Remko Tronçon for Council 2009

Personal Trivia

 * My name is Remko
 * I live in Leuven, Belgium.
 * After finishing my Master in Computer Science at the Catholic University of Leuven in 2001, I stuck around and did a PhD in Engineering at the same university.
 * Since early 2007, I am employed as a software engineer at CoWare, an EDA company designing tools targeted towards embedded system chip designers.
 * I have been an active free software developer and contributor ever since I learned to write my first few lines of code in a language that didn't end with the letters 'BASIC', and will probably be so for the rest of my life.

Jabber/XMPP Activities
I have been a member of the lead development team of Psi since early 2004, after having contributed regularly since 2003. In 2004, I joined the XMPP Software Foundation (in the good old days when it still was called the JSF). Together with Kevin Smith, I'm currently working on the Swift Jabber/XMPP client and C++ library. Next to Swift development, I also contribute to various other Jabber OSS projects, including Openfire, PyMSN-t, and SleekXMPP.

Besides coding, I like to do some writing now and then too. Together with Peter Saint-Andre and Kevin Smith, we wrote the O'Reilly book XMPP: The Definitive Guide. I also wrote a chapter on XMPP in O'Reilly's upcoming title Beautiful Testing, promoting XMPP in other circles as well.

Another thing I fancy doing is talking in public about XMPP, such as giving introductions like XMPP 101 (which I presented at FOSDEM, and which was later reused at OSCON).

Although I hang around on the XMPP mailing lists and do my best to contribute constructively to protocol (and other) discussions, my official protocol spec contributions are limited to the following XEPs:
 * XEP-0115: Entity Capabilities
 * XEP-0146: Remote Controlling Clients
 * XEP-0209: Metacontacts

Finally, I try to attend as many XMPP meetings as my (personal) budget allows me. So far, this has brought me to EuroOSCON and to 2 XMPP summits.

Motivation
I have always been very passionate about (protocol) standardization. XMPP is probably the greatest place to be for working on protocols, not only because of its potential, but because the community is extremely open to anybody who wants to contribute. I would very much like to take my involvement in the XMPP community to the next step as an XSF council member.

Plan
As a council member, I want to focus the XSF on the following topics during the following year:
 * Improving user experience: Some 'flows' used in todays XMPP clients form big usability problems, and require changes in the protocol in order to fix them. These changes include the roster management of gateways/components, presence/priority handling in clients, secure and reliable communication, ... Working on usability problems will expand XMPP's potential user base to a much broader audience
 * Secure & reliable communications: XMPP has the name of being the 'solid' choice for IM. We should make sure we live up to that name, and focus on providing good, usable protocols for secure and reliable communications
 * Embedded XMPP: XMPP needs some work to be attractive to the restricted environment that mobile devices work in.
 * Jingle FT: Now that Jingle is being deployed for VoIP in several clients, we can start making use of the full power of the genericity of Jingle, and extend it to file transfer. This will allow us to build more reliable file transfer capabilities in clients than we have so far.
 * Emerging technologies: XMPP is being considered and used in several emerging technologies, including microblogging and social networking. We should make sure that we have the facilities to become the de facto standard for these technologies.

Contact
If you're interested in discussing my application with me, feel free to have a chat with me.