Serve on One of the New XSF Teams

January 19, 2010

One of the big changes the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) has made recently is to create special teams that are in charge of handling various internal tasks. Each member is expected to serve on at least one of these teams, and by spreading the work load among a group of interested individuals, more work gets done.

Currently there are three of these teams, one each for communication, technical review, and infrastructure.

The communications team is charged with maintaining the XSF wiki and web site, keeping updates flowing on the blog, producing presentations, tutorials, and other guides for the XMPP community, and editorial reviews of extensions. Currently the most effort has been focused on writing and reviewing blog posts.

The infrastructure team handles the machines and software that power the xmpp.org services. There are a lot of moving parts, and this team does an excellent job of keeping them well oiled. Most of the work of this team is usually invisible, but it’s important to remember their important efforts even when we can’t see them.

The technical review team evaluates extensions at each stage of their progress and provides advice to the XSF Council and others. It is extremely helpful to have a wide range of people reviewing each extension, but it is easy for less popular extensions to fall through the cracks. The idea behind the technical review team is to make sure that there is a minimum coverage level for everything, hopefully improving the quality of XMPP extensions even further.

It’s great to see the XSF get more organized; it is a sign of the growth of XMPP and the maturation of the XSF.

I just noticed that I have yet to sign up for one of these teams officially. Hopefully the technical review team and the communications teams will have me. If you are an XSF member, I encourage you to volunteer for one of these teams; many hands make light work. If you are not an XSF member, the XSF is currently accepting membership applications until the end of the month for the upcoming election.