Status Update

[Daniel Appelquist]

Hi all --

Unfortunately I have some difficult news to impart. As I posted
previously, Vodafone is closing its R&D center in Maastricht, where
our One Social Web core team members Laurent Eschenauer and Alard
Weisscher have been based. For a number of reasons, we haven't been
able to make it work to move them to Düsseldorf so I'm sad to report
that Laurent and Alard are going to be leaving Vodafone.

Vodafone R&D is still committed to the OneSocialWeb project. Diana
Cheng and Owen Griffin will be stepping up to play a role in
maintaining the OSW repository - I'll let them introduce themselves. I
will also be taking a more active role than I have done, especially
around the ongoing development of the protocol (for those who don't
know me, I'm the Web standards guy here at Vodafone). We will likely
be growing this team but for now expect our (Vodafone R&D’s)
engagement to be lower until we staff up. It would be an
understatement to say that this will impact our development timelines.

We will be continuing to maintain the repository, so we also want to
encourage you, the community, to step up and take a role in OSW's
future: to continue developing, forking and submitting ideas and
patches. We will be working to review submissions, maintain the code
base and make releases.

Finally, we are also working on migrating the osw.vodafonernd.com
server to a new home in the Betavine hosting facility in Newbury. This
will happen early next week and there may be some outages of that node
when we cut over.

Of course, this will continue to be an open project and so we hope
Laurent and Alard will continue to be involved in the community, and I
personally wish them the best in their new endeavours, where I'm
certain they are going to continue to conceive and build amazing
things.

Dan Appelquist
d...@osw.vodafonernd.com (OSW)
@torgo (Twitter)

[Luca Faggioli]

Hi Dan,

Yes, it's bad news: I'm really sorry that Laurent and Alard are leaving - best wishes to both of them for their future!

I'm also glad that Diana and Owen are on board! I can see some good vibes in the community, therefore, even in this tough moment for your team, OSW is not dead (as someone wrongly supposed via twitter :-)

Looking forward to seeing what we can achieve

Luca

Follow Me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/lfaggioli

[Alard Weisscher]

Dear all,

It's has been an exciting adventure and a real pity that we were not able to find an arrangement that worked for everyone. For me it's a moment of great sadness, but also of new opportunities and challenges ahead. I am still considering my future, but chances are that I will setup my own company. Although it is my first priority is to make that successful, I will do my best to find ways to keep active and contribute to this project. There are still many nuts to crack particularly in the User Experience of distributed social web.

I would like to thank everyone for encouraging, challenging and helping us make OneSocialWeb happen. I am confident that one day in a not so distant future distributed social networking will become a reality and that with this project we helped shape that vision.

Thanks!

Alard

[Laurent Eschenauer]

Hi everyone,

The news is out (and thanks to Dan for not waiting and posting this as soon as possible): we won't be able to stay on board. Saying that I'm sad would be an understatement. We have invested a lot of ourselves in this project and would have loved to continue the adventure. The federated social web will happen, and it was really exciting to be part of the first baby steps.

The good news is that the community is there, the code is out, and the basis of the protocol is published. The other good news is that Vodafone is committed to the project. So I see this as an opportunity for this project to really become a community effort, with more engagement from third party, also on the core architecture and next steps. I hope that you can all keep on collaborating, via this channel, but also in closer cooperation with the XMPP social folks.

As much as I would like to stay involved, I know that I'll be busy on other topics. We are having a second kid in the coming weeks and I'll focus on a new challenge: going away from a big co, and getting into the startup world. I can't say much at this stage, so just follow my tweets (@eschnou) if you want to keep in touch. It will be a technology project, in the cloud computing space (i.e. in the cloud & datacenter automation field).

I'll stay on the mailing list, happy to answer any questions you have, and feel free to contact me directly via email or tweets.

Thank you very much to all of you. Seeing this community emerge has been the most rewarding experience of this all project.

Cheers,

Laurent

[Diana Cheng]

Hi all,

This is a bit of a late reply, but I wanted to introduce myself for
those in the list who don't know me yet. I am based in the Vodafone
office in Düsseldorf and I had been working for a couple of months
with Laurent and Alard on OSW, mainly on the backend (openfire plugin,
model).

Their departure is very unfortunate, I am sad to see them leave and I
wish them the best of lucks in their future endeavours.

As Dan already mentioned I'm staying on board and I'll do my best in
the coming weeks to help mantain the code repository and provide
support through this mailing list. Yesterday we migrated
vodafonernd.com and I will be administering that server.

Many thanks for your continued support to the project!

Cheers,
Diana.

[Luca Faggioli]

Hi Diana,

Good to hear from you!
Things were a little bit uncertain in the last few weeks but now that you, Owen and Dan are part of the team and Vodafone is still committed to the project everything looks good again.

I cannot say welcome to you since you were already involved in OSW, but I hope you will enjoy your new tasks/role in the project

Ciao

Luca

Follow Me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/lfaggioli

-----Original Message-----
From: Diana Cheng <daian...@googlemail.com>
Sender: onesoc...@googlegroups.com
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2010 07:45:02
To: onesocialweb<onesoc...@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: onesoc...@googlegroups.com