Winfried Tilanus Application 2018

Hi,

I am Winfried Tilanus, you can reach me at: xmpp:winfried@tilanus.com or mailto:winfried@tilanus.com. You can usually find me with the nickname 'winfried'. I am self-employed at https://www.tilanus.com/ Projects I work for, include: https://www.samenbeter.org/ (see also http://betermetelkaar.org/ ) and https://vraagapp.nl/

experience

I have been running a SaaS chatsystem for online pyscho-social counseling from 2003 till 2016. This system was based on XMPP. Nowadays I am specializing in privacy aspects of healthcare over the internet.

Involvement with the XSF

I have been involved with the XSF in several ways: talks at Fosdem, participating in the summits in Brussels, some editorial work and advocacy in other forums. Recently my involvement hasn't been up to my own standars, due to personal issues and the course my work takes. But still I am advocating the use of XMPP in several projects I am involved in: I think both the maturity of XMPP and its distributed nature make it a great tool for building advanced real-time systems. In the 'SamenBeter' project for example, XMPP would offer out of the box an ideal base-infrastructure. (Because of the complexity of the project, it is a cooperation of more than 100 organisations, the decision to use XMPP still isn't made, unfortunately). But also in some other projects I keep pushing for XMPP.

What I want to contribute

For me big topics are (of course) security and privacy features of XMPP. But also I noticed that there is still a big world to win with XMPP: it is still too often regarded as a chat protocol, while I believe its real strength is offering a distributed backbone for real-time applications (including signalling). But for some reason in many corporate settings there is ample attention for the benefits of XMPP. I want to bring back my experiences in some of the teams I participated in, to make XMPP more attractive.