Ben Schumacher for Council 2011

My name is Ben Schumacher (occasionally 'rynok'). I have been an XSF member since September 2011, though I was formerly a member from 2002 - 2005.

History
I have been working with XMPP since I joined Jabber, Inc. in March of 2001. Primarily I've been an engineer on Jabber's (now Cisco) XCP server implementation of XMPP, but I've also dabbled in clients and general purpose XMPP libraries. I'm a bit of a protocol wonk and I tend to advocate strict adherence in the interest of broad compatibility. I've been active in open source software for many years, having contributed to many projects, including Ruby on Rails, FreeBSD, dovecot, BincIMAP, tpop3d, etc.

XMPP Council Goals
My primary desire, as a member of the council, would be to ensure consistency among protocols. I feel protocols often advance through the XSF without consideration for their interactions with other widely used protocols. While I don't intend to "hold up" protocols needlessly, I do expect to encourage protocol authors to document expected interactions.

To this end, I'd value:


 * Protocols with detailed use cases
 * Prototyped or production implementations
 * Reuse of generic protocol structures

Conclusion
While I've not always been the most active participant on the XMPP mailing lists, I've always been an active advocate of open standards. I believe this is my strongest qualification for the Council.

Contact
Please feel free to contact me with any questions. My XMPP and email addresses are <[xmpp:bschumac@cisco.com bschumac@cisco.com]>.