Lucas Nussbaum Application 2006

My name is Lucas Nussbaum and I'm applying to retain my JSF membership.

=History=

I've been involved in the XMPP/Jabber community for a few years now (JSF member since 2004), and in the Free Software community for a few more years.

This year, I've decided to write the application by outlining the differences with last year's application. It's probably more interesting both for you and for me :-)

=Protocol=

Last year:
 * I haven't written any JEP yet. I'm more interested in making them work (either by coding or server administration) than writing them. ;)

Now: I've worked on |XEP-0162: Best Practices for Roster and Subscription Management. However, I got busy with a lot of other things, so I really need to find some time to finish this. This XEP is Informational, trying to discuss the way client developers should implement the "roster" subsystem. I would like to see more JEPs of this kind, since they are probably an easy way to improve the behaviour of Jabber clients.

=Code= Last year:
 * I've written JabberTest, a test framework for Jabber servers, but it would need more love to work well. My main code contribution is XMPP4R, a XMPP/Jabber library written in  Ruby. With Stephan Maka, we have been making a lot of progress recently, and I  think XMPP4R will soon be used for some very cool things. (There's already a      MySQL-based JUD, for example)

Now: Ouch! JabberTest is definitely dead (I'm not using it anymore, but prefer to use smaller scripts which just test one thing). For XMPP4R, Stephan Maka is now maintaining it. I'm very happy with his work, so I see no reason to get involved more closely :)

=Admin stuff=

Last year:
 * I'm administering the French biggest Jabber server, im.apinc.org/jabber.fr (~ 1k concurrent online users on average).

I'm still a member of the admin team for this server. It is now team-maintained, and we recently made the choice to move to Jabberd 1.5, which involved submitting quite a few bug reports (Hi Matthias!). We are also interested, when time allows it, to work on scalability issues of some components (especially gateways, which are consuming a lot of resources on such large servers).

=Evangelism=

Last year:
 * To help my server's users, I started JabberFR.org, a french Jabber community site. Its Wiki and its Forum are now considered the main reference in French about Jabber. Jabber desperately need such a website in English, and I'd like to help with that if some native english speakers start to work on this.

JabberFR.org still works very well. The very good thing about it is thanks to the Forum and the Wiki, I don't have to do much work on it (actually, I've hardly done anything for jabberfr.org during the last months). I really think the Wiki + Forum model was the best choice: the wiki gets a lot of high quality contributions. I also gave |a talk during the Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre about XMPP/Jabber (in french). On the geeky side, I've also wrote |quite a lot of blog entries on Planet Jabber.

=Why I'm reapplying=

Because I was asked to ;) Jokes aside, even if my "jabber time" was mostly dedicated to dealing with im.apinc.org/jabber.fr, I still think I could be a valuable participant in the JSF discussions.