Annual Report 2009

This is a "working page" for writing the 2009 annual report of the XSF (coinciding with the Board and Council terms for 2008-2009). The model for this page is http://xmpp.org/xsf/docs/annual-report-2007.shtml

= Executive Summary =

To follow...

= XMPP Extension Protocols =

The XMPP Council worked to complete several primary tasks in its eighth session (2008-2009). A full accounting of work on Draft and Final XEPs for this session is located at http://xmpp.org/council/tallies_08.shtml

Jingle
In June 2009 the Council was finally able to advance the core Jingle specifications from Experimental to Draft:


 * XEP-0166: Jingle
 * XEP-0167: Jingle RTP Sessions
 * XEP-0176: Jingle ICE-UDP Transport Method
 * XEP-0177: Jingle Raw UDP Transport Method

This effort represents a major milestone in the use of XMPP for multimedia session negotiation as originally deployed in the Google Talk application.

Reliability
During recent instances of the twice-yearly XMPP Summit a significant topic of discussion has been improving the reliability of XMPP as a transport protocol (e.g., in mobile environments and distressed networks). The major result so far has been advancement from Experimental to Draft of XEP-0198: Stream Management (as well as advancement from Draft to Final of XEP-0199: XMPP Ping).

Draft to Final
The eighth Council made a concerted effort to advance more XEPs from Draft to Final in the XSF's standards process. The specifications so advanced were:


 * XEP-0012: Last Activity
 * XEP-0085: Chat State Notifications
 * XEP-0174: Serverless Messaging (originally developed by Apple for their Bonjour technology)
 * XEP-0138: Stream Compression
 * XEP-0199: XMPP Ping
 * XEP-0202: Entity Time
 * XEP-0203: Delayed Delivery

It is probable that additional XEPs will be advanced from Draft to Final during the ninth Council session (2009-2010).

XEP Maintenance
As is evident from the vote tallies for the eighth Council session, maintenance of existing specifications now consumes quite a bit of attention. This is an inevitable result of the fact that the XMPP protocol stack continues to grow year after year. Some concern has been expressed that this large maintenance burden might be taking away resources from development of new XMPP extensions. It is unclear yet how this issue can be addressed.

= IETF Activities =

The XSF has spearheaded creation of a renewed XMPP Working Group at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

The primary focus for the WG is to complete revisions to RFC 3920 and RFC 3921, which comprise the core definition of XMPP. This work is very far along and will likely be complete in late 2009 or early 2010.

A strong secondary focus for the WG is development of a secure, deployable technology for end-to-end encryption of XMPP traffic. A requirements document has been published (borrowing heavily from XEP-0210 and one proposed approach to solving the problem has been documented using an application-level profile of Transport Layer Security, called XTLS.

= Marketing =

The XSF is not a traditional organisation attempting to sell a product or a service. It does however have an interest in raising the profile of and promoting XMPP with the aim of increasing the size of the XMPP development community. With this goal in mind, efforts are made to ensure that the XSF is represented at some industry events and that the XSF is presented as an active organisation.

Conference Presentations
XSF Members often give talks at industry events raising the profile of XMPP. During the period covered by this report two major events occured at which the XSF had an official presence. FOSDEM and OSCON.

FOSDEM 2009
The XMPP Room at FOSDEM was host to 9 XMPP-related talks, 8 by XSF Members and one by Simon Tennant of BuddyCloud:


 * XMPP 101 A Fast-Paced introduction to XMPP Technologies (Remko Tronçon & Peter Saint-Andre)
 * PubSub and the Web (Nathan Fritz)
 * Integrating XMPP into Web Technologies (Jack Moffitt)
 * Geolocation (Simon Tennant of BuddyCloud)
 * Deploying Jingle (Diana Cionoiu)
 * Personal Media Networks (Dirk Meyer)
 * Large-Scale XMPP Deployments (Florian Jensen)
 * XMPP in Real Life (Mickaël Rémond)
 * Presenting Information Flow in Deployed XMPP Clients (Dave Cridland)

Blog posts on some of these presentations (which were all very well attended) can be found on the XMPP Blog. The team also tried their hand at some commercial promotional activities at the XMPP Booth, giving away stickers and selling XMPP T-Shirts.

OSCON 2009
Notes on OSCON tbc.

XMPP in the News
The large number of XMPP-related announcements and stories this year provided plenty of content for the regular XMPP Roundup blog posts authored by Nicolas Vérité and Peter Saint-Andre.

xmpp.org Website
Efforts have begun to replace the existing XSF website at xmpp.org with a new design, currently under development at http://stage.xmpp.org

= Board of Directors =

The membership of the XSF elects a new Board of Directors every year in September. The Board provides business and organizational leadership for the XSF. The following individuals volunteered their time to serve on the Board during the 2008-2009 term.


 * David Banes (Chair) - Cleartext Systems
 * Alexander Gnauck - AG-Software
 * Jack Moffitt - Collecta
 * Mickaël Rémond - Process One
 * Will Sheward - Isode

= XMPP Council =

The membership of the XSF elects a new XMPP Council every year in September. The Council provides technical leadership for the XSF, focusing especially on the review and advancement of XMPP Extension Protocols (XEPs). The following individuals volunteered their time to serve on the Council during the 2008-2009 term.


 * Dave Cridland - Isode
 * Ralph Meijer - Mediamatic Lab
 * Jack Moffitt - Collecta
 * Peter Saint-Andre - Cisco
 * Kevin Smith (Chair) - Psi/Swift