XSF Discussion - 2012-04-20

afternoon all

Board meeting in 20?

board meeting time?

dwd bear?

Afternoon.

Yes, meeting time.

Florian, I think this may be the first meeting we've had across three continents.

if bear is here, we're quorate, right?

Florian, If he's awake. bear ?

haha ... I think you might be right

You need to change the bylaws so I count towards quorum, as I'm always here :p

heh ...

Kev, We can't do that, we need a members meeting.

I think that says less about the bylaws than it does about you :)

Kev, I think we can allocate ourselves a salary, though. Or at least, we can appoint ourselves into an officer's position and then give ourselves a salary.

:)

Hi Chris.

hi Chris here

hello!

Hi Chris :)

I'm happy with handing out salaries as long as I get one.

Well, that's certainly quorate.

Kev, I bet you wish you could vote, now.

OK, and now we are four.

all good then :)

sorry that I was late

So, we don't actually have any real agenda, but stuff has been happening nonetheless.

GSoC is one thing

Kev, My understanding is that the Summer of Code application went well?

We got slots for all the students we wanted marked "Amazing", although none of the ones that were "Nice to have".

But as that's already more slots than in the last couple of years we did pretty well.

How many is that?

7

I think that's a nice number

OK, so two questions:

1) What's the next step?

1) Attending the dedup meeting in approximately 3 hours 19 minutes.

2) Presumably this means we get 7 x $SOMETHING into the XSF's piggy bank at some point?

What's a dedup meeting?

If multiple orgs accept the same student it's a dupe.

some students are accepted by more than one org - dedupe is when they figure out who wins the student

These need to be resolved.

right

do we know of any risks in our case?

This will take about 5 minutes, as all the dupes should already have been sorted out between the orgs (ours was, at least).

Florian: I've already resolved our only known duplicate.

alright :)

It's possible for more to occur during the meeting, but this is unlikely to affect us.

The next real step is sorting out an appropriate welcome for the students.

I'm hoping someone will help with this, as I'll be fairly busy with my own student.

appropriate welcome in what sense? A nice mail + blog post?

or should we give them XMPP Swag?

We typically give them swag, although I think we dropped the ball a bit last year.

right ... books for all?

yes, I messed up the books for last year

tshirt + books would be nice IMO

right

But yes, we should make sure they're on the gsoc mailing list, we should make sure they know who to talk to.

I was thinking of shirts / hoodies ... but they're locked up at Cisco Diegem

I'd like it if someone other than me was a possible contact - at least so my student has a chance to bitch to someone about me.

I'd be happy to help

Thanks.

I can help monitor the gsoc xmpp list

Thanks.

I need to join that :)

I note that we did have a bit of an issue this year.

the stuck-in-moderation issue?

louiz' didn't read any of my mails or Carol's emails, and so hasn't started deciding he wants students for poezio until today - which is clearly far too late to be able to do anything about it.

ah

So some poor students haven't got slots through no fault of their own.

Other next steps include setting up weekly meetings for all students and mentors in the gsoc room.

that was hard to wrangle last year - the students were in timezones that made a common meeting hard

alright

what time worked last year?

As for books, I suggest the two XMPP books, pragprog and something on time management.

Florian: Typically evening UK time is what we go for, we'll see once we have the students.

alright

We will also need some blog post, I imagine.

on a sidenote: what's the URL / E-mail to subscribe to gsoc?

To our gsoc list, you mean?

yeah

I'm on the Google one

Kev: if you send me the info that need to go into the blogpost, I can write one tomorrow at the airport

http://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/gsoc

Florian: Thanks - but we can't discuss our accepted students until they know themselves, which is Monday :)

we could use an etherpad to start coordinating student meetings and posts

or that :)

so we all have info on which student is attending and also blogging

bear: We should get all the students to set themselves up with blogs and onto planet, too, yeah.

gsoc@xmpp.org. You are already subscribed to this mailing list.

interesting

Congratulations :)

part of their "Day 1" activities: wiki accounts, blog planet, meeting info, mailing address

Ok, so we've got a bunch of stuff to do, but we can't do it until Monday.

alright

actually - we should create a gsoc 2012 wiki page

and have the students, when known, start filling in info

We can sign them up to the mailing list and wiki ourselves, but theother things need their interaction.

So aside from approving $MONEY to spend on $BOOKS, does the Board need to do anything here?

Is someone willing to offer to sort out bear's list of TODOs above, Monday or Tuesday next week?

florian - we can meet monday and work out the list

bear: sounds good

Is that bear and Florian sorting out the student welcome?

kev - yes

yup

Marvellous, thanks chaps.

I will chase if I remember, once the announcements go out.

bear, Florian - that's including the swag, right?

dwd: 2) Yes, there will be $3500 available to the XSF towards the end of the year. We'll need to invoice for it. I believe we failed to last year.

it can

For books I suggest we go with the two XMPP books, PragProg and something timemanagementy.

alright

Assuming we can swallow the cost until the end of the year.

where I failed last year was in getting addresses for shipping until way to late

Kev, Yes, we can.

Where is the list of students going to be documented?

it will be on the xsf's gsoc page

actually it is, just private

dwd: On google-melange.com. I can just tell you who right now if you want - but not in a logged public channel.

It's not final until Monday, but it's very nearly a done deal at this point unless the dedup meeting throws us a new dupe.

Kev, Sure - it was more of a question of our internal logistics, not because I wanted to know.

I note that there wasn't much Board help in ranking students this year.

In fact, only Florian signed up.

OK, noted.

Kev, Anything more on GSoC?

And I think that's GSoC covered.

great

So in summary, Florian and bear are sorting out student welcomes on Monday.

yup

yes

I quickly wanted to bring up another thing ...

if we're done with GSOC

Florian, Shoot.

did we approve money for books?

bear: I think we did

bear, In principle - get a proposal together. I'm assuming it'll all come to << what we're getting.

right :)

k, once we have list of students I can find out what cost will be for shipping

coolbeans

at the Summit in Brussels, we talked about BrowserID and letting XMPP become the standard for it

bear, Sure, but if we're getting books, we can ship locally (ie, ship to EU from EU, etc).

Florian, Yeah, we discussed a lot in this space and we (meaning I, mostly) haven't followed up much.

right

I think we should push this as the board

what is required for pushing?

internal to moz i'm pushing hard to get some work done on 2 dns srv related bugs

good question ... I think just starting conversation with entities such as BrowserID (Mozilla?)

bear, Someone who works for Mozilla getting the right (BrowserID + XMPP) folk in a chatroom together, probably.

to allow js code to make dns questions

buddycloud folk are already in touch with all the mozilla people

ah, cool

so maybe get them together too?

but maybe we need to start having buddycloud have public conversations so mozilla folk have to respond in public

right now I think it's all via email

OK, so the thing to do from a Board perspective is to push these conversations into the public sphere.

+1

+2

+3

let me ping simon

and make sure XMPP becomes the glue for the internet :)

and ask what he is blocked on

well, and to also get him to post to the list about it

is it worth that we get a SIG ?

we need to figure out what all the pieces are

The problem with SIGs is that we run the risk of them having too small a number of people to keep momentum. I'd rather form SIGs by demand, in general.

I agree.

My inclination is that if Simon & co are actively driving this, we should let them continue, and support them where we can.

yes

yes, I agree

I think we (the XSF) need to push this in the next few months

Although pulling the discussion into the public seems like something we should push for, of course.

Ah, speak of the Simon.

simon, Your discussions with Mozilla - we'd like them to be public, if at all possible. What can we do to help?

At the moment someone needs to implement a proof of concept. I'll be in Mountain View next week and would like to meet with Ben Adida at Mozilla again.

i'm sending him an email right now to try and get that done

There's no secret on progress. I've just exceeded my mental bandwith this month and so nothing has happened.

more resources at mozilla are being thrown into the persona and identity space

internally they are gearing up to enter that space as a company

so now is the time to get under their noses

I like that Thunderbird has an XMPP stack now and perhaps something could come out of that. From my own opinion I'm really keen on "get a channel, you've got a browserID"

right

simon, RIght, our aim here (as XSF) is to ensure that XMPP is the identity/browserid solution.

for me I see it this way: you have a single ID (a JID), and all your friends are on there

Ben was really keen on not excluding an XMPP component... but there isn't any demo for that yet.

momspeak: "My email that I can chat with also enables me to sign into my Etsy account"

with tbird now doing xmpp - the time is right for other parts of moz to do the same

indeed

and if you think of identity ... it consists of you (authentication) and your network (your roster)

Bear: how will mozilla be spinning up XMPP hosting?

and we have notifications sorted

email sent to ben and david ascher about your being in MV

as we can do push

So, we really need a tech demo done, you think?

yes

.

hmm, would it be worth spending some money on doing that?

I haven't pushed for moz running their own xmpp - I think the ops folks are scared of it by lack of knowledge

bear: they should contact a third party :)

the last one they tried was ejabberd

Mozilla should just make a nice sign-up process that can spin you offto other known providers. (heck, they don't host email either).

they don't host it *yet*

It's a problem we have with bc too. The next version will help a user choose a good domain.

email hosting was the biggest problem for tbird also

people downloaded it expecting to get an email address

that still doesn't mean they need to get one from Mozilla.

true

they also thought to host sync offsite - until they realized none existed that had the privacy policy that was likeable to moz

so they had to create sync servers

the issue with xmpp is that once it is part of the browser then they need xmpp servers that can handle 40 million users

bear: they should drop us a line :)

"us" being flosoft?

it's called gtalk.

bear, Or else we need a protocol that allows distributed fedreated signup.

bear: yeah, sorry .. I'll stop self promoting :)

florian - no - was just wanting to be clear - keep self promoting :)

for a brief moment I thought you meant xsf

can gtalk be used for non-gmail signups?

bear, No, not really.

because the browserid would be their xmpp jid - for it to really be federated

bear, But in any case, sign-up is a technical problem.

agreed

So back to where I was before my DSL dropped, I'm wondering if there's likely to be someone we could throw a bounty to, to get the tech demo written.

I think it's an area where, if XMPP got a foothold, we'd massively increase XMPP deployment and use, and that seems somethign worth spending actual cash on.

agreed

we would need an xmpp server that groks the server side browserid implementation

agreed

Yay world domination!

bear, Yeah, we need a protocol too, or at least a strawman for one.

dwd: Write down what you described at the summit?

Zash, Yeah, although my solution had an XMPP address for the website. But yeah, we could do something here.

can we continue on list for this - I need to run

bear, Yeah - assuming we're happy in principle to spend some cash here, let's raise it on the members list?

I can send a quick summary of where we're at with BrowserID to the list

list, being board first?

I think if we can get a small focused project idea - yes

and we can decide what we can do?

or even an incremental list of tech demos

XMPP as ID for everyone in the world ... I'd be more than happy to spend money on that

since i was late, we're describing something for GSOC or just more general purpose?

Florian, That has been duly noted.

Ashley, General purpose, in this case.

ok, cool & interesting!

Right - Next meeting - was this time OK for everyone?

I like this time

this time was very good

yes, was good for me, but did it ever get added to the ical?

Then this time next week, OK?

Ashley, Erm. Possibly not.

Was this meeting arranged on the members list? It's possible I missed it, but I didn't see it announced.

i think it was on the board list

yeah, I think board only

Kev, No, this is also true - I arranged it on the board list.

I vaguely remember a discussion about the members list being used by Board for everything that didn't need to be out of camera.

are we moving to fridays then?

but yeah, let's push it to Members list

bear, I'd +1 that

+1 for fridays also

not that it matters to me ... everyday is sunday :)

bear, Seems that way, unless there's objections.

my wed is just way to busy lately

I am good with that

+1 on fridays for me

OK, so same time next week, I'll announce it on members and do the ical thing.

Friday 1530 UTC it is :)

+1

great, thx!

If anyone is interested in how bc is planning on doing a distributed sign-up this is the current plan: http://postimage.org/image/6shnsv2k1/

tho, next friday i'll be traveling and may not be able to make it

I think we're done - anyone anything further?

I am good, thank you

+1 for ending this :)

Not from the peanut gallery.

+1 for adjourn

See you all on the list, then. :-)

thanks all

ciao

great meeting guys! thanks all!

simon - davida says he can meet later in week

Awesome! I'll shoot him an email.