Will Thompson Application 2010

My name is Will Thompson, and I'm applying for XSF membership this cold and dreary November.

Background
I'm a twenty-something developer, based in Cambridge, UK. Since graduating with a Master's degree in mathematics and computer science from the Other Place, I've worked for Collabora on the Telepathy framework, having got involved with Pidgin while at university.

Besides real-time communication and open standards, I'm interested in free software, type systems and functional programming.

XMPP-related projects
At Collabora, I've mainly worked on Gabble, the XMPP backend for Telepathy, and Wocky, the GObject-based XMPP library it uses. I co-implemented the current drafts of Jingle and Jingle RTP in Gabble (and worked on interoperating with Google Video Chat), added support for (a subset of) PubSub to Wocky, and ironing out edge cases all over the place. Much of this work was done in the course of development of the Nokia N900. I've also worked on a few XMPP extensions which are as yet unreleased.

As for the future: among other things, I'm interested in optimizations for mobile XMPP clients—my, what a crowded bandwagon this is!—and in improving the user experience with multiple simultaneous connections. I'd like to get involved with multi-user Jingle, though my coworkers may have this covered.

Why I'm applying
So far, I've been lurking on various XMPP-related mailing lists for a while, proposing amendments to XEPs as I implement them, chiming in on topics that interest me, and generally trying to be a good citizen. I'd like to increase my involvement in the (remarkably-civil and -constructive) XMPP community, and applying for XSF membership seems like a sensible step in that direction.

Contact details

 * JID
 * [xmpp:will.thompson@collabora.co.uk will.thompson@collabora.co.uk]


 * Email
 * [mailto:will.thompson@collabora.co.uk will.thompson@collabora.co.uk]


 * Company
 * Collabora

Please get in touch if you have any questions!