Just about a week ago, the XSF held yet another successful XMPP Summit in Brussels in conjunction with FOSDEM’10.

As I had to miss the Hackfest on Friday, let’s start with the important things: The FOSDEM Beer Event.

It was nice to see, that this year, the Beer Algorithm allowed us to actually get a seat, unlike the last years where we had to stand in front of the Delerium most of the time.

On Saturday, the XSF had the Stand and Devroom at FOSDEM. We were happy to see, that the devroom was packed throughout the event. There were some great talks, including a very popular “Stump the experts”, where the audience was able to ask our XMPP Book Authors and Council members this amazing technology called XMPP.

The booth was also not left unattended. Although this years T-Shirts proved to be harder to sell, GREY?! REALLY?!, we were able to sell about half of them.

We also had some odd people visiting the booth, such as a lawyer, that wanted help the XSF help to defend their copyrights. The thing we noticed though was, that not that many people are aware of the fact that they use XMPP every day, in their favorite websites, such as GMail and Facebook.

The thing that people really seemed to like, were our “Shiny Toys” (N900′s nicknamed by Dave; reference here), and the other Mobile XMPP demos, like Ooros‘ NFC Demo, and Buddycloud. We’ll try to have more of those next year round!

Speaking of “shiny toy”, I’d like to thank Nokia for lending us the 20 N900′s and MobileVikings for being so generous and giving us SIM cards with Mobile Internet to take advantage of all the functions of the N900′s. I had my first Jingle call that JUST WORKED! It actually worked so well, that I got a wake up call on the N900 early in the morning from other people on XMPP Jingle – Nokia, please implement auto away.

Of course, after people had played with the N900, many started hacking software together in order to try and keep the N900′s provided by Nokia. Here you can see Remko porting Swift to the N900, and Dave finding the accelerometer API.

Sunday evening, it was time for the big XSF Dinner. It was less spectacular than last years, but that’s because we had a coach bringing us to the restaurant and back, which resulted in less running in the Brussels Metro stations, and a short 15 minute drive. With 54 attendees, the dinner was full up, and we might need to restrict it to XSF Members and Sponsors only. But we’ll see.

I’d also like thank Auberge Bretonne for another successful dinner.

On Monday, we had the actual Summit. There were some talks about mobile optimizations, server to server security and of course Jingle. More info about these can be found on the official XSF Blog.

I’d also like to congratulate Frank Scholz and Philippe Normand, who gave a talk about their Mirabeau application, and won the XSF Developer Challenge.

It’s a pity that I didn’t find time to talk to everyone personally, and learn about all the cool XMPP projects out there, but I’ll try to catch up next time.

I’d just like to thank some people personally, without whom, this weekend wouldn’t of have been the same:

• Nokia and specifically Kristian Luoma and Petri Liimatta, for their continued support of the XSF and the cool N900′s.
• Our Dinner Sponsors, who paid for the great dinner: Nokia, Vodafone, Collabora, Isode, TANDBERG, Buddycloud, Collecta, and Ooros.
• MobileVikings, for giving us the SIM cards with Mobile Internet, that saved us from FOSDEM’s flaky WiFi and allowed us to keep in touch over the weekend.
• Auberge Bretonne for the great dinner.
• Everyone in the XSF community, who joined the events.
• And the rest of the XSF Board, for organizing the event!

I hope that everyone who attended enjoyed the event, and I hope to see you all next year (or maybe earlier – if I am able to attend OSCON).

For me, the trip to Brussels consisted of 3 great parts. The Actual FOSDEM, the XMPP Summit and last but not least: The Social Events all around it.

FOSDEM: A place where people talk and hand out T-shirts

After arriving in the evening from London and having had a dinner with the nice guys from Seesmic, we headed down to the FOSDEM Beer Event. Having lived in the UK for a few months now, I was missing my real beer. Until today, I haven’t had a beer in the UK that comes close to the good taste of Belgian Beer, and people are trying hard to prove me wrong

The FOSDEM Beer event is an event held in the city centre near the grand place in the Delerium Cafe. The equation more or less goes like this: Geeks + Free Beer = Overcrowded bar. But it’s always nice to meet up with the people you IM with atleast once a week. Ofcourse, you can’t stay there too long, as you have to try to get up relatively early the next morning to get to the conference.

So Saturday morning, I realized that it’s actually quite difficult to fit a box of 25KG with 110 T-Shirts into a small Golf. After about 20 minutes of turning and moving around the box, it finally fit, and we we’re ready to head down to the ULB Campus. Arriving there with the box of T-Shirts, Dave found his calling as a T-Shirt salesman. He saw the box of T-Shirts, ripped it open, and before anyone realized, the first batch of T-Shirts we’re already sold. AMAZING!

In the back of the building, XMPP had it’s DevRoom, which was the place to be around the conference. The room was packed on nearly every single talk. It just shows you, that XMPP is actually quite popular. Who would’ve guessed?!

The Crowd

My Talk

So at 16:30 the big moment had arrived. My turn to hold a talk in front of a room of XMPP Fans. Thanks to Will for the pictures.

For everyone who’s interested in my presentation, it can be downloaded here: fosdem09-largescalexmpp-public

Sunday mainly consisted of running round at FOSDEM and selling shirts at the booth, although we actually only had 3 left in the end which then got back ordered.

So let’s move on to the XMPP Summit. Actually, let’s give a summary of the Social stuff in Brussels.

Social Events all around Brussels

The XSF Dinner:

Some time in December, I heard that there wouldn’t be any XSF Dinner. Not being able to rest before knowing that there actually would be one, I talked to some people in the XSF, until one evening, Jack gave me an idea. Small contributions towards the dinner, making it an official event, and a cheap dinner for participants.

Running around with this idea, people quickly joined in and pitched in some money towards the dinner. In the end, we had more money than the dinner would cost. Unbelievable! We collected 1875€ for the dinner.

I would like to thank again everyone who pitched in and made this dinner happen. Thank you a lot.

The hard thing was actually getting there. I underestimated public transportation timing, and the costs to transport that amount of people. I’m sorry that it took this long. I should of have tried the route before. But, public transportation had it’s fun moments.

Hermann-Debroux Metro Station

One was when getting in to the Metro, we went down to the normal departure platform, where we noticed the Metro arriving on the other side. Adding 1 and 1 together, we quickly realized that we were on the wrong side. Not wanting to miss the Metro, everyone started running up the stairs to reach the other side. It was mayhem. However, some smart people, to be exact only Will, actually saw that there was an unused alternative path. You’ll soon know why it was unused. Will saw the stairs and thought it wasn’t enough of a challenge. So he took the escalator. The escalator that was going down, not up. Running alongside the stairs, you could see him trying to fight the system, and actually nearly beating Dave on the way up. Will would’ve won if he didn’t trip on one of the last steps, which set him back a few seconds, allowing Dave to reach the top first.

Arriving on the other platform, completely exhausted, we saw the Metro driver leaving her car, slowly walking to the other side of the train, as yes, Hermann-Debroux is a Terminal Station. The Metro wasn’t supposed to leave for another 7 minutes. But hey, sports are healthy

A side note on this story: We had the XSF Dinner, which consisted of a solid 4 course menu about 20 minutes beforehand.

The second thing that was quite funny, was the size of the group. On Sunday evenings, public transportation is usually running empty. No-one uses the Buses on a Sunday night. Getting on to a Bus with 45 people which was empty just seconds before, filling it up completely is a funny thing to see. The Bus drivers couldn’t believe their eyes.

Saturday Night @ Poechenellekelder:

After having had a good dinner at a nice restaurant on the Grand Place, we headed down to the Poechenellekelder.

This pub is just amazing. We had the best bar tender ever! EVER! EVER! After a few initial beers, he said to us: “Challenge me!”. We had to describe a taste for a beer that we would want, and he would bring a beer tasting like that. So the first round, we gave him a decent challenge, and he matched it perfectly. Seeing this talent, we quickly challenged him with the impossible. However, he always got a perfect match! Unbelievable! Just amazing!

The biggest beer bottle I have ever had.

Some random notes on the evening: I have never seen Artur smile that much; I have had the biggest bottle of Beer I have ever seen in my life; I have tasted amazing beers that were too good to be real.

I want RIBS!:

On Monday evening, StPeter mentioned that he knew an amazing ribs place in Brussels. Being all up for a solid meal, we quickly found a few people that thought the same way. Remember the beer place? Well this was the same for Ribs. You basically had a cow each! And they actually brought more! Again, pictures say more than words.

Please note: This was a huge plate! And I think the salad was just there to decorate. You can’t have those ribs, and then some salad!

RIBS!!!

So, having covered all of the major social events, let’s move on to the Summit.

The Summit

The XMPP Summit was held in the Bedford Hotel this year, as we’ve had a lot more participants than the year before. Like you’d expect, there we’re a lot of hot discussions going on about PubSub, File Transfer, Mobile Optimizations, and one of the most interesting for me, Server Security and Abuse Reporting.

I won’t go in to detail for any of these in this post, as this post is already way too long, and you’re probably already asleep.

So just some closing words: It was great seeing everyone at the Summit, and hope to see you again next year!