Ulrich Staudinger

Open letter
Hello dear member,

my name is Ulrich B. Staudinger and my hobbies are still jabbering with friends, kendo and honorary work in open source communities and projects. I am currently serving the Jabber Software Foundation as one of the directors in the board of directors.

Serving in a board is no easy job, serving in a board of an international open source community is even more difficult - it's difficult to work together, difficult to get things up and running, difficult to understand each other fully, always and everytime. I am online very often, lending an ear to members, non-members and everyone in general.

In this years period i am serving as secretary to the board. Thanks!

(Business)Life in general
Crashy overview:
 * born in '77
 * Grew up with computers
 * Secondary school
 * First company
 * Studied computer science
 * Several internships
 * Met Jabber sometime in 2001 (i think)
 * Joined the JSF
 * Freelancing for several companys
 * Got elected into JSF board
 * Worked for two years at GMX, germanys biggest email provider
 * Got employed, starting at 1st of october 2005, at Lycos Europe, germanys 5th biggest email provider, but one of the bigger ones in europe!
 * Still serving as board.
 * Here.

Recent activities
My recent activities have been mostly invisible to the community. I am doing a hard job travelling and presenting jabber, speaking about jabber in different citys, different states of central europe. I am holding in average at least 5 presentations per year about jabber. My last presentation took place in Vienna sometime in May. The next presentation will be on the 10th of September in Tilbur, NL. Almost always, my travel expenses are nullified by the organizers of an event.

Beside actively bringing jabber to the world and vice versa i am working with a task force in my current employing company on integrating jabber in internal business processes - with good success. Google Talk has opened many doors.

I am actively approaching many industry partners on IT fairs, like CEBIT. Most of the time is spent on introducing Jabber to companys, ICQ and MSN are tough competitors, especially because these commercial partners have cash to offer - and we have freedom.

I am right now taking care of the next roll out of another official jabber site, called Jabber Software Map (Prerelease: http://jabber.org/software/map/jabber/ ). We propably will have one or two competitions next year.

I do have a look after the wiki - something very useful imo.

Open source projects i am involved in
First of all: JABBER!

Now in the pipeline:
 * JabberSoftwareMap - Prerelease @ http://jabber.org/software/map/jabber -> working with Lukasz Sielay who wants to become a JSF member

I am author of, in a not very sorted list:
 * CCAPI, an API for share trading with various brokers - http://activestocks.de/ccapi
 * HelixCommunity Jabber grant program - currently somewhat frozen - http://jabber.helixcommunity.org
 * GreenThumb, still a very stylish jabber applet - http://greenthumb.jabberstudio.org
 * Enigma3, one of the real early audio chat enabled jabber clients, webstartable- http://complat.sourceforge.net/jnlp/
 * a small TV-related tv-schedule-to-your-remote-control project
 * several jabber bots

Publications
All my XEPs travelled the way to status 'obsolete' or 'deferred' - which is ok - they were to specific to flow into the official protocol.
 * http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0056.html
 * http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0067.html

Been involved in the discussions during the doings of some other XEPs.

On the horizon
Well, first of all i am busy with the Jabber Software Map. When all things are done on the project, we need to propagate it a little bit, that will take some months.

I really would like to organize some online events within the community, i.e. vote your favorite jabber client and win a cup. While meeting several user groups we talked about ideas. A welcomed idea has been to creating consultant certificates like brainbench does. I would appreciate a discussion on this topic.

I would really very much like to see better audio and video applications, but i (currently) don't have the time and muse to dive into this hard development subject for several months. I can really help only with some marketing support.