Help us connect the puzzle pieces of open source VoIP technology!
RubenJoin our team as the community builder to further our mission
The Open VoIP Alliance started from a project, and it started from a feeling that more could be done to strengthen the innovation of open source VoIP technology. At Spindle we have the freedom to run with our ideas, and thus the Open VoIP Alliance was born. Over the past year Ruben and Ashley have put together their combination of technical and communication skills to get the Alliance where it is today - a fledgling community of builders, thinkers and idealists who have one thing in common, the love for open source VoIP technology.
Now we are looking for someone with the experience and passion for building open source communities to really get this going. Keep reading to find out how the Alliance started and how you fit in the picture!
To understand how and why the Open VoIP Alliance was born, it helps if you first understand the organization that sprouted it, Spindle. Spindle is a collective of professional tech enthusiasts with the purpose to develop open and free communication tools that connect people and organizations. We work towards achieving this by being a self managing organization that uses the Holacracy framework. This gives Spindlers a lot of freedom and choice to work on the issues they find important for the organization.
Open source has always been at the center of what Spindle builds and creates. Without open source technology, there would be no Spindle. Whether it be using others open source projects or releasing our own code in ways that benefit others, we recognize that open source should be a give and take kind of situation.
Years of experience meeting developers at conferences, watching online communities, and creating our own open source software allowed us to interact and better understand the community and it’s needs. We wanted to give back, not just through donating time and energy to others projects, but by trying to build a community we want to be a part of ourselves. This community would care more than anything about being open in what we do and how we do it, to ultimately create software that betters all of us. That’s the goal - to create software that benefits all of us.
A mix of our prior experiences and ideas about open source technology is why the Open VoIP Alliance was created. To start it all off, we wrote down our aims and goals in the manifesto as a way to communicate our intentions. Then opened the conversation by setting up a forum so people could join us and have a place to share their thoughts. We looked for like-minded people and companies and asked them to join us so together we could make the open source VoIP space a better place.
Eventually we started publishing software on our GitHub page. We started with the WebphoneLib, a library to help developers build their own projects with SIP integration. Later CA11 joined the list of projects, a WebRTC softphone that supports multiple signaling protocols. We also created an open source project template to help developers kickstart their own projects and made a list of current and past VoIP related conferences.
We still have a long way to go, which is why we’ve started looking for someone that can help us build this community. So are you looking forward to finally getting paid to work in open source? Then come and join us in building the Open VoIP Alliance!