Shiny new Instant Messaging XMPP server, application updates.
Banner of the month
This month, as I’ve just finished reading the absolute must-read that is The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi KLEIN, it’s the perfect opportunity to talk about Inventaire.io.
Inventaire.io is an online application which lets you register your books and decide what to do with them. Readily available in English, French, German and Italian, with many more translations ongoing, here is the pitch from the website:
This is an experiment about resources and capabilities. Given a resource you have or you look for, what are your possibilities? Make, give, get from a gift, lend, borrow, rent, buy, sell, upcycle, recycle…
The goal of the Inventaire project is to map those possibilities, make alternatives visible. At the same time, this is about easing resources data transparency and openness, and the transmission of those data from the business to the customer.
Also very important is the pledge on keeping the collected data open to all (could be compared to OpenFoodFacts in that sense I guess):
All public data gathered in Inventaire will be published under an open licence.
Nomagic went ahead and created a user and group on inventaire.io!
Communication material is available within the Inventaire repository
Now if you wish to contribute, there are many ways to do so, and most of them are not technical. It is mostly about contributing to improve books data, help translating the website, and help spreading the word. Reach out to their dedicated contribute page to get started!
Announcement
There is progress with opening the organisation’s bank account. We finally got a validation, and should get our credentials within a few days.
Our XMPP service is reborn
XMPP is the EXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, a set of open technologies for instant messaging, presence, multi-party chat, voice and video calls.
We have retired our venerable Openfire XMPP solution to replace it with Ejabberd, a different solution which is also very mature and supports more extensions. We have implemented many of those extensions.
Your XMPP unique username (called JID, aka your handle) is now : <username>@xmpp.nomagic.uk
XMPP was here long before Matrix, and at some point was even implemented by Facebook and Google, which was making it possible to chat, from any XMPP server, with someone on Google chat.
However they both rendered their implementation incompatible with anybody else before long, putting their users behind walled gardens. That way, the users now do their advertisement for them 
.
Compared to Matrix, XMPP is much much lighter on the server side, which I find very attractive as a system administrator who doesn’t have nor want unlimited resources and storage to work with.
The documentation on XMPP on our Wiki is in the process of getting updated with tutorials for modern XMPP client applications on desktop and Android. We are getting help with this from some of you, thanks! 
The coming weeks will be used to attempt to deploy a bot designed to connect XMPP and Matrix users for some rooms.
Achievements
Website
Built with love and SVGBackgrounds, our homepage has never been so shiny 
.
Applications upgrades
The following applications have been upgraded to their latest stable versions:
- Hedgedoc
- Seafile
- Mobilizon
Coming up
Our road map now includes:
Short-term objectives
- Upgrade the last 3 servers to the latest release.
- Accompany our user into transitionning from donations to memberships.
- Rent another server to handle our increasing load and allow for new services.
Mid-term objectives
- Implement Single Sign-On (SSO) so that Nomagic users won’t have to authenticate on each and every service in their Web browser.
- We are yet to start organising monthly discovery sessions to ease out first contact with people interested in Nomagic.
Long-term objectives
- Keep on implementing security/privacy policies.
Icons made by mavadee from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC 3.0 BY
