hopefully know me. Indeed, I actually believe I reach out a lot, if not too much. To my impression so far I have been very punctual up to rather ask on almost everything, right? That may also explains why my thinking did not see a big problem in "just doing something" once instead of long discussions the time we could use better. (Just to give you my perspective) That also wonders me why sentences like this appear:
[...l] in other messages apparently complaining that the Board insisted you consult with the membership for the di.day initiative.
I don't see where I did complain here and I followed as I have been asked to? Way before this idea came to my notice, community members reached out to the di.day organisers (no one here asked the XSF). Then they approached me. Looking at the situation I just intended to hear for confirmation if that's okay as it's already "out there". Under these circumstances I did not see a big point to discuss joining the media campaign. Its of course okay to say "let's ask the XSF members what else we can do". I'm not sure why this is raised. But we are getting off topic.
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.
In my perspective before, this would mostly be asking others to do efforts and I did not intend to scare them away nor ask anyone to take over heavy lifting organizing this. I didn't see that to be realistic and took it on me.
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.
And it's the same for me, I hope that's also clear. Unfortunately and with regrets, I ended-up at 'closed', not seeing this brings so much harm to the idea.
I would expect the Board to react to by increased oversight and decreased autonomy I certainly did not wanted to ruin anything for others. See below.
@all: Realizing this is seen as harm to the organisation and community, which I apologize for again for and try to rescue what I can, as well as has lead to frustration with my person I would like to ask everyone and the official roles: - Do you want me to continue/stop with this initiative? (I mean if I put everyone off with this, it doesn't make sense anymore.) - Furthermore, do you still trust in me in my role and want me to continue here, too? If the response is a no, I offer to step down from my role if that helps reducing harm. - Anything else you want me to do now/soon? Best regards, Eddie On 11/01/2026 16:12, Dave Cridland wrote:
On Sun, 11 Jan 2026 at 13:52, E.M. <emus@mailbox.org> wrote:
### Point of critique 1: Members have not been involved
* In the past we were, often times, under the impression that we received few feedback on the work we did as well as reactions in the mailing list or chat. When preparing this, I don't intended to put efforts on anyone when it comes up to extensive work on pure organization. Now, with a better grasp and understanding about the sensitivity and expectations within the organization and community I will try to improve.
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.
* In addition here my question if you would have expected this to be organized by e.g. SCAM team or so? To us, as the Communication Team, then it's also a question about how far are we allowed to go with the ambitions we see.
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/
The Communication Team’s mission is to inform the XMPP community and interested parties on news and recent developments within XMPP ecosystem.
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/
The Summits, Conferences And Meetups work team is responsible for supporting XMPP-related summits, conference activity, and meetups.
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
* Intentions: I believed for a long time that we, as an ecosystem, can and need to do more beyond single projects and developing a technology, that is, to my impression, at risk of becoming more and more niche. We can build the best RTC protocol and technology in the world, but if there is few application to a significant scale - well...
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.
* Adding a new holistic space for collaboration with the community: This posses no harm nor threat to other spaces we actually have, and furthermore, I believe this will provide them with more value. It is also conceived to happen more frequently and the invites are simply a first shot in the calendar.
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.
* This is an offer for a talk: Online, with options to include more people to join, and bring with them their different backgrounds and views and ideas. People, that may struggle to participate in other contexts. Those talks are planned to be guided by your interaction in a collaborative space. It's for example planned to ask you about your perspective on the status quo of the XMPP ecosystem. What are we getting right, what are we not? Where is it that we see room for improvement? Can we formulate any activities out of this? Where is it that we concur a common ground to act? Over the sessions we will get a more clear picture here and steer it together.
Once again, nothing here (or in subsequent points) is unreasonable - but it feels like a Board level project.
* Communication: This is not barely discussions and activities on the ecosystem in general, it should also come with benefits to your projects. In that regard its planned with presence in the media channels we have (and are expanding to) and offer >explicitly< participating actors and projects. This is an opportunity for you to take advantage out of it.
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.
### Point of critique 3: Choice of tooling
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.
Last point as critique back: I made mistakes here. Yes, and I'm sorry.
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.
But some of the feedback received was certainly out of line on how we want to communicate, at least from where I am standing.
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.
El Sun, 11 Jan 2026 19:03:39 +0100 "E.M." <emus@mailbox.org> escribió:
Hello,
first of all thanks for taking the time to respond.
Below, I ask three questions to everyone on my role and responsibility.
@Daniel: Thanks for the supporting the idea in general. That helps for sure. And yes, I took my lesson already.
@Dave: Same here, I took my lesson and agree with most points. In general, acting like this is not my common behavior as you hopefully know me. Indeed, I actually believe I reach out a lot, if not too much.
To my impression so far I have been very punctual up to rather ask on almost everything, right? That may also explains why my thinking did not see a big problem in "just doing something" once instead of long discussions the time we could use better. (Just to give you my perspective)
That also wonders me why sentences like this appear:
[...l] in other messages apparently complaining that the Board insisted you consult with the membership for the di.day initiative.
I don't see where I did complain here and I followed as I have been asked to? Way before this idea came to my notice, community members reached out to the di.day organisers (no one here asked the XSF). Then they approached me. Looking at the situation I just intended to hear for confirmation if that's okay as it's already "out there". Under these circumstances I did not see a big point to discuss joining the media campaign. Its of course okay to say "let's ask the XSF members what else we can do". I'm not sure why this is raised. But we are getting off topic.
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.
In my perspective before, this would mostly be asking others to do efforts and I did not intend to scare them away nor ask anyone to take over heavy lifting organizing this. I didn't see that to be realistic and took it on me.
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.
And it's the same for me, I hope that's also clear. Unfortunately and with regrets, I ended-up at 'closed', not seeing this brings so much harm to the idea.
I would expect the Board to react to by increased oversight and decreased autonomy I certainly did not wanted to ruin anything for others. See below.
@all: Realizing this is seen as harm to the organisation and community, which I apologize for again for and try to rescue what I can, as well as has lead to frustration with my person I would like to ask everyone and the official roles:
- Do you want me to continue/stop with this initiative? (I mean if I put everyone off with this, it doesn't make sense anymore.)
Yes, please go ahead and carry on with what you have in mind. You didn't put me off at all, so please stop referring to "everyone" in the future, because "everyone" includes me and that's never been the case at all.
- Furthermore, do you still trust in me in my role and want me to continue here, too? If the response is a no, I offer to step down from my role if that helps reducing harm.
My trust in you in your role was never an issue. So, yes, I absolutely trust in you in your role. Furthermore, and as an actual matter of fact, chances are pretty high that without you we wouldn't have a Comm Team at all.
- Anything else you want me to do now/soon?
No, not at all. You've already been disproportionally nagged, bashed and (to my personal amazement) even patronized for whatever alleged harm your actions may have caused. Just as if XEP-0458 (Community Code of Conduct) never existed at all and nobody had ever made a bad move before. You've already (unnecessarily so in my personal opinion) apologized for your actions, and did so in public. That leaves only two ways to go: accept your apologies or not. Anything other than that is beating on a dead horse. What's been done, has been done and there's no point in keep pouring salt on and open wound. We actually have a lot more, way deeper, and serious issues that require a lot more attention than this, which in my humble opinion, has been blown completely out of proportions. Worst case scenario, simply delete the toot form Mastodon, the call from the blog and call it a day, because .. nobody is watching, believe me .. Gonzalo Raúl Nemmi
Best regards, Eddie
On 11/01/2026 16:12, Dave Cridland wrote:
On Sun, 11 Jan 2026 at 13:52, E.M. <emus@mailbox.org> wrote:
### Point of critique 1: Members have not been involved
* In the past we were, often times, under the impression that we received few feedback on the work we did as well as reactions in the mailing list or chat. When preparing this, I don't intended to put efforts on anyone when it comes up to extensive work on pure organization. Now, with a better grasp and understanding about the sensitivity and expectations within the organization and community I will try to improve.
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.
* In addition here my question if you would have expected this to be organized by e.g. SCAM team or so? To us, as the Communication Team, then it's also a question about how far are we allowed to go with the ambitions we see.
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/
The Communication Team’s mission is to inform the XMPP community and interested parties on news and recent developments within XMPP ecosystem.
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/
The Summits, Conferences And Meetups work team is responsible for supporting XMPP-related summits, conference activity, and meetups.
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
* Intentions: I believed for a long time that we, as an ecosystem, can and need to do more beyond single projects and developing a technology, that is, to my impression, at risk of becoming more and more niche. We can build the best RTC protocol and technology in the world, but if there is few application to a significant scale - well...
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.
* Adding a new holistic space for collaboration with the community: This posses no harm nor threat to other spaces we actually have, and furthermore, I believe this will provide them with more value. It is also conceived to happen more frequently and the invites are simply a first shot in the calendar.
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.
* This is an offer for a talk: Online, with options to include more people to join, and bring with them their different backgrounds and views and ideas. People, that may struggle to participate in other contexts. Those talks are planned to be guided by your interaction in a collaborative space. It's for example planned to ask you about your perspective on the status quo of the XMPP ecosystem. What are we getting right, what are we not? Where is it that we see room for improvement? Can we formulate any activities out of this? Where is it that we concur a common ground to act? Over the sessions we will get a more clear picture here and steer it together.
Once again, nothing here (or in subsequent points) is unreasonable - but it feels like a Board level project.
* Communication: This is not barely discussions and activities on the ecosystem in general, it should also come with benefits to your projects. In that regard its planned with presence in the media channels we have (and are expanding to) and offer >explicitly< participating actors and projects. This is an opportunity for you to take advantage out of it.
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.
### Point of critique 3: Choice of tooling
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.
Last point as critique back: I made mistakes here. Yes, and I'm sorry.
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.
But some of the feedback received was certainly out of line on how we want to communicate, at least from where I am standing.
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.
Hello everyone, I have proposed an update to the blogpost: https://github.com/xsf/xmpp.org/pull/1626 The major changes cover usage of BigBlueBotton and a HedgeDoc pad. I would also schedule a reminder toot for tomorrow unless being stopped. Best regards, Eddie On 12/01/2026 04:15, Gonzalo Raul Nemmi wrote:
El Sun, 11 Jan 2026 19:03:39 +0100 "E.M." <emus@mailbox.org> escribió:
Hello,
first of all thanks for taking the time to respond.
Below, I ask three questions to everyone on my role and responsibility.
@Daniel: Thanks for the supporting the idea in general. That helps for sure. And yes, I took my lesson already.
@Dave: Same here, I took my lesson and agree with most points. In general, acting like this is not my common behavior as you hopefully know me. Indeed, I actually believe I reach out a lot, if not too much.
To my impression so far I have been very punctual up to rather ask on almost everything, right? That may also explains why my thinking did not see a big problem in "just doing something" once instead of long discussions the time we could use better. (Just to give you my perspective)
That also wonders me why sentences like this appear:
[...l] in other messages apparently complaining that the Board insisted you consult with the membership for the di.day initiative.
I don't see where I did complain here and I followed as I have been asked to? Way before this idea came to my notice, community members reached out to the di.day organisers (no one here asked the XSF). Then they approached me. Looking at the situation I just intended to hear for confirmation if that's okay as it's already "out there". Under these circumstances I did not see a big point to discuss joining the media campaign. Its of course okay to say "let's ask the XSF members what else we can do". I'm not sure why this is raised. But we are getting off topic.
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.
In my perspective before, this would mostly be asking others to do efforts and I did not intend to scare them away nor ask anyone to take over heavy lifting organizing this. I didn't see that to be realistic and took it on me.
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.
And it's the same for me, I hope that's also clear. Unfortunately and with regrets, I ended-up at 'closed', not seeing this brings so much harm to the idea.
I would expect the Board to react to by increased oversight and decreased autonomy I certainly did not wanted to ruin anything for others. See below.
@all: Realizing this is seen as harm to the organisation and community, which I apologize for again for and try to rescue what I can, as well as has lead to frustration with my person I would like to ask everyone and the official roles:
- Do you want me to continue/stop with this initiative? (I mean if I put everyone off with this, it doesn't make sense anymore.)
Yes, please go ahead and carry on with what you have in mind. You didn't put me off at all, so please stop referring to "everyone" in the future, because "everyone" includes me and that's never been the case at all.
- Furthermore, do you still trust in me in my role and want me to continue here, too? If the response is a no, I offer to step down from my role if that helps reducing harm.
My trust in you in your role was never an issue. So, yes, I absolutely trust in you in your role. Furthermore, and as an actual matter of fact, chances are pretty high that without you we wouldn't have a Comm Team at all.
- Anything else you want me to do now/soon?
No, not at all. You've already been disproportionally nagged, bashed and (to my personal amazement) even patronized for whatever alleged harm your actions may have caused. Just as if XEP-0458 (Community Code of Conduct) never existed at all and nobody had ever made a bad move before.
You've already (unnecessarily so in my personal opinion) apologized for your actions, and did so in public. That leaves only two ways to go: accept your apologies or not. Anything other than that is beating on a dead horse. What's been done, has been done and there's no point in keep pouring salt on and open wound. We actually have a lot more, way deeper, and serious issues that require a lot more attention than this, which in my humble opinion, has been blown completely out of proportions.
Worst case scenario, simply delete the toot form Mastodon, the call from the blog and call it a day, because .. nobody is watching, believe me ..
Gonzalo Raúl Nemmi
Best regards, Eddie
On 11/01/2026 16:12, Dave Cridland wrote:
On Sun, 11 Jan 2026 at 13:52, E.M. <emus@mailbox.org> wrote:
### Point of critique 1: Members have not been involved
* In the past we were, often times, under the impression that we received few feedback on the work we did as well as reactions in the mailing list or chat. When preparing this, I don't intended to put efforts on anyone when it comes up to extensive work on pure organization. Now, with a better grasp and understanding about the sensitivity and expectations within the organization and community I will try to improve.
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.
* In addition here my question if you would have expected this to be organized by e.g. SCAM team or so? To us, as the Communication Team, then it's also a question about how far are we allowed to go with the ambitions we see.
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/
The Communication Team’s mission is to inform the XMPP community and interested parties on news and recent developments within XMPP ecosystem.
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/
The Summits, Conferences And Meetups work team is responsible for supporting XMPP-related summits, conference activity, and meetups.
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
* Intentions: I believed for a long time that we, as an ecosystem, can and need to do more beyond single projects and developing a technology, that is, to my impression, at risk of becoming more and more niche. We can build the best RTC protocol and technology in the world, but if there is few application to a significant scale - well...
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.
* Adding a new holistic space for collaboration with the community: This posses no harm nor threat to other spaces we actually have, and furthermore, I believe this will provide them with more value. It is also conceived to happen more frequently and the invites are simply a first shot in the calendar.
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.
* This is an offer for a talk: Online, with options to include more people to join, and bring with them their different backgrounds and views and ideas. People, that may struggle to participate in other contexts. Those talks are planned to be guided by your interaction in a collaborative space. It's for example planned to ask you about your perspective on the status quo of the XMPP ecosystem. What are we getting right, what are we not? Where is it that we see room for improvement? Can we formulate any activities out of this? Where is it that we concur a common ground to act? Over the sessions we will get a more clear picture here and steer it together.
Once again, nothing here (or in subsequent points) is unreasonable - but it feels like a Board level project.
* Communication: This is not barely discussions and activities on the ecosystem in general, it should also come with benefits to your projects. In that regard its planned with presence in the media channels we have (and are expanding to) and offer >explicitly< participating actors and projects. This is an opportunity for you to take advantage out of it.
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.
### Point of critique 3: Choice of tooling
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.
Last point as critique back: I made mistakes here. Yes, and I'm sorry.
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.
But some of the feedback received was certainly out of line on how we want to communicate, at least from where I am standing.
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.
**Chat of the Future Initiative - Spring Check-in** In the coming session the focus will be on progress behind the activities that participants have been agreeing towards since we kicked off. Agenda: * Welcome & Check-in * Update & Discussion on unified promotion banners * Update & Discussion on possible online community online event The check-in sessions are more a discussion than a working setting. Time: Tue, 17th Mar, 19:00 - 19:30 (CET) Where: Remote, session changed to https://talk.teamjoin.de/room/8a1e5d06-4d31-4283-a73a-2c7a0d3755d3?invite=76... Speak to you, Eddie On 05/01/2026 22:58, E.M. wrote:
Dear all,
the XSF Communication Team is pleased to announce a new initiative to help evolving the XMPP ecosystem in a broader and aligned perspective. This should cover discussions, development but also extended public communication and presence. As this is being setup in an iterative way its participants will be able to form and steer the collaborations direction over time.
You can read the full blog post here: https://xmpp.org/2026/01/chat-of-the-future-initiative/
After a number of questions let me elaborate a bit more.
So, when you join the session(s) we will have a interactive collaboration board present where we will conduct different exercises. We start with basically exposure and a discussion of the networks status quo is as everyone sees it from their corner. If you have ideas of what you would like to change, you can just propose those.
Ideas could be for example that members from the XMPP community are interest in an organised (regular?) interoperability meeting on certain XEPs. Others think of more engagement along encryption or building a better landing page for developers. In the end, all those great ideas and constructive feedback can be brought to the first session, but also at a later point. Out of this, the round will form a collaborative direction that anyone interested can join, commit and contribute to.
There are more and other directing and hopefully fun exercises of this nature and we will collect, review and discuss ideas that could be worth moving on within a couple of months. Ideas, to be shaped in smaller activities, with no long time frames but effective outcomes that the ecosystem benefits at user or (new) developers level.
We hope this is a motivating opportunity for the XMPP network and help us to step ahead all together. We also believe that such a collaboration can enable the network to evolve and gain new momentum and result in strong benefits for all actors.
Feel free to comeback with your thoughts already.
Best regards from the Communication Team, Eddie
participants (4)
-
Daniel Gultsch -
Dave Cridland -
E.M. -
Gonzalo Raul Nemmi