XSF Discussion - 2015-02-23


  1. goffi

    g'day

  2. Kev

    Added two IoT things from Joachim to the GSoC page.

  3. Tobias

    +1 for self-aware water coolers

  4. Flow

    Tobias: "self-aware water coolers"?

  5. Tobias

    Flow, just a reference to the IoT proposals to GSoC

  6. Flow

    ahh :)

  7. Flow

    Well the openHAB project sounds interesting (and not just because Smack is involved :))

  8. Kev

    I'm not comfortable that for the Sleek ond openHAB projects no-one from those projects is involved, but hopefully Joachim can sort that out by the time it matters (if it ever matters).

  9. Flow

    Kev: yeah I was a bit suprised about the openHAB project too

  10. Kev

    If Joachim can get them to agree to have a project lead co-mentor, it's fine. Else we'll probably have to remove those ideas.

  11. Flow

    Sounds reasonable

  12. Kev

    No idea if we'll be accepted this year, though. We'll see.

  13. Flow should really take a look at those IoT XEPs

  14. dwd

    Flow, Are you having trouble sleeping?

  15. Flow

    dwd: sleep is for the weak :)

  16. dwd

    Flow, Or those who've been reading the IoT specs...

  17. Flow

    hmm, I wasn't expecting those to be entertaining, but are they so "lengthy/boring"?

  18. fippo

    i keep saying that about the rayo specs

  19. Flow

    hmm some high level view on those iot xeps sure would be helpful

  20. Laura

    Prepping for the Board meeting - as a reminder, this meeting has only 1 agenda item - Board Goals and the results of the recent survey

  21. ralphm

    hello

  22. Kev

    "This meeting has only 1 agenda item; X and Y"

  23. adam

    howdy

  24. ralphm

    Kev: :-)

  25. Simon

    :)

  26. Laura

    Ha ha Kev, they are the same thing :)

  27. Laura

    And hi folks, who do we have today?

  28. dwd waves

  29. Kev

    o/

  30. stpeter

    hello

  31. Laura

    Our minute taker is back, hurrah!

  32. Laura

    Any board members?

  33. adam raises hand

  34. Laura

    ralphm Simon Will ?

  35. Simon

    I'm here.

  36. dwd cracks open the colouring pencils.

  37. ralphm

    I was already here

  38. Laura

    Ok, hopefully Will isn't too far behind (as he did all this great work)

  39. Laura

    *bangs gavel* Let’s start the meeting!

  40. Will

    I'm here sorry!

  41. Laura

    Oh good :)

  42. Laura

    As we said last week, this meeting would be dedicated solely to the Board Goals.

  43. Laura

    Hopefully  the Board have had time to review the document.

  44. Laura

     I have just updated the access rights so this document is now open and can be viewed by anyone attending this meeting (link here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1k0ISvtI38cZS7yg16X9bORHZSW0ruZRHepLJi0lNAls/edit?usp=sharing)

  45. Laura

    Last week I said: What I would like to suggest is that I share the results of that vote with the Board, and we each spend 5 minutes thinking about what activity / measure we need to commit to, to make that happen. I would like to propose that the Board meeting next week focuses solely on this - agreeing what we are going to do etc. I will then write a blog post about it - outlining what the vote results were and what the Board agrees to do.

  46. Laura

    *gives people a minute to read, open link etc)

  47. Laura

    Are the Board folks with me and ready?

  48. ralphm

    yep

  49. Will

    yup

  50. Simon

    yes

  51. Laura

    OK. Let's work through this one page at a time

  52. Laura

    % based goals

  53. Simon

    Do we have metrics from the website yet?

  54. Laura

    What are people's thoughts here - do we pick one, and backlog the others? Then as we achieve one, move down the list in order of what scored highest?

  55. Will

    on the % based, pick one I say

  56. Laura

    Board - what do each of you suggest (using the votes to help us understand what the community want)?

  57. Will

    and i'd go for website traffic (as membership engagement will fall out of other activities)

  58. Laura

    +1

  59. adam

    Agree with will. Membership engagement is too inwardly focused. If the website is effective, that will help membership.

  60. ralphm

    I think membership re-applications are a function of the perceived utility of the XSF

  61. Will

    happy to note that, as an engineering focused org, money came last ;-)

  62. ralphm

    doesn't seem like a goal in itself

  63. adam

    ralphm: it can be a goal, but isn't one that can be achieved directly.

  64. ralphm

    adam: I'm mostly talking about the prose at that item, but sure

  65. Simon

    I'm presuming there's an overarching goal of attracting new members implicit in what we do. Since looking at this one could assume there is no drive to attract new members.

  66. adam

    ralphm: agree

  67. Laura

    agree

  68. Laura

    That is a wider achievement for the Board, I think

  69. Kev

    Simon: I don't think there is. There's an overarching goal to grow the community, but that's independent of membership.

  70. Will

    Simon: I think if we do the rest well, more members will result

  71. adam

    Kev: exactly this

  72. adam

    "member" ≠ "community member"

  73. Laura

    ralphm - which goal would get your vote? Hearing what you are saying also

  74. dwd

    FWIW, I'd think that getting the membership motivated (which is effectively what "membership engagement" is) would make the other tasks somewhat easier.

  75. ralphm

    So I personally think we need to focus on providing information better, both on the website, and by having useful summits that bring in people not yet in our community

  76. dwd

    Also it's not wholly clear why you need to pick just one of each.

  77. adam

    I would additionally say that before we were to aim to increase membership or member engagement, it would be good for the board to identify what the goals of "membership" are in 2015, which may not be the same goals of membership were at the creation of the XSF.

  78. Laura

    dwd - we needed measurable goals. This was never going to be definitive (nor easy)

  79. Will

    dwd: I think there's a two-way relationship

  80. Laura

    ralphm - so you vote for website traffic and registration for summit?

  81. dwd

    But in particular, given the website and membership engagement goals seem to have the same level of interest, why not pick both?

  82. Laura

    Because we agreed to pick one dwd - we have 2 more sections yet

  83. Laura

    Some might happen as well, but we committed to picking one from each

  84. Simon

    My vote is for membership engagement - imho website traffic flows out of that and is part of measuring it.

  85. Laura

    Thank you Simon, ralphm?

  86. Will

    Simon, I think membership engagement will increase if we execute properly on the item in the next slide

  87. Laura

    We need one vote each

  88. ralphm

    Simon: membership engagement is about XSF members, the website is going to be mostly informing the community. I don't see your point.

  89. Simon

    Ralphm: members can help create the website and maintain their parts of it.

  90. ralphm

    I don't personally care much about membership v.s. being part of the community, and I don't believe that having a 25% increase in membership (for example) will suddenly make more people want to work on the website.

  91. Laura

    ralphm - we have been over this before. We had to set measurable objectives for this excercise

  92. ralphm

    Laura: I understand how it works

  93. adam

    I am extremely hesitant to say "membership engagement" because that seems a very inwardly focused goal. I think the board unanimously agrees we need an outward focus. My hope is that we are able to engage and involve members in that focus. Putting the website in the crosshairs will drive us all to focus outward rather than inward.

  94. ralphm

    Laura: I want to make clear again what options there are, because apparently we don't believe they mean the same thing.

  95. Laura

    adam : well said

  96. stpeter

    IMHO the ultimate measure is "how many developers are using XMPP to build applications?" - anything else is a proxy for that (which might be hard to measure)

  97. ralphm

    stpeter: indeed

  98. ralphm

    that makes me torn between website and summits

  99. Laura

    stpeter - not sure that is a goal for the Board, more the whole community

  100. bjc

    summits are hard to make for a lot of us

  101. Laura

    These are Board goals - so we can measure our success as a Board

  102. adam

    stpeter: could not agree more. I just see the website as our best chance of being able to measure that, given that xmpp.org is always going to be the first thing that people find when they search for "xmpp"

  103. Will

    bjc: the registrations don't have to be for physical attendence, remote is a possibility

  104. Kev

    Can I propose a new goal to consider? A binary one: Board manages to agree on goals to select. :D

  105. ralphm

    Laura: I think it should be, if you believe the XSF is a guide in the community

  106. bjc

    that's news to me. maybe i should look at the website more *ducks*

  107. Laura

    Kev - we did!

  108. stpeter

    what if we had a set of developer-focused guides on the website and measured that traffic?

  109. Kev

    Laura: No, I think you've not managed to agree yet ;)

  110. Laura

    I am amazed that this discussion is happening now

  111. Laura

    We asked the members to vote on the goals we have been working on since November, with the intention of doing this very exercise. It is not acceptable to then faff around ourselves after asking for votes from them.

  112. Will

    laura: +1

  113. Laura

    We agreed to come up with goals, vote on 1 goal per "section" and commit to achieving that.

  114. adam

    stpeter: indeed. there's an entire "learn" section focused on this in the new website.

  115. stpeter

    I'd put my emphasis on website traffic

  116. stpeter

    that will drive us to create information that's truly helpful

  117. Will

    stpeter: so presumably that's what you voted for?

  118. adam

    (which, incidentally, we'll need to engage membership in order to create those resources ;)

  119. ralphm

    I am picking 'website' because that will ultimately drive people to summits, too

  120. Laura

    So far, I have me, Will and adam voting for website traffic. Now we have ralphm too

  121. Simon

    Can I jump to website too :) ?

  122. Laura

    Of course!

  123. Laura

    Result: 5 votes for website

  124. Simon

    +1 website.

  125. Laura

    I'm not trying to stifle conversation btw, but want to make sure we follow through on this activity

  126. adam

    Laura: you're doing great

  127. Laura

    Ok, next section *breathes*

  128. ralphm

    Laura: I think it is good to do the discussion bit along with it though. Context is important

  129. Simon

    Laura: part of follow through could be a metrics report as part of the board meeting.

  130. adam

    ralphm: +1 just enough discussion :)

  131. Laura

    :)

  132. Laura

    Binary goals

  133. Laura

    There is a clear "winner" from our community votes!

  134. ralphm

    adam: good thing we haven't defined 'enough' :-D

  135. Laura

    What do we think?

  136. Will

    IoT +1 easy

  137. Laura

    Bearing in mind we have already achieved one, and in progress with another (pats everyone on the back)

  138. adam

    +1 iot

  139. Will

    (easy to decide, not to do)

  140. Laura

    +1 IOT

  141. stpeter nods to Will

  142. ralphm

    +1 and, yes, this not going to be easy

  143. Will

    worthwhile things rarely are

  144. Laura

    Just need adam's vote, then this one does need discussion. How?!

  145. Laura

    Sorry, adam has voted

  146. ralphm

    Laura: that's another meeting, right?

  147. Laura

    dwd - do we have 5 for IOT?

  148. Laura

    ralphm - definately.

  149. adam

    +1 to another meeting on this topic

  150. dwd

    I see no Simon vote?

  151. Simon

    iot

  152. adam

    P=[]\'=P

  153. adam

    -O0R5 42Q1 m;.'/

  154. adam

    lol

  155. Laura

    Fabulous. I have an AOB about a date for this meeting noted

  156. adam

    excuse me

  157. dwd

    NO CARRIER

  158. adam

    just about spilled my glass of water on my keys

  159. ralphm

    splendid

  160. Laura

    ha ha!

  161. daurnimator

    adam, Gesundheit

  162. Laura

    Ok, final one…

  163. Laura

    Soft goals

  164. adam

    I think the leading two options should be bundled together.

  165. Laura

    adam - agree. How could we phrase this?

  166. adam

    benefits of federation is one of the points of xmpp as leading realtime messaging protocol.

  167. adam

    just call federation a subpoint of positioning

  168. Laura

    I would support this - what do others think?

  169. ralphm

    the other two as well, arguably

  170. adam

    indeed

  171. dwd

    FWIW, I'd have thought federation was a USP of sorts for positioning XMPP.

  172. ralphm

    so, I am going to go with positioning XMPP, keeping the others as important aspects of that goal

  173. adam

    +1 to that read on this

  174. Will

    agree with ralphm

  175. dwd

    But I took the item to be referring to espousing the benefits of federation over walled-garden XMPP services.

  176. ralphm

    dwd: ok, interesting

  177. dwd

    (That is, trying to push the benefits of federation to the HipCHats and Slacks of this world)

  178. Kev

    That's how I read it.

  179. Simon

    I'm all for federation but too often I see this turned into an evangelical point rather than a listening to what a developer really needs for *their* project. For that reason I'm voting on the overall positioning of XMPP.

  180. dwd

    Simon, And also, I'm interested in what the user wants as well as the developer.

  181. Laura

    My vote - positioning - as per ralphm comment

  182. ralphm

    dwd, Kev: I do agree that is an important thing to advocate

  183. Laura

    dwd - vote count for soft goals?

  184. dwd

    Laura, I've no idea. :-) Want to ask for clear votes on positioning?

  185. ralphm

    all for positioning

  186. Laura

    positioning from me

  187. Simon

    +1 positioning.

  188. Will

    +1

  189. ralphm

    as I read the history here

  190. adam

    +1

  191. ralphm

    +!

  192. ralphm

    +1, too

  193. Laura

    ha ha - votes are cast - we have results!

  194. Laura

    I will turn this into a blog post, which I will share with the Board first

  195. Laura

    If that's ok?

  196. Simon

    Thanks for running this Laura!

  197. adam

    Yes, thank you, Laura.

  198. Laura

    Sorry for pushing for votes, but I didn't want us to get too side tracked

  199. Will

    sounds good Laura, now all we have to do is figure out how to do these things. easy right?

  200. Laura

    ha ha - i need wine.

  201. dwd waves an AOB flag

  202. stpeter

    Laura wins the Internet

  203. Laura

    Does anyone have any AOB's?

  204. Simon

    wine was a vote option? How did I miss that.

  205. Laura

    dwd - so impatient

  206. Kev

    Just noting that the GSoC application is in (thanks to Laura for proofreading).

  207. dwd

    The communications mail - I think Kurt had a really valid point about how Officers fit in.

  208. Kev

    Now we wait to see if we get accepted.

  209. Laura

    dwd - that is for next week - we gave everyone 2 weeks to comment

  210. stpeter

    huh I thought I had an AOB but now I don't remember what it was

  211. Laura

    But his comment has been noted for discussion

  212. dwd

    As written, Alex can't announce the voting stuff without running it past the Board first.

  213. Laura

    Noted dwd

  214. Laura

    I have 2 AOB's.

  215. Laura

    1) Do we need a whole meeting (like this one) to discuss the IOt strategy?

  216. ralphm

    I have another AOB: anyone the XSF owes money to (for Summits 15 and 17), please send invoices to stpeter

  217. dwd

    Laura, Yeah, but worth joining that thread to get a conversation going.

  218. stpeter

    ralphm: thanks, yes

  219. Laura

    ralphm just answered my second AOB - has Will got his money back

  220. adam

    It might be good to get input from the council and membership on IoT before having a board discussion about that.

  221. Laura

    adam - agree

  222. ralphm

    stpeter will collect all the receipts and stuff, look at the incoming money for sponsorship and work out the best money flows

  223. Laura

    Maybe we can discuss next week, about how to start? as part of the agenda

  224. adam

    Perhaps we create a questionnaire or something.

  225. adam

    Sounds good to me, Laura.

  226. Laura

    Awesome. Back to agenda items next week - same time same same place?

  227. adam

    wfm

  228. ralphm

    Kev: is there a Council meeting this week?

  229. Kev

    No-one has followed up on me saying I can't make it and for a volunteer to chair it, so no.

  230. ralphm

    ok

  231. dwd

    Kev, Oh, I'll chair if you want. Been away so hadn't replied yet.

  232. ralphm

    Can someone update the XSF calendar with proper Board meeting entries?

  233. stpeter

    ralphm: sure - every Monday at this time?

  234. ralphm

    yes, until EU timezone changeover

  235. stpeter

    damn timezones

  236. dwd

    ralphm, The EU TZ change lag might well make Adam really uncomfortable. I forget which way it runs.

  237. ralphm

    stpeter: DST starts on 29 March

  238. Laura

    Right, calling it a day there. same time same place.

  239. Laura

    Next week

  240. Laura

    *bangs gavel*

  241. stpeter

    big thanks to Laura!

  242. adam

    dwd: I'm good with the early side of this meeting :)

  243. Kev

    dwd: Ah, I just sent a mail calling it off.

  244. ralphm

    dwd: In fact the US goes on March 8

  245. dwd

    Kev, Replied. Sorry.

  246. adam

    when does EU?

  247. ralphm

    dwd: at which point the diff is one hour less

  248. ralphm

    adam: March 29

  249. stpeter notes that he is finishing up several large non-XMPP projects and wil soon have more time for XSF matters

  250. adam

    have a good week, everyone. :)

  251. ralphm

    stpeter: awesome work on those IETF thingies

  252. stpeter

    ralphm: yeah, I'm pushing to finish all of these documents in the new few months: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/search/?name=&activedrafts=on&sort=&by=author&author=Saint-Andre

  253. stpeter

    and I have learned to say no to IETF people :)

  254. ralphm

    :-D

  255. stpeter pokes some working group chairs about last calls :-)

  256. Kev

    "Why is this message in Spam? It's similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters. Learn more"

  257. Kev

    There we go, Google has spoken on the subject of whether Laura or Dave's minutes are better :D

  258. ralphm

    :-D

  259. ralphm

    I suppose it is no accident I am coloured orange.

  260. ralphm

    the diff between adam, stpeter and bjc is a bit too subtle

  261. bjc

    i am nothing like them!

  262. Kev

    ralphm: Too much fake tan.

  263. dwd

    TBH, I didn't particularly like the colours, but generally highlighting the names was interesting.

  264. dwd

    ralphm, Laura said she picked Orange for you carefully, as well as Pink for herself. I didn't really take notice of the other colours she used.

  265. ralphm

    dwd: right, but three greens, just different by bold, italic, and normal...

  266. dwd

    Yeah. I was sort of experimenting with distinguishing between floor and Board, and then worried over ex-officio, and...

  267. dwd

    Also nobody's noticed that I used a different colour for myself each time. :-)

  268. dwd

    stpeter, Out of curiosity, how many redirects is sensible in POSH? I'm struggling to think of any useful case involving more than 3, and I'm somewhat pulling even that figure out of thin air.

  269. stpeter

    actually I think the original HTTP spec provided good advice by saying 5

  270. stpeter

    "no one should ever need more than 5 redirects"

  271. bjc

    i'll be sure to tell the people who use bit.ly on twitter =P

  272. bjc

    stupid t.co

  273. bjc

    hell, stupid url shorteners

  274. stpeter

    nod

  275. stpeter

    strangely, even RFC 2616 changed that bit about 5 redirects to "watch out for infinite redirection loops" - so the hard limit is old stuff

  276. bjc

    until you're on a crappy mobile connection and each redirect takes a few seconds or breaks at some point in the middle

  277. intosi

    Purty minutes!

  278. dwd

    In fairness, we're no longer considering URL shortners in POSH, so I'd imagine - hope - most of the redirects would go away.

  279. bjc

    where are they? i only see up to 2014-11-17 in http://xmpp.org/about-xmpp/xsf/meeting-minutes/

  280. dwd

    bjc, Board minutes go to the Members list.

  281. intosi

    http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/members/

  282. bjc

    ah

  283. dwd

    bjc, The archives of that list are public if you want to go see your name in lights.

  284. intosi

    They are purtier when rendered in HTML.

  285. bjc

    i'm good, thanks =)

  286. intosi wonders why Dave didn't reserve red for Kev. Welsh dragon and such.

  287. dwd

    I only copied Laura's self-assigned pink and Ralph's orange.

  288. dwd

    I don't think I'll do colours again, they're really too much faff.

  289. MattJ

    It looks like the minutes should be hosted on GeoCities

  290. dwd

    <blink>Yes</blink>

  291. dwd

    I did actually consider looking at putting an animated GIF in or something, before deciding that was taking things way too far.

  292. bjc

    <blink>there's no such thing as too far</blink>

  293. dwd

    bjc, <marquee>I think you'll find there is</marquee>

  294. dwd

    Wow. Apparently that element is still supported by all major browsers.

  295. waqas

    I have heard complaints that you can't send GIFs in most XMPP clients

  296. Maranda

    Oh noes! What a tragedy, no animated GIFs!

  297. waqas

    Lance: That reminds me, weren't you working on specs around file sharing (as opposed to file sending), or was that someone else?

  298. waqas

    Maranda: http://i.imgur.com/51mbxT9.gif

  299. Lance

    Yes. ran into some weird issues though

  300. waqas

    Oh?

  301. Lance

    but i think with mam-style stuff they might be fixable

  302. Lance

    its large results for file shares

  303. Lance

    eg, large nested directories

  304. Lance

    would either require an initial sharing of a directory listing file, or lots and lots of disco queries

  305. Maranda

    Awww waqas

  306. Lance

    and also ended up wanting to implement file shares as pubsub, but that would require client-side pubsub servces

  307. Maranda

    💜

  308. waqas

    Lance: Typically fire-sharing is tied to upload-file-to-server in most non-XMPP clients that support such a thing

  309. waqas

    I wonder if that's something we should have a spec for

  310. waqas

    But regardless of where the files exist, we are roughly talking about webdav over XMPP or what? :P

  311. ralphm

    padoom tish

  312. waqas

    ralphm: Indeed ;)

  313. dwd

    Given there's specs about for non-walled-garden cloud storage, should we be just working with that instead?

  314. Maranda

    Padoom...

  315. Lance

    oh, for that case, sure. upload to somewhere via existing standards. send the url like you would any other cat gif. and the receiving client can use oembed to grab a preview & insert into the chat. i would use mep to store references to files associated with a muc if you wanted something slack-ish

  316. puch

    that seems incompatible with crypto

  317. ralphm

    Lance: oembed is kinda nice

  318. ralphm

    Lance: I use it in ikdisplay

  319. waqas

    It would be useful to have some specs covering this area, and even if we are reusing non-XSF standards, something documenting that, so we get interop.