Hi Guus, thank you for bringing this up.
On Mon, Feb 3, 2025 at 3:32 PM Guus der Kinderen <[email protected]> wrote: > If the term "XMPP" attracts such attention from the FOSDEM crowd, we should > consider using it more explicitly during FOSDEM. Specifically, I'd like us to > consider renaming the name of our stand "the Realtime Lounge" into something > that contains the letters "XMPP". I believe that this would help a lot for > recognition with the public. > > People that now look through the list of stands on FOSDEM's website, or on > the printed maps at the venue itself, do not see "XMPP" anywhere. I believe > it would be helpful if they would. For the years that I've visited, I cannot > recall having a non-XMPP presence in our stand, so I don't think that we > would be excluding projects or people by implementing a rename (but please do > correct me if I'm wrong). I agree. The booth should be called: (Jabber) XMPP Standards Foundation or something close that ideally contains both the words Jabber as well as XMPP. This is both for discoverability for people that want to find us as well as for just raising awareness that XMPP is still a thing. I believe that even if people don’t decide to come by our stand just reading the name in the booklet or the listing on the website can have positive effects. > A secondary, but to me separate, change that we might consider is moving away > from the "lounge" concept. Although it's nice to have a place to chill out, > those bean bags also take up a lot of space. From what I've seen in the past > few years, the lounge is almost exclusively used by people manning the stands > (myself included), and not so much by visitors. I don't believe it's doing > much these days to help us engage in conversations with FOSDEM visitors. > Maybe we can find a better use for that space in future editions of FOSDEM. > > Please share your thoughts on this. I'm conscious that much of what we do is > rooted in tradition and history, and I certainly don't want to trample on > that - but if there is generic consensus that some changes may be desirable, > it's something that we can consider for 2026. I haven’t been at our FOSDEM stand in a while but last time I have I made similar observations as Guus. No guest ever comes into the "lounge" part. cheers Daniel
