XSF Discussion - 2022-05-06

what steps do I have to accomplish to get an account for wiki.xmpp.org?

IIRC someone has to create it for you, but I can't remember who

(not very helpful I know)

I can do that. Instructions are actually on the home page, linking to this article: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Sysops

thilo.molitor: let us know what changes has been done

“22:09:34 moparisthebest> I don't even like that language, why should anyone "come to us" in the first place? only if they feel like it I suppose”, around me, there were quite a few of my friends who once tried to contribute to XMPP clients, not even specs or servers or anything similar, but in my experience you usually come to that after you’ve found them lacking in some way and want to improve them.

Merge/pull requests being neglected for years (perhaps forever), issues being ignored or closed with little to no consideration, anxiety about issues being public or them not doing the right thing or posting what’s needed, were powerful deterrents to them continuing in that direction.

Oh, and communication only in chat rooms where you have to socialise with a lot of unknown people is also an issue.

Some people very much would want to contribute, but all of this tech acts as a barrier which filters them out, to never see them again.

Some of these people are happily working at a tech company, brilliant CS students, or even people from very different fields who could help with non-technical stuff.

> Merge/pull requests being neglected for years (perhaps forever) This comes back to the issue of free labour. Other people are not obligated to do free work for you, and to the extent that projects are open source, they can be forked.

In a voluntary system, where people are not compelled to do work for others, you will have a situation where PRs aren't addressed

It's in the nature of the agreement that people aren't forced to work for free on stuff they don't want to

jcbrand, yes, but even with very little resources there are huge improvements to be had here.

Can you give a concrete example?

In another project I work on, the main maintainer is trying to at least put labels on issues and merge requests, and give a succint answer as to whether she feels it’s a good direcion or not.

Bigger projects often have a bot which auto-replies to new issues/MRs requesting a particular maintainer for the code changed.

Ge0rG, /me as well, I’m not good at all at that yet. ^^'

Link Mauve: That's work. She has decided to spend the time and energy on that, but no-one can demand it from her

It's great that she does, and I also think people like that deserve praise (which gets into the whole meritocracy debate)

but we can't demand or even expect it

jcbrand, that’s obviously work yeah.

jcbrand: I would say this is the difference between a free software project and a source code dump

People are free to walk away from a project which they don't want to work on anymore

Reviewing pull requests / code review is absolutely dreadful work. My next open source project is probably just going to be 'closed contribution'. That's at least honestly communicating how I feel

particularly if they don't have paying customers

if you have paying customers you could still argue that you have some responsibility towards them

jcbrand, then advertise that you are not working on it any longer, and would like someone else to step up as a maintainer.

jcbrand, why just if they are paying?

because there was an explicit exchange of value and generally that comes with some kind of binding agreement

I personally feel this responsibility towards my users no matter the money I receive from them (I don’t receive any).

Yes, because you're a conscientious person, as are most people who work on FOSS for free for many years

jcbrand, a lot of companies would disagree with you, closing at random and never doing any of the maintainance you once paid for.

Yes, and that's worth criticizing

If a company goes bankrupt, it kinda goes again into the "can't force people to work for free" thing

aka slavery

But I respect the people/companies who open source their code or try to accommodate users when they go bankrupt

That's work, sure, and that's what it takes to include people that wouldn't feel included. It's a choice to make

↑ this.

I described a few bits of hurdles which prevented potential contributors from getting into the XMPP community, mostly because of their upbringing as women but not only, whether we act on it or not is up to us.

So MRs not being addressed is keeping women away from contributing to XMPP? ✏

it's keeping non-stubborn people away from contributing

When I said upbringing, (at least here in France) it comes with the baggage of aiming to be as discreet as possible, to not make waves, to avoid confrontation, to try to do things on your own before reaching for help, if ever, etc.

This isn’t specific to women, you’ll find countless counter-examples of both genres, but it is still a consequence of gendered education.

Doing things on your own before reaching for help is good advice

I wish more people followed it

Another would be to explain what you did and why you're stuck when you ask for help

jcbrand, being stuck and giving up before reaching out for help isn’t a good outcome.

And you will need help, when you’re completely new to both free software, XMPP, a particular client, its culture, bug tracker, community, maintainers…

Perhaps being stubborn is a requirement for being a FOSS contributor? Perhaps giving up prematurely is just not going to cut it? Regardless of what CoC a community has or what other things it does?

There needs to be some kind of intrinsic motivation here... you have to be motivated to be involved and to do stuff

Perhaps being stubborn is indeed a requirement to be a Foss contributor because of what we made it

jcbrand: absolutely disagree

It's not an inherent requirement to being a Foss contributor

pep. Because of the nature of voluntary interaction

Yeap. Its what we made of foss culture

Which basically is open source software that doesnt really respect its users at all

Being able to research / use Google is 95% of our industry

Not in all cases of course

jcbrand: there is a lot more than voluntary interactions going on here, you forgot about all the power structures

jcbrand, oh, one of the people I have in mind is very stubborn, she’ll try to fix her problem for days or weeks or months before giving up. But once fixed, if the answer is *tumbleweed* she won’t be able to overcome that alone.

I don't know what you mean, if she fixed the problem, she can use that fix

(tumbleweed?)

Contributing to free software isn’t about fixing your own problem and then using your own fork forever, an integral part of it is providing it to other users as well.

Yes, and if other users reject it, then that's the way it is

You can't force other people to use your FOSS code

pep., the thing you see in cartoons, where to signify nothing happens some ball of straw (?) rolls in the background.

Link Mauve: oh

jcbrand, I don’t have any ready-made solution to those social problems, otherwise I’d be advocating for them already, but saying “that’s just the way it is” and thus ditching a lot of potential contributors isn’t something I approve of.

I'm not ditching anyone

Current FOSS culture is.

I just don't buy this argument. As if there is a long line of people waiting outside to contribute and somehow we (being bad in some way) are preventing them from contributing

Yep. This is a widespread problem of my cide i dont care. Which is funny because open source is supposed to be about collaboration

msavoritias: maybe for you

I'm not against collaboration but you can't say what FOSS is for everyone

jcbrand: that is what you are describing tho

I don’t think so either, but in the off case of someone wanting to contribute who isn’t part of our current circles, the many barriers to entry we erected are a problem.

No, I'm describing voluntary interaction, of which collaboration is a part, but there's also competition in FOSS and other forms of interaction

Again, maybe that's because we want it this way

To me, FOSS is about freedom. The freedom from coercion is a big part of that.

We can say XMPP is a white boys club, that probably wouldn’t be too far from the truth. Still, I don’t like that fact.

And I don’t think we should aim at keeping it closed that way.

It's wrong though

There are Indian developers working on XMPP, there are woman and there are other non-white people

> jcbrand wrote: > No, I'm describing voluntary interaction, of which collaboration is a part, but there's also competition in FOSS and other forms of interaction What you are describing doesnt sound like voluntary interaction though. It sounds more like contributors have to "prove" themselves by passing a bunch of barriers we have to them cintributing.

And I'm not aware of anyone aiming to keep it a white boys club

jcbrand: marginally yes

Oh sure, a lot of non-white boys are working with XMPP, but how many are involved in this community?

msavoritias: No, I'm saying other people cannot be forced to review and integrate contributions

Because participation is voluntary

jcbrand: sure. But the labels as Link Mauve said or the better communication with the COC or other initiatives are part of that making it easier

Honestly, if I was a woman or non-white, I think I would be annoyed if my contribution is considered marginal ✏

jcbrand, this is just one specific issue, amongst many others (of which most of us are probably not aware).

msavoritias: So what? You still cannot force someone to add labels

jcbrand, what do you mean “considered marginal”?

Simple as that

The mentality of i dont have to do anything for users/contributors is very exclusionary by nature

Ah so "inclusivity" requires people being forced to do things against their will?

> jcbrand wrote: > msavoritias: So what? You still cannot force someone to add labels No i cant. I can just say that saying that it is voluntary while not doing the minimmum effort to collaborate fith the community and your users doesnt seem very voluntary

jcbrand: well you choose to be inclusive. Here it doesn't seem like you want to be

It feels like a "test" i have to pass to prove myself to you

jcbrand, if their will is to keep excluding potential contributors based on self-made walls, perhaps yeah.

pep. I'm not exclusive. I don't exclude anyone from using my code, from forking it, or from contributing to it. That's enough

jcbrand, I wasn’t going especially for your project, I think exactly none of us are being inclusive currently.

Not being something doesn't equal being its opposite

Link Mauve I'm replying to pep. saying that I don't want to be inclusive

“Just fork it if you aren’t happy” isn’t being inclusive, it’s the bare minimum you must allow to be considered free software.

jcbrand, it’s again not your project, but your stance in this discussion which he is pointing.

My stance is that people cannot and shouldn't be forced to do free work, and you guys are saying that free work is required to be inclusive

(Also I'm on the phone sorry, really short sentences and latency because typing)

If you want to do the work that you think is necessary to be inclusive, then by all means, don't let me stop you, but you can't expect it from people and somehow tell them they're bad people if they don't want to do free work

And IMO part of contributing to FOSS is to be realistic

jcbrand, not necessarily from you tbh, other contributors who like that could do it, I’ve always seen a huge increase in pleasantness to interact with projects when someone is managing the bug tracker, even if they themselves aren’t a developer.

and to realise that you can't demand unpaid volunteers to do stuff for you

Link Mauve: Yes, emus has done that for Converse and it makes a big difference

But that’s also voluntary work, if it isn’t welcomed or encouraged or rewarded it will never happen, or in the off chance someone wants to do it they will stop pretty quickly.

jcbrand: you're saying two things here though, you're saying we expect too much for you to be inclusive, and you're also saying you already are, which conflicts with the first part

No, I said I'm not exclusive

Which to me is enough

jcbrand, I don’t think we’ve said you are a bad person for not doing that work, just pointing that not doing it adds a barrier to potential contributors who aren’t part of the white boys club. :p

It's not about me personally

It's about the line of argument being taken

I gotta get to work

See you! \o_

This was an interesting discussion, thanks. :)

Fwiw I'm happy we got to this point in the 2-3 years I've backed off, there is progress. And it's much easier to chat about it, even though we still don't agree

One last thing... that I was trying to think of how to formalise... The line of reasoning that you're "exclusionary", "don't respect the users" and so on, is a negative form of motivation. It's saying, "do this or you're not a good person". I don't think this is helpful. It's much better to motivate people positively. So, the people who *do* make an effort, give them praise, give them credibility and appreciation, so that there is an incentive to continue.

Thanks as well 🙂

jcbrand, I think it’s usually done that way in communities which take that problem hands on and work on solutions together.

I don't think there's any requirement on OSS volunteers to be inclusionary, or indeed to have any sort of community ta all if they don't wish to - it's enough to throw some code over the wall (although I do think it's good to set expectations). But if one *does* want to build a development/whatever community it is a positive thing to try to find ways to remove barriers to people joining it. For my tuppence.

I’ve heard very good echoes of that in the Rust community for instance, although I haven’t interacted much with them to experience it first hand.

So the question really is, does the XSF want it :)

no, the question is, who does it ;)

Both are questions :)

But yes, just deciding you desire something to happen doesn't, sadly, come with a magic wand.

not wrong

No, the XSF as a whole can take a stance and decide (or not) to be inclusive. In a way it's already done with the CoC. And everybody who gravitates around the XSF is of course encouraged to contribute. It's not a one person job, it's the effort of the whole community. If not everybody does it, then just one person could ruin efforts of a small group

well if the XSF takes a stance and then nobody does the job, it's not good either

Well here we are then. The CoC is out, what now

do things and talk about them?

There's probably two 'doing its' here. One is following whatever community norm we try to set for ourselves, and everyone needs to do that - but potentially someone needs to police it. The other is putting in the work to come up with norms, and whatever positive actions might need explicitly doing.

If the CoC says "Don't be an arsehole" - everyone needs to not be an arsehole. If we decide we want to find underrepresented groups and reach out to them, that needs an explicit action from someone(s).

> If we decide we want to find underrepresented groups and reach out to them, that needs an explicit action from someone(s). I wonder how that would actually work in practice. besides 'being nice and welcoming'

Daniel, probably a bit like design work, where we would contract someone who is affected by some of these issues and work with them to improve our stuff.

?

Daniel, the issue here is about improving things we are not even aware are a problem.

Which is very similar to design/UX work in our software, as we’re used to them we don’t see the glaring problems caused by it.

no i mean how and where would I actually find someone to work on my XMPP project?

i don’t mean hiring a consultant to tell me how to be more nice

Ah uh, I don’t actually know.

Daniel: It was meant to be an example of a thing needing explicit action, in contrast to group compliance, rather than something I was proposing.

Oh, another inclusivity thing which is very often overlooked in our community is i18n.

Our specifications are all written in English, and the few Russian ones get laughed at (perhaps at reason, I haven’t been able to read them).

Yeah, but at the same time translating specifications is possibly even harder than writing them in the first place

When I wrote my first XMPP client, if some French association didn’t have a page about getting started in French I wouldn’t have been able to do it probably.

mathieui, yup, I agree.

And keeping them up to date with the source of truth is even harder.

But the vast majority of people don’t speak English.

Do you have a concrete proposal?

I was insisting on bug trackers earlier, the barrier of having to speak English there has been a big issue for many people around me (this time not women, their handicap was being French :p).

Yeah I had to propose my help to someone in jabberfr@ not so long ago about this ^

I still remember the handicap of interacting with French xmpp projects in the early days of Android. it was a horrible experience

And it happens regularly

Guus, making language-specific rooms, providing help with opening issues by proxy, stuff like that.

Making obvious where these places are, also

Link Mauve, but I am not sure there is strong value into making that close to the XSF, as opposed to making it wherever there is a community of local-speaking XMPP people

XMPP is a very small community, it can become rather hard to maintain support venues in multiple languages

mathieui, yup, with JabberFR we kind of fill that hole already for French.

yeah

mathieui, I'm not sure I entirely agree. Does that mean people on JabberFR should do there? own specifications their? And not within the XSF? ✏

(fail correction.)

No, I was talking about the chatroom & help thing

Right but one thing leads to another

Our wiki is terribly understaffed (with zero current contributor), but it once provided translation of various resources from the XSF.

The fact is that one has to speak english to contribute to anything XSF (even tech in general)

on the other hand, I could see value in being able to i18n xmpp.org, specifications aside

I wonder where we are with this on a scale of "desirable" to "realizable".

It never got linked to from xmpp.org though.

Guus, we are currently nowhere :p

and there is no clear and simple action to be taken on the XSF side as of now

Guus, I think a first step as was said above would be to link to places that currently exist. That we can probably change on xmpp.org

And yeah i18n on xmpp.org if it's not already there (I think it is to some extent?) would also help

Ok /fr/ is a thing but everything is in english

So there's tooling already

hugo supports multilingual stuff

(and the theme)

But I do think we could come up with something regarding specifications

I wonder if it is possible to plug weblate or other translation facilities onto the website, instead of having to commit manually each translation

(and having to be aware of what needs to be translated)

I think that half-complete, or worse, outdated i18n is a lot worse than having no i18n.

Guus, I have mixed feelings on that

and if jabberfr apparently doesn't have the resources to get their own native wiki up to date, I have very little confidence that the XSF is going to pull off i18n properly.

Guus, it would be easier to do translation in a weblate than copying from one xmpp.org page into some MediaWiki page, and then doing the translation there, without any way to track changes.

Would I object to having a fully i18n website en resource repo? Not at all. Can we do it properly? Only if we throw more money at it than that I believe is sensible.

Yeah I also have mixed feelings on half-i18n. I'm not entirely sure I agree. Understanding something a little seems better than not understanding at all

Guus, the issue of the jabberfr wiki is multifold, we don’t like wikis, it needs around 10 years of catching up, the main wiki contributor disappeared a few years ago, and updating this stuff is thankless work :p

mathieui: all of these arguments will be equally true for an i18n effort in XSF.

Guus, not really, the scope of doing i18n effort in the XSF is much more limited (specifications aside)

there are *hundreds* of pages about dead clients on the jabberfr wiki, with multiple references, things from the early days, JEP references, etc

an insurmountable scope nonetheless.

I'd love to be proven wrong - and occasionally, I am, but I am far from optimistic here.

I’ll put it differently: translating is hard work best done by professionals and I don’t exactly have confidence to proppose i18n on the xsf website; but it is much more framed than having to write an XMPP reference on a wiki with links to all relevant information, translated, for different levels of technical expertise, with server guides, client guides, client version history with feature listing and drawbacks, video tutorials

GIF tutorials! :D

(Yes, the file format. :D)

I wouldn’t be able to do it alone, but as I enjoy doing translation work I would certainly contribute to such an effort.

I'll happily add things to my weblate instance (which is currently only used for Snikket stuff)

I am open to doing translation work too if it matters

Me too.

Realizing that this is different from what we are discussing here, but: if people enjoy doing translations, then there are plenty of projects that would welcome those.

> jcbrand escribió: > Link Mauve: Yes, emus has done that for Converse and it makes a big difference He is talking about labeling issues for example and it is a tedious task, but I have managed to do it for Jitsi, Converse, Monal, blabber and yaxim. and I am happy to invest in others, too

Guus, I already do translation on a few XMPP projects, but would like more of them I think. ^^

Guus: not that I particularly enjoy translating. I also think I'm pretty bad at it. I do it because it needs doing

Link Mauve: Openfire has received a full French translation only last month, but that excludes all of its plugins. I'm more than happy for anyone to have a crack at those.

:o

pep.: I feel you. I absolutely detest doing translations myself.

another project: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/conversejs/#languages

if people enjoy this stuff... you'll be welcomed with open arms.

there might be the odd Dutch guy obsessively throwing flowers at you.

Guus, I have done a good part of the translation of Converse. :)

I'd be happy to point out how to perform translations for Openfire to anyone interested. Let's do that in open_chat@conference.igniterealtime.org rather than here though.

Guus: i was talking in the context of being able to translate the xmpp.org website and/or xeps with weblate

Alright, the French translation of Converse is now up to date again!

https://jabbers.one:5281/upload/XUZ4sQxzZg50iMTi/20220506_191303247_9ed1.jpg

I assume its known?

Are we using Gitlab for anything these days?

I thought there was some moving of the xeps velongings? But I am not sure if I found the right repo

https://gitlab.com/xsf/xeps/-/tree/main

jonas’: or was it some testing?

last commit 1 yr ago

I assume not

it was some testing, I'll delete it some time these days

Ok

jonas’: does this .onion publication suggestion belong in the github repo?

it's really a task for infrastructure team...

> Link Mauve: > 2022-05-06 03:01 (CDT) > Current FOSS culture is. ???

Link Mauve: Implies the current _culture_ must fixed to accommodate whom?

People who are not interested in something doesn't equate to _left out_.

If you want diversity and representation, then you're talking about politics again.

crypt, oh good, I finally catch you

in reply to your request earlier

two days back or so

crypt, ok, let me translate your message, i.e. what you said to me effectively: > jonas’: do you want to invest time and energy in a discussion of changing the tos [which were instated to save time and energy]. If yes, which room would work best for you? Perhaps a scheduled time on a weekend day, so that as many people as possible can throw in their uninformed [because they don't run the service and don't know what comes with it] ideas? > Perhaps even announce it on the homepage to get as many random folks involved as possible! It could cause even more traffic in the support channel in the future, taking more of your freetime without any compensation! I hope you can see why I'm not going to do that. People who're interested in change need to first show that they are ready to invest *their own time and energy* in that. I'm not going to do that for anyone unless I *want* to, which I don't for this and at this point. I'm not at all interested to go into "advance payment" on any contributions (i.e. I won't write documentation beyond what exists, blogposts or share any details beyond what I might want to share in a specific moment and a question from someone who I'm not familiar with is not likely to inspire interest in sharing anything). One way to show this can be to run your own instance of the service. Another way can be to make pull requests or send patches if you don't like interacting with GitHub.

jonas’: No worries

jonas’: I respect the fact that German law may limit you.

jonas’: if you ever want to chat and bounce some ideas off each other, feel free to reach out to me.

crypt, not “diversity and representation”, which sounds like some corporate bullshit, I talked about actual people who wanted to make actual contributions but got stopped by the many barriers to entry we have.

Link Mauve: can you list the barriers so we're clear?

No, because I don’t experience them myself, being in free software since what feels like forever.

Earlier today I mentioned those, but there are many more I’m not aware of: 09:34:17 Link Mauve> Merge/pull requests being neglected for years (perhaps forever), issues being ignored or closed with little to no consideration, anxiety about issues being public or them not doing the right thing or posting what’s needed, were powerful deterrents to them continuing in that direction. 09:35:02 Link Mauve> Oh, and communication only in chat rooms where you have to socialise with a lot of unknown people is also an issue.

> Link Mauve: > 2022-05-06 02:54 (CDT) > Earlier today I mentioned those, but there are many more I’m not aware of: > 09:34:17 Link Mauve> Merge/pull requests being neglected for years (perhaps forever), issues being ignored or closed with little to no consideration, anxiety about issues being public or them not doing the right thing or posting what’s needed, were powerful deterrents to them continuing in that direction. > 09:35:02 Link Mauve> Oh, and communication only in chat rooms where you have to socialise with a lot of unknown people is also an issue. These are addressable. I hope people are listening. ✏

I think so too. :)

only by the individual projects, nothing at all to do with the XSF

I personally feel excluded when projects say "join our discussion on discord!" but I just write them off as shitty projects and move on

moparisthebest, we were talking about the XMPP community at large, not just the XSF itself.

For XSF stuff, allowing GitHub PRs in addition to emails was a good accessibility move imo.

moparisthebest, no no no, that's _you_ being excluding!!! /s

moparisthebest, I too don’t contribute to such projects.

the XMPP community at large is fine, some projects don't want your contributions, others do, if you think an individual project could improve talk with the devs

Their loss I guess.

Mutually Assured Exclusion!

I get the feeling that there are two issues that are confused or conflated, one being that of having an including and welcoming environment, and the other being the fact that some kinds of contributions create additional work for volunteers.

all contributions create additional work for volunteers, it's just a matter of if that additional work is worth it or not

My bozo bit doesn't discriminate

Folks, recently someone posted a new design of the XMPP logo. Did you see it? Do you find the post?

doesn't OX end up uploading an encrypted private key such that the server can pull off https://www.kopenpgp.com/ ?

No implementation does this atm.