IndiaFOSS is coming up in September and the waiting list for booths has opened. I am planning to apply for an "XMPP Everywhere" booth under the XMPP Standards Foundation.

My idea is to have a table with various devices—smartphones, laptops, feature phones, and other gadgets—all running different XMPP clients (and servers?). This will help provide a live demonstration of federation and interoperability, which will help us overcome the challenges we usually face when explaining these concepts to a new audience. Rather than telling, we can just show them!

The primary aim is to generate some excitement about XMPP and we can also showcase recent new features like Status and group calls. However, a secondary goal is for people to create accounts and hopefully remain engaged even after the conference.

If the booth is confirmed, this would be a good chance for Durare to participate. What I have thought of so far:

• We can make a special Durare invite link QR code for people to create XMPP accounts during the conference. This could be displayed alongside Prav signup details, so people can decide whether they want the quicker option or the one that leaks less metadata—or even give both a try 😉

• This would also be a good time to prepare informational flyers and stickers about Durare, including fundraising campaigns

• If people from the Durare community are going to be around at IndiaFOSS, they could help to run the stall (more people means the time requirement from each person is less, leading to everyone having more time to explore the rest of the conference)

• If people want to talk about or demonstrate the Prosody server, that could happen too. I will independently reach out to Prosody as well in case they want to show their own flyers and stickers, but people who are experienced with handling Prosody on the Durare server would be able to better answer any queries that may come up

More suggestions are welcome; I'll wait for a few days and then make volunteer/proposal polls if needed.