The XMPP Standards Foundation (also known as the XSF and formerly the Jabber Software Foundation) is an independent, nonprofit standards development organisation whose primary mission is to define open protocols for presence, instant messaging, and real-time communication and collaboration on top of the IETF’s Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).
The XSF also provides information and infrastructure to the worldwide community of Jabber/XMPP developers, service providers, and end users. In addition, the XSF administers the Jabber Trademark Licensing Program.
At the core of the XSF is its elected Membership who, in turn, elect a Council (the technical leadership) and Board (the business leadership). The Board also appoints various work teams (such as the editor team and infrastructure team) as well as the Executive Director, Treasurer, and Secretary.
If you have an interest in XMPP standards, it is straightforward to become a Member of the XSF. (See a list of XSF members here)
The Board
The Board of Directors of the XMPP Standards Foundation oversees the business affairs of the organisation. As elected by the XSF membership, the Board of Directors for 2015-2016 consists of the following individuals:
- Laura Crossley (Chair)
- Dave Cridland
- Ralph Meijer is the lead developer of several Jabber-related projects and services, including Wokkel and the XMPP support in Twisted, the Idavoll pubsub component, and Planet Jabber. Ralph has been member of the XMPP Council from 2004 to 2013 and Director since 2013. You can find him on Twitter and chat with him on XMPP
- Arc Riley
- Mike Taylor
The Council
The XMPP Council is the technical steering group that approves XMPP Extension Protocols. The Council is governed by the XSF Bylaws and XEP-0001, as augmented by various policies and procedures.
The Council is elected by the members of the XMPP Standards Foundation. In the interest of transparency, chatroom logs and mailing list archives are available (anyone can subscribe to the mailing list, but only Council members can post).
The Council (2015-2016) consists of the following individuals:
- Lance Stout (Chair) has worked on several XMPP client/component libraries since 2010, including SleekXMPP. Lance works at &yet where he has been focusing on improving the experience of developing with XMPP in the browser, which has resulted in the new stanza.io library. With the recent introduction of WebRTC, he has been working with Philipp to create interoperable implementations of Jingle using WebRTC.
- Dave Cridland
- Tobias Markmann
- Peter Saint-Andre
- Matthew Wild is a founder of the Prosody XMPP server project and a number of smaller XMPP projects. Matthew has been a member of the XMPP Council since 2009, has authored and co-authored various XEPs and helps maintain the Jabber.org IM service.
