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 initiative is being setup in an iterative way, participants will be able to form and steer its direction over time.

Why the Chat of the Future Initiative?

XMPP exists for more than 25 years now, with world-wide implementations across various applications and more than 500 published and public specifications. At xmpp.org, software of more than 35 clients, 20 libraries and 8 servers are listed. This rich history is only possible through the federation endorsed since 1999.

Although this is an advantage, maintaining a federated and decentralised network also requires significantly higher efforts for cross-network alignment, adoption and also quality of the XMPP technology. This initiative intends to support such activities along different actors.

What is the Chat of the Future Initiative about?

Participants will try to identify, collect, and formulate activities that apply to the XMPP ecosystem that needs efforts around today’s status quo. This new collaboration space is considered to formulate along user and developer needs. From the discussions common ground on where we can act should be found.

Far thinking, this could lead to community vision and strategic thinking that every actor can decide to contribute individually. In the past, possible topics named have been for example an interoperability session, to work on encryption or having a landing page for developers.** Of course, the scope should be limited to the actors capabilities.

How will the Chat of the Future Initiative work?

The Chat of the Future initiative will begin with a series of open-ended and interactive collaboration sessions and open up for discussion, alignment and collecting of thoughts and ideas. This can happend across multiple session and is always a quarterly activity. 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?

The participants will have the chance to contribute with their perspective, feedback and discussion topics via a BigBlueBotton session, both in spoken and written form. For notetaking a HedgeDoc pad will be used. If other organisation spaces - such as a group chat - be necessary, the development of the initiative will show. At its best, this interactions are integrated in what is available in the existing XMPP channels.

Who can participate the Chat of the Future Initiative?

Anyone interested and willing to contribute to the XMPP ecosystem of any level of experience can join with their perspective. This also involves newcomers and bare users as well as professionals of the XMPP technology. If you cannot participate, consider to provide your thoughts in a written statement to the organiser. There are multiple sessions and more planned, so one can join at another time or phase.

When & Where will the Chat of the Future Initiative take place?

Currently a first set of sessions is planned and listed below with more sessions to work on actual topics to come. This can be matter of change based on feedback.

The session link can be found here: BigBlueBotton. Access code: 932872

The password code and the pad will posted on the day in the XSF Chat (see below).

Meeting netiquette: Please keep a respectful, constructive and positive tone and statements.

If you have further questions, please join the XSF chat.

We hope this will positively contribute to the community and technology as a whole. See you soon,

— The XSF Communication Team

Note: In a previous statement another tool and setup has been named. Through dicussions this has been changed.