Building teams around SIP and XMPP in Debian and Fedora

I've recently started a discussion on the Fedora devel mailing list about building a team to collaborate on RTC services (SIP, XMPP, TURN and WebRTC) for the Fedora community. We already started a similar team within Debian.

This isn't only for developers or package maintainers and virtually anybody with a keen interest in free software can help. Testing different softphones and putting screenshots on the wiki can help a lot (the Debian wiki already provides some examples). The FedRTC.org site is not intended to be an advertisement for my web design skills and anybody with expertise in design would be very welcome to contribute.

Teamwork in this endeavor can provide many benefits:

• Sharing knowledge about RTC, for use within our communities and also for other communities using the free and open technology
• Engaging with collaborators who are not involved in packaging teams, for example, the Debian RTC team has also had interest from upstream developers who are not on other Debian or Fedora mailing lists
• Minimizing the effort required by the system administrators (the DSA team in Debian or Infrastructure team in Fedora) by triaging user problems and planning and testing any proposed changes.
• Freeing up developer time to work on new features, such as the exciting work I'm doing on telepathy-resiprocate.

There are also many opportunities for project work that go beyond traditional packaging responsibilities. Wouldn't it be interesting to find ways to integrate the publish/subscribe capabilities of SIP and XMPP with the Fedmsg infrastructure?

Bringing XMPP to FedoraProject.org

We recently launched XMPP for debian.org and it would not be hard to replicate for FedoraProject.org users. Sure, some people are happy running their own XMPP servers. There are just as many people who prefer to focus on development and have something like XMPP provided for them.

With the strong emphasis on building a roster/buddy-list, XMPP can also help to facilitate long-term engagement in the community and users may identify more closely with the project.

I haven't offered XMPP on the FedRTC.org trial service because it would be inconvenient for people to migrate buddy lists to the FedoraProject.org domain when the service is officially adopted.

Collaboration across communities

There are various other places where we can share knowledge between teams in different communities and people are invited to participate.

The Free-RTC mailing list is a great place to discuss free RTC strategies and initiatives.

The XMPP operators mailing list provides a forum to discuss operational issues in the XMPP space, such as keeping out the spammers.

Would you like to participate?

Please consider joining some of the mailing lists I've mentioned, replying to the thread on the Fedora devel mailing list, volunteering for the Debian RTC team or emailing me personally.