Adam Brault for Board 2014

Who am I
I'm the founder and CEO of &yet, a small bootstrapped software company focused on realtime technologies founded in 2008. We have done a lot with XMPP and WebRTC over the past several years.

XMPP: [xmpp:adam@brault.io adam@brault.io] Email: [mailto:adam@andyet.com adam@andyet.com]

Why I'm standing
I'm a huge fan of the XMPP community.

Many of the folks who are passionate and vocal in this community have inspired my beliefs about what the Internet should be. The XSF is this tiny community that seems to have somehow preserved the ethos of the best hopes of the Internet.

But sadly, XMPP is viewed *at best* as irrelevant to every developer community I have participated in outside the XSF.

In an era when people are increasingly distrusting of centralized services, that's absolutely unacceptable.

I want that to change. I believe it can. And I believe I can help.

My "street cred"

 * Founded and grew &yet to a 40 person company
 * Somehow hired a number of amazing XMPP folks (all of whom constantly inspire me—even Fritzy)
 * Brainchildified three iterations of RealtimeConf, assembling a tremendous team who made it unforgettable
 * Co-creator of original Talky app with Henrik Joreteg
 * Conceptual contributor to Otalk and one of its primary investors

What I'm good at that's a good fit for what the XSF needs

 * Collaborative leadership
 * Design, UX, positioning/branding, strategy, writing
 * Being an underdog
 * Stubbornly insisting on what I believe to be right
 * Changing my mind when a good argument is presented

I also apparently must have some knack for XSF leadership, given that I somehow have managed to employ numerous current and former council and board members. (In order of arrival: Nathan Fritz, Lance Stout, Mike "Bear" Taylor, Philipp Hancke, and Peter Saint-Andre.)

What I would do as a board member:

 * Push for the XSF to be *very* opinionated and have an agenda.
 * Encourage the community to focus on end-users.
 * Get rid of religious ideals that discourage new users from accessing, adopting, and understanding.
 * Help the XSF shift toward seeing itself as an agent of empowerment for open source rather than a judgmental gatekeeper.
 * Help push forward a new XSF site within one month.
 * Celebrate and publicize every single new XMPP open source project and software product using XMPP.
 * Use the XSF site to systematically dismantle myths about XMPP.
 * Help the XSF switch to using popular, modern collaboration tools.
 * Create a campaign educating people on why federation is important.
 * Help position XMPP as an ideal technology for those focused on indie technology, concerned with privacy, and eager to avoid silos.
 * Advocate documenting, promoting, explaining important features for IoT, mobile, low-energy, WebRTC, etc.
 * Identify the gaps that keep new messaging app services using XMPP from federating and work to influence them to do so.
 * Be able to make a federated WebRTC call work between four popular XMPP clients by Summer 2015.
 * Woo, cajole, guilt, and/or friendly armtwist Mozilla into getting Firefox Hello to federate with XMPP+WebRTC.