Technical details
To communicate across the local network telekinesis will use the serverless link-local extension of the XMPP (Jabber) protocol described in XEP-0174 and originally implemented by Apple iChat.
While we started planning to use the Telepathy framework in this project, Sjoerd Simmons from Collabora made public his telepathy-salut connection-manager implementation and we quickly decided that we could base our work on it, extending its functionality where needed.
The implementation of the ZeroConf mDNS protocol used by telepathy-salut to discover other users is the one from the Avahi project: it even uses the same IPC mechanism used in the Telepahty project, D-Bus. :)
After a short while, Xavier Claessens started his modular Gossip fork making use of Nokia's Mission Control, developing the Empathy chat client and the related libempahty, so we jumped on this bandwagon too, planning to embrace and extend the libempahty library.
