Jabber @ FOSDEM
FOSDEM, the Free and Open Software Developers Europe Meeting, is an annual conference in Brussels. It is really a gathering of people interested in the development of free and open software, with very good talks, and a nice informal atmosphere. This year, the conference takes place on 21 and 22 february.
I've been to the last two editions, and really enjoyed it, but only as a visitor. So, this year I am taking a different approach. I took up the task of promoting Jabber at this year's edition through various means.
Jabber server
First of all, on the 2003 edition, I talked to raphinou, the leading
man of the FOSDEM team, to do something with Jabber on this years
edition. He agreed that this would be nice. The result so far is the
FOSDEM Jabber server:
jabber.fosdem.org.
Everyone registered on the FOSDEM website automatically has a
Jabber account. With this, or any other Jabber account from
elsewhere, you can access the group chat rooms and meet other FOSDEM
participants. There is general chat at
hallway@conference.jabber.fosdem.org for both
before and during the event, and all conversations in the chatrooms
are logged for
later reference.
Besides the chat room logs, the website has a Getting Started page with a list of Jabber clients, and some contact information. The pages are written in DocBook website and are processed using XSLT into XHTML.
Live reporting
During the two days of the conference, there will be a number of chat rooms, corresponding to the physical rooms where the talks will be held. Using the WiFi access points, this enables people in the same talk to exchange ideas about the talk at hand. Also, it would be great to get live reports from the talks in the chat room, so people that are in another talk, or not even at FOSDEM, can still attend the talk at least virtually.
Other goodies
Time permitting, I will be extending the services with stuff I've been working on the last couple of years. I want to make a local version of the Jabber World Map, so people can publish their location and find others on the conference grounds. Also, I want to make it easy for the FOSDEM team to do announcements using a variant of Mimír.
Furthermore, dj, who did a Jabber
talk two years ago at FOSDEM and is attending
again this year, suggested to setup something like the Chump. Originally,
this is an IRC bot that allows the occupants of a chat room to
maintain a simple blog by interacting with the bot. Looking at it,
it looks really interesting, and I've contacted Edd Dumbill about the
existence of a Jabber variant. It seems the Chump team is working on
a version of Chump rewritten in the Twisted Framework.
Using the Twisted Jabber stuff from 
dizzyd, it should be easy to
make a Jabber Chump bot.
JSF Stand
Besides the FOSDEM Jabber server and its facilities, I'm also busy setting up a Jabber Software Foundation stand on FOSDEM. With a fancy table skirt featuring the JSF logo, and some informational handouts, I hope to draw the attention of even more developers. Seeing the recent approvement by the IETF for XMPP Core, Jabber will get more attention in the market place, and where better to start educating than the people having to build stuff with Jabber.
I am particularly interested in the integration of Jabber into the desktop. For example micke is working on connecting GNOME's DBUS to Jabber. I will definately be talking to micke on FOSDEM. I owe him a beer, too.
Finally, Ulrich will be giving a lightning talk on merging media streaming and Jabber in the Jabber on Helix project.