XSF Discussion - 2020-05-14

How to become an author of xep-0371? Seems like the original author doesn't care about the future of the xep.

Reminder for those who have not reapplied yet: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Membership_Applications_Q2_2020

https://xmpp.org/community/membership.html#application talks about "the first two weeks of January, April, July, and October", has this changed or are things just delayed (this time)?

looks like we need to update the webpage. dates have slipped many years ago

Ah :-)

rion, ask council :)

Sorry, forgot I can't make the meeting today

:)

!

It's time

ralphm, Guus, Seve

o/

uhoh

hmm.

I don't really want to skip this one

Hey

woo

Let's start and hope it'll summon ralphm

1. Agenda

- Add emus to commteam

I also have an item to add re ISOC foundation

Anything else?

what's the status on that adopt-a-char issue?

are we still blocked on figuring out how to vote?

if so, I'd like to see if we can get that oving.

*moving

I haven't heard any news on this, personally.

Last time I checked that was up to Flow. I think he meant to have a look at updating memberbot

(No items from me)

(to be added to agenda instead of disccussed right now)

right

2. Add emus to commteam

He has been taking care of the newsletter, I think it would help the process. I'm +1

It was mentioned this week in their channel. emus has been helping for some time now with the newsletter

Seve, let's wait for the motion :p

Who's actually the team lead for comm?

nyco?

I'm not entirely sure, but the question was indirectly raised by JC

Guus, the commteam is a bit "afk" lately (I'm included there)

emus asking for people to publish things on social media

https://xmpp.org/about/xsf/comm-team.html

Wasn't there an attempt to hire a social-media contractor?

And JC wondering if he should give him access (hence asking team membership)

Ge0rG, it's in the works yes

I'll update on that in commitments

In any case, I'm happy to have emus added.

is JC asking for him to be added, or is he asking himself? 🙂

emus is asking, from my PoV JC just prompted the discussion

+1

+1

+

shees

+1

sorry 🙂

Ok. 3 +1s ! emus congrats

Thanks for stepping up, emus !

emus, woo :)

...

nyco, ?

Does commteam have access to the site?

as in, first task: add yourself to the website in the new role? 🙂

(for which we probably need iteam to add him in the correct github team?)

MattJ, in case you read back notifications, can you facilitate that?

As a note, I'd like us to figure out how to have teams handle that themselves. I'm curious why we need board here

Wat

Who soeaks where?

nyco, I'm curious if you have any comment, I'd like to hear them

Ping

pep. probably mandated in the bylaws. We can go through them out-of-band if you want.

hi

for now, let's move on 🙂

3. ISOC Foundation grant

soryr to interrupt, sometimes I receive some notifications from I don't know where nor I don't know who, but no always

ok, sorry

https://www.isocfoundation.org/grant-programme/emergency-response-grant-programme-covid19/

The isoc foundation is offering a grant that non-profits can apply to in order to help with the current situation (covid)

The application period is until the 17th though, so pretty quick. I personally don't have many ideas but if anybody is interested in suggesting something I'd like board to consider it before the deadline

We briefly discussed this yesterday (day before yesterday maybe?). I do like attracting a grant like this, but a) it's short notice, and b) I'm unsure if we'd qualify for this particular one.

If someone has a good idea to move this forward, I'm all ears though.

I'm also unsure, but if anybody is willing to take up on the challenge I think we should hear it yeah

The ISOC offered grand discussion did trigger an idea with me. Should the XSF aim to have more of a team that chases down grants like these, and have proposal drafts available to answer? We might even want to consider hiring people to do this - basically have them pay for themselves?

grand/grant

Not sure exactly what this should look like, but it might be worth entertaining the thought.

hmm, why not. I'm open for discussion

let's ponder, and revisits in a next meeting?

In the meantime I'll send an email regarding this specific grant

to members@

ok, tx

That does imply board is willing to give their approval before the 17th though, right

For this specific case though, I'm out of ideas. I hardly see how could we present something for that grant, but it will be great to hear any ideas from that mail

pep. I don't think that that's implied.

it's implied that board will at least see what comes out of it 🙂

I mean, discuss it, not approve it

right

Of course

Okay

4. Adopt a character

As mentioned above I don't think there is much progress since last time, but that's not up to me

I'd just like to know where we are on this, and, if board needs to do something to move this along?

flow ?

I'm happy to leave this with flow for the time being

We can contact him out of this meeting and come back with an update. Then decide.

sure

Though an update would be nice

5. Commitments

Regarding the marketing person, MattJ and I have had a chat with her, we've tried to state what we'd be expecting of a marketing/comms person and it seems she had a bit more clue compared to when she joined the meeting :)

where does that leave the effort?

She said she'd send us a sketch of what she thinks we can do, alongside with her rates

(is that the word?)

that's _a_ word - unsure which one you're talking about 🙂

So I'm waiting on this at the moment

"rates", money things

yeah, fair enough. I usually use the singular 'rate' - but none of us are native speakers so we're forgiven 🙂

:D

Anyway, good news that we've engaged

That's it from me.

Looking forward for the sketch

6. AOB?

None here

none here

none here

:)

Close then!

I'll send minutes later

Next week is ascension day

is that reason to postpone a meeting?

or shall we simply see who turns up?

Not for me

Wohoo, thank you pep.

we might make a family day out of it, unsure yet.

I'm happy to just see who turns up

Me too

(at the meeting, not the family day)

wofs

Oh..

:D

wfs*

wfm.

hard to type on a keyboard

ok +1w then

Thanks all

thanks!

🙌

re the adopt-a-character and members opinion poll: I am (more or less) blocked on https://github.com/andrewcmyers/civs/issues/33

if CIVS would offer an option to generate N vote URLs then we could let every member draw exactly one URL from membersbot

(of course this needs adjustment to membersbot, but this should be trivial)

so I guess +1 the issue pls, and maybe we have an perl hacker amoungst us who wants to add that feature to CIVS

Ok. If, in the interest of time, we want to move without using CIVS, I'd be fine with that.

If we end up postponing this indefinitely only to be able to test-drive CIVS, that kind of defeats the purpose

Not that I'm in a hurry

Guus, well if there is a tool that fits the(/my) requirements I would happily use it

+ I really like to use it as trial run for condorcet voting and allow members a first impression of it

I think your requirements are higher than the requirements 🙂

sure, I'm not opposing that

Just want to make sure you don't feel obliged to chase down a dependency on our account.

I kinda could go with a system that does no condorcet voting, but I could not find a sensible one

Goodday guys 👋 Happy to join the team. Sorry, I missed the meeting 😫

fwiw I'm not against testing Condorcet for this "non-essential" task

(I also don't care really much about the character personally, sorry but not sorry)

pep., no need to apologize, you are entitled to your own opinion

(in this case)

;)

nyco, btw, still happy to hear your comments if you have any, here or in private

About ?

Your messages above happened while we were talking about emus

Since you're also commteam I thought it might have been related

emus, what's your Github username?

(and congrats :) )

MattJ: Thanks, just check the recent drafts for the XMPP Newsletter, Im was the creator, echolon wait

yes its only Echolon

Ok, added. I think you may receive an invite

MattJ: Yes. already accepted, thanks!

Minutes sent

https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2020/04/23/our-arguments-against-the-french-contact-tracing-app-stopcovid/

can the XSF also make a statement against solutionism or sth? (the idea that everything can be solved with technology)

also related: https://edri.org/blog-ban-biometric-mass-surveillance/

I would personally agree to work on a draft, but Iag time this weekend 😕

I would personally agree to work on a draft, but Iag time this weekend 😕

hello, I'm confused about connection error from xmpp.org with my server

>>>> admin@jabber.eu.org/eyeCU 22:03:05 +19238 >>>> <iq xmlns="jabber:client" to="xmpp.org" type="get" id="sid_212"> <query xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/disco#info"/> </iq> >>>> admin@jabber.eu.org/eyeCU 22:03:05 +4 >>>> <iq xmlns="jabber:client" to="xmpp.org" type="get" id="sid_213"> <query xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/disco#items"/> </iq> <<<< admin@jabber.eu.org/eyeCU 22:03:05 +566 <<<< <iq xmlns="jabber:client" from="xmpp.org" xml:lang="en" xmlns:xml="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace" to="admin@jabber.eu.org/eyeCU" type="error" id="sid_212"> <query xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/disco#info"/> <error xmlns="jabber:client" type="wait" code="504"> <remote-server-timeout xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-stanzas"/> <text xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-stanzas" xml:lang="en" xmlns:xml="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace">Connection failed: connection refused</text> </error> </iq> <<<< admin@jabber.eu.org/eyeCU 22:03:05 +15 <<<< <iq xmlns="jabber:client" from="xmpp.org" xml:lang="en" xmlns:xml="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace" to="admin@jabber.eu.org/eyeCU" type="error" id="sid_213"> <query xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/disco#items"/> <error xmlns="jabber:client" type="wait" code="504"> <remote-server-timeout xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-stanzas"/> <text xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-stanzas" xml:lang="en" xmlns:xml="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace">Connection failed: connection refused</text> </error> </iq>

xnamed, what's confusing about it?

Zash, what's the problem

The local server could not connect to xmpp.org.

From "connection refused" I would guess that it either failed to look up the SRV records and tried to connect to the wrong port, or that there's a local firewall that blocks connections to the port xmpp.org uses.

I think the second possibility

thank you Zash

I always think it would be nice if the textual error message would include the involved tcp 4-tuple ✏

Hmm

now is a good time to point out that the text element of stream errors is not supposed to be user-understandable

I'm not sure we should shove too many details at users, but it can be useful.

my counter argument is always that users who do not understand it could at least give the text to their admin

When will I find the time and energy to write that Extended S2S Error Info XEP?

because there is a reason why some UIs just tell the user that "something bad happened, try again later"

The <error/> element: MAY contain a <text/> child element containing XML character data that describes the error in more detail

so you usually want to display this to the user, with an extra button that leads to a detailed error report

that he/she is not expected ot understand

While we have that single <text> element, we could at least try to have the beginning of it easily understandable, and then go into more details.

I would totally support adding a "dump-user-text" element

but the existing <text/> should probably contain as much as details as possible

err dumb-user-text

for dumb-user-text all you need is a set of strings for all well-known conditions

If they're well-known conditions, wouldn't conditions be better?

as in like the tag names we have, but moar!

<certificate-expired/>, <connection-refused because="firewall"/>...

can't catch them all

but yes, why not, we certainly will end up with a textual escape hatch

we already have that

great, I like hatches. but not the one from lost

I remember had certificate expired error long ago but this time it's something else

I think good idea to add details

> flow> my counter argument is always that users who do not understand it could at least give the text to their admin I agree. For the 5% that do send things to their admin, it's good when they have more than "it doesn't work"

The admin can usually correlate the timestamp with a particular s2s attempt in their debug logs.

But +1 for more understandable errors.

Maybe the admin is not that admin

It’s a good thing for users who are their own admin too. :)

Link Mauve: "yesterday I couldn't talk to Jack"

And then you have 2GB of server logs and they have three Jacks on the roster

What if the admin like me doesn't have access to the debug logs?

Compared to yesterday I got a weird message when talking to Jack: "something something error 1235"

I'm still kinda proud of the new certificate related s2s errors in Prosody (trunk)

xnamed, uh, then you can’t debug.

I sometimes get screenshots from users, even for errors that were toast messages.

They manage to make a shot of their mobile screen in the 1 or 2 seconds that the toast is visible

Zash: a pity that I can't see them.

xnamed, with my iteam hat on, I see no trace of any connection to xmpp.org from that server.

Ge0rG, not?

Zash: I'm not checking certificates

But maybe one day I could run through all domains from my users' rosters and s2s ping them to collect certificate validity data and to be able to decide whether to enforce certificates after that.

I hope we can improve DNS and TCP related errors too

Currently you get e.g. > Server-to-server connection failed: unable to resolve service or > Server-to-server connection failed: connection refused

And some clients are only wide enough to show "Server-to-server connection fa..."

Maybe someone could improve that as well

Compressed jargon doesn't feel like the solution, especially not if we want more details in there.