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.

Though, maintaining a federated and decentralised network also requires significantly higher efforts for cross-network alignment, adoption and also quality of the XMPP technology. Establishing communication that goes deeply into the ecosystem will help and support orientation along different actors.

What is the Chat of the Future Initiative about?

With this ambitious activity, participants will try to identify, collect, and articulate key activity areas that apply to the XMPP ecosystem that needs efforts and help us to review and challenge the current status quo. Though, this new space is considered to be open about its outcomes, one guiding element here is a user-centric and developer-centric formulation. Any activity here is welcome, though this activity should be to organised on common ground and steer in the same direction towards those audiences.

One potential early outcome recommended could be to formulate a so-called community vision and potential key areas that every actor can decide to contribute individually. If you have an idea and believe its essential for the XMPP eco-system, such as establishing an interoperability session, work on encryption or having a landing page for developers, then this is your place to expose this. Of course, the scope here needs to be manageable and should be limited to the actors capabilities. But first let’s start this process.

How will the Chat of the Future Initiative work?

The Chat of the Future initiative will begin with a series of interactive collaboration sessions and open up for discussion, alignment and collecting of thoughts and ideas. Subsequently, conclusions will be gathered, reviewed, and adjusted into the next session.

The participants will have the chance to contribute with their perspective, feedback and discussion topics via the collaboration tool Mural, both in spoken and written form. The interactive collaboration workspace has the capabilities and feature to help work together. 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.

Info: This initiative evolves out of a former attempt in 2024 that failed due to poor tool choice.

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. More session to work on actual topics are yet to come. This can be matter of change in the future based on feedback.

The first session link can be found here: Teamjoin.

Password is: XMPP@chatfuture2026

The interactive workspace will be accessible from the first session: Workspace.

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