A few days ago we announced on twitter that we are part of the 9th round of the Prototype Fund and get therefore funds from the german Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) to develop XMPP group calls. But what does it mean and what can you expect?
It means that we have 6 month to develop a prototype which shows how group calls can be handled in the XMPP ecosystem. This means you should not expect to have a full blown XEP at the end of the funding, but you will probably be able to test group calls in JSXC after that time. Nonetheless the long term goal is to work with other client developers on such an XEP, but we doubt that this is possible in 6 month.
Our roadmap looks like this:
- Implement peer-to-peer group calls. We will look at XEP-0272 and maybe adopt XEP-0353 for a multi-user environment.
- Share results and findings of step 1 with the community.
- Evaluate video bridges, like Jitsi videobridge and Kurento, in conjunction with XEP-0340 to develop a concept for larger groups.
- Implement group calls with support for video bridges.
- Share results and findings of step 4 with the community.
Splitting the task into smaller steps should increase the possibility of group calls in a few weeks. We are excited and looking forward for your feedback on the whole topic.
We would like to thank the ministry, DLR and the prototype fund for this possibility.
