[Members] XSF membership: what does it mean?

[Diana Cionoiu]

Hi Adam,

Aren't we suppose to do what you are saying by default.
There is no gain in terms of money to be a XFS member. We all do that 
because we believe is a better technology.
And i believe that a lot of us talked about XMPP protocol on different 
conferences.

OTOH I do agree that we should create working groups for different 
topic. I mean i have no idea what so ever what pubsub means and what are 
the ideas behind it. While i do know some things about jingle.

Regards,
Diana from Romania

Adam Nemeth wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> For me, XSF membership means that I can act as a router to XMPP 
> related things. 
>
> Since I represented myself in a few conferences and meetups (with 
> previous permission from Peter) as a member of XSF, developers, system 
> administrators usually route XMPP-related questions for me usually on 
> whether XMPP is feasible in a given situation or not, or when they 
> come to choose technology. 
>
> After that of course I route them towards for further information: 
>  - towards vendors, 
>  - towards MUC rooms,
>  - towards documents (usually XEPs), 
>  - towards implementations (libraries, clients),
>  - towards hosting solutions, 
>
> and of course, towards persons.
>
> It's not that I don't give technological consultancy myself (like, 
> "how this should be written?" "how much time do you think it is to 
> implement XEP-1234 in SomeLanguage with SomeVendor?") or providing 
> them with actual statistical data or other social science related 
> information (such as people's chat habits in various groups, etc), but 
> I rarely get money for such. (In fact, it's nearly a year since the 
> last time I got money from XMPP consultancy - it was 60 hours of work 
> within a month, pretty much for an external consultant.)
>
> And it's not like I gave up my actual dreams about XMPP, even if I'm 
> uninterested in some aspects becoming mainstream recently 
> (computer-computer communication), or I don't know how to gather the 
> resources (JS-API), or the time (Ext.Jabber client-library). Still I 
> understand I haven't gave enough energy into them yet.
>
> As for the operational part of XSF and the XMPP community:
>
>  You know I'm an eastern-european, which means I'm sometimes a bit 
> harsh, so let me say that  our original webteam initiative was a 
> failure, and most probably I'm - at least partly - responsible for it.
>
> And this thing is exactly about responsibility: I see the clear 
> responsibility of Peter (to run this whole stuff), I see the clear 
> responsibility of Alex (to help organize official things), I see the 
> clear responsibility of the Council (to decide on XEPs), but pretty 
> much that's all.
>
> I haven't seen my own responsibility clearly in the website building 
> (even if I'm a senior web developer). 
>
> Also, there was a lack of agreement on what this website should be 
> about; there was a lack of agreement of directions. While sometimes 
> colorful environments are healthy, when you have to actually go 
> somewhere as an organization, you are sometimes stuck.
>
> So, in sum: I think XSF members can act as hubs / gateways to the XMPP 
> community from the outside world, easily foundable, and are 
> responsible for advocating the XMPP technologies, and keeping 
> themselves up-to-date in a lot of fields to be able to fulfill this 
> role, since they act as a widespread network of people in knowledge of 
> this whole stuff.
>
> This is something every member should be responsible for.
>
> I also think that we must ensure we provide clear responsibilities and 
> create certain roles / position within the organization other than the 
> existing roles. 
>
> If there would be an agreement at least these responsibilities I 
> mentioned above, I'd create a wiki page for that.
>
> On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 6:57 PM, Remko Tronçon <remko at el-tramo.be 
> <mailto:remko at el-tramo.be>> wrote:
>
>     > We could change that. We could ask XSF members to get more heavily
>     > involved in website development, running the jabber.org
>     <http://jabber.org> service, doing
>
>     My thoughts on the topic:
>
>     The great thing about the XSF is that there are no formal rules or
>     processes to become a member: all you have to do is *mean* something
>     to the XMPP community, be it by developing code, writing specs,
>     helping people out, or just joining the discussion on the mailing
>     lists.
>
>     However, I strongly feel you should do *something*. Whether you think
>     someone is actually doing something relevant is entirely personal, but
>     I never vote for people who apply because 'XMPP is cool' or because
>     they run an XMPP server on jabber.elbonia.com
>     <http://jabber.elbonia.com>. And sometimes, I get
>     the feeling that many members take this too lightly, and just vote
>     'yes' on everybody to be done with it. If voting would be taken more
>     seriously, I think that the XSF membership would actually consist of
>     nothing but active people.
>
>     cheers,
>     Remko
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Aadaam <aadaam at gmail.com <mailto:aadaam at gmail.com>>