A Vision

by Peter Saint-Andre

2009-03-10

I have this vision for jabber.org services:

1. A clean and simple website with minimal text that will help end users get started with Jabber.
2. Web chat for a real-time window into one end-user chatroom and one developer chatroom (and perhaps one additional room, such as a language-specific or country-specific room).
3. Internationalized versions of everything so that volunteers around the world can run sites like de.jabber.org (Germany) and pt.jabber.org (Portugal).
4. Extension of this international model to XMPP services, so that we can run SOCKS5 data proxies for file transfer and TURN media relays for voice+video all over the world (we'll need to convince companies and ISPs and non-profit organizations that this is in their interest, since they are the people with the bandwidth).

For me the idea here is that jabber.org will be the community-driven "running code" laboratory for the formal "rough consensus" technologies produced by the XMPP Standards Foundation. The goal is to build an open and distributed IM, presence, data, and VoIP service that can provide a realistic alternative to closed systems like Skype.

None of this would be exclusive. We'd still strongly encourage people to run their own XMPP services and join the network. But we'd also work hard to have worldwide coverage under the jabber.org banner.

Call this "Jabber 2.0" if you must. In any case, I think it's time for a strong community centered at jabber.org to provide technology leadership in the communication space and thus help us all achieve the original mission that Jeremie Miller defined long ago: freedom of conversation.

Peter Saint-Andre > Journal