B. Mann Consulting

I'm now officially a member of the Jabber Software Foundation, according to the member meeting minutes.

For one of my first acts, I'll be at EuroOSCON's Dot Org Day (some info posted on the DrupalCon website -- if you are an open source project with presence in Europe, please attend!) helping RalphM and stpeter man the booth there.

That was one of the reasons I wanted to be "official" -- I've already unofficially been promoting/evangelizing Jabber, but now I can say that I'm a member of the JSF.

I hope to get more involved as a member, working on everything from web presence, conference attendance, and general promotion of Jabber-the-community and XMPP-the-protocol.

Help keep our instant messaging and real time protocols open, free, and standards based -- Jabber is for people :P 

I'm in Stuttgart meeting with some clients. Lots of Drupal + Jabber integration talk, and luckily ralphm is here to bring along lots of Jabber expertise.

We've been talking a lot about geolocation notification over Jabber -- so users can indicate their location over Jabber. There are few (if any?) clients that support this today, so we'll probably support some short hand for testing purposes -- being able to type in geoloc:[lat],[lon].

So, I was looking at JEP-0080 (geoloc) and JEP-0112 (physloc). 112 is a plain text representation of physical location, and JEP 80 is the latitude / longitude. JEP 80 also has a plain text "description" field. So...why not collapse the two? physloc could replace the current JEP 80 "description" entry...every single entry is optional, so the text field in physloc can handle the current usage of the description field. It just seems wasteful to maintain two separate JEPs for what is essentially the same information.

As well, if a service already knows the physical location, it can send it along with the geoloc -- you can't derive the physical location from the geolocation, so in the current case, you would have to send two messages.

FOSDEM 2006 is over. The picture at left was taken by Dries Buytaert, showcasing the fact that this was my first appearance at an event being associated with Jabber. I'd put "officially" somewhere in that last sentence, but I'm not a member of the Jabber Software Foundation (JSF)*, so it's just my name on a presentation. I had a lot of fun co-presenting with Ralph for the second time -- he knows all the technical nitty gritty, and I wave my hands and try and open people's minds as to the current and future potential of XMPP.

Lots of people had heard about Jabber, and I think mine and Ralph's intro presentation on the first day helped hilight the point that I have been trying to make for a while now: that it's time for people to pick up the IETF-blessed XMPP standard and use it for real-time uses other than IM.

The picture at right is from my poking my head into the Jabber developer room on the second day -- every seat was taken and it was standing room only. Ralph by all accounts kept the room quite full, being stuck doing all the presentations as other presenters hadn't been able to make it. The Virtual Presence session (see the LLuna project for more info) became a step more virtual because the presenter wasn't in the room, but that itself became a great example of uses of the technology.

I just joined the Free Software Foundation as an Associate. It's $120/year, or $60/year if you're a full time student. The OSCMS Summit is next Tuesday, and I will be attending FOSDEM.

As well, I've really enjoyed my efforts here in Vancouver, working with organizations like Leading Edge BC to explain and promote open source locally. And, of course, Zak Greant (of many free-and-open connections, as well as now regional director of North America for eZ), who was the direct inspiration for my FSF membership. And ActiveState. And Enfold Systems. Gee...lots of cool, innovative open source stuff going on here in Vancouver! This is a Good Thing™.