We sometimes receive questions about whether there are restrictions on who may submit and comment on proposals to extend XMPP, join the various XMPP-related discussion venues, or participate in events such as our upcoming DevCon.
The short answer is: No.
The long answer is that we strive to be a completely open and transparent community. Unlike some standards development organizations that call themselves open but are in fact industry consortia with closed processes and high barriers to entry, the XMPP Standards Foundation is fully committed to openness. Although we have elected members and generous sponsors, they merely provide the legal and financial basis for us to pursue our work.
Perhaps because our technology emerged from the open-source community, we think that the philosophy of “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” applies just as much to protocols as it does to code. That’s why all of our protocol discussions take place on an open discussion list. That’s why we publish the agendas and chat logs of the XMPP Council for all to see. That’s why we keep all of our specifications (and in fact our entire website) under source control so you can see exactly what we change. And that’s why you don’t need to be an elected member or an employee of a sponsoring company in order to participate.
So if you or your organization builds XMPP-based technology, we encourage you to join the conversation. It’s the only way we can achieve our mission of building an open, standardized, secure, feature-rich, widely-deployed, decentralized infrastructure for real-time communication and collaboration over the Internet.
