Weekly Roundup
2002-03-08
When it's Friday evening and you're done working for the week, it's time to reflect on what you've accomplished recently and what remains to be done. (Well, maybe it's just time to relax, but I don't do too much of that these days.) Over at Jabber, Inc. I hand in a short list of weekly accomplishments every Friday, and I may start doing that in my weblog, too. First, here are some raw numbers (counting from last Sunday -- I'm never really sure when the week begins):
- Posted 11 messages to JADMIN
- Posted 7 messages to JDEV
- Posted 2 updated revisions of the jabberd howto (more work required to bring it up to date -- not to mention my half-finished revisions to the Jabber User Guide)
- Processed and published 2 JEPs, with 2 or 3 more in the queue
- Submitted 1 JEP to the Jabber Council -- my proposal for streamlining (well, disbanding) the Jabber Interest Groups
- Ran 1 meeting of the Jabber Software Foundation (here's the log)
- I also finished coding a voting bot and started the voting process to accept new members into the Jabber Software Foundation
- Oh yeah, and I converted the JSF news page over to XML+XSLT (of course!), and added links to recent news items and JEPs on the JSF homepage (check out that JSF RSS feed, too)
But the big fun of the week came in some discussions we had on the various lists. Mike Lin re-introduced the issue of the Jabber trademark. Feeding off some discussion in our weekly meeting and my voting report, Harold Gottschalk asked what JSF membership really means, and wondered how members can contribute more. Some folks on JDEV proposed a new architecture for our gateways to the closed IM systems, to which I replied that Jabber is not about bridging to closed systems but about building an open network.
To me, all of these issues require a lot of thought and, dare I say, leadership. In general I cleave to a studied neutrality with regard to many Jabber issues, and I don't want to push people in one direction or another (this is in line with my generally libertarian attitude, which I once expressed as letting go of ought). Yet I do have strong opinions about where the Jabber community is today, where it needs to be, and how we can get there. So perhaps I need to start sharing my opinions more freely and forcefully -- though, as always, expressed reasonably and with due respect for the ideas of other members of the Jabber community.
And I also need to, as Jer would say, keep grunting -- doing the necessary but unglamorous work that keeps us moving forward.
Speaking of which, here are some additional projects I've started working on:
- For a long time I've wanted to publish interviews with prominent Jabber developers so that people can get to know the team. I'd forgotten about that idea until this week, when Justin pointed me to the KDE website. They have an interview area on their website, which I'd like to emulate for Jabber. So look for monthly interviews beginning soon!
- I think we really need to encourage innovation within the Jabber community and spark some interest in coding up fantastic software. In a recent post to JADMIN, I broached the topic of having the JSF award prizes for best software in several categories. I am definitely going to work up a proposal for this. If you have ideas for categories or prizes (xboxes and flat-screen monitors seem to be popular items), let me know. Perhaps we wouldn't even need categories, just tell people we'll have three grand prizes or whatever and here are some of the kinds of things you could code up (but leave the rest to people's imagination).
- Well, and there's always that new Jabber-based Headline Service I'd like to code up. Hmm, I'd better stop talking and start working....
Peter Saint-Andre > Journal