James Tomson Application 2007

Current Job
I work for Wimba Inc. in New York City, where I am the lead developer for our Pronto IM collaboration tool. Pronto is a school-centric IM system, and is based on XMPP. We have experimented with and extended XMPP to meet the needs of Pronto's educational focus, and it's been a very positive experience.

XMPP Contributions
I've worked with my colleague Hugues Pisapia on the Multi User Collaboration (MUCol) proto-xep, and I currently am involved in developing a new proto-xep which we call Multi User Community (MUCom). We use MUCom to provide information about instructor and student affiliations within courses, and we hope to talk more about it with everyone soon.

I made a couple of small commits to the Psi project, and I hope to provide MUCom and MUCol support in Iris as we work out the kinks. I also wrote a small Iris quickstart as I was starting Pronto client development.

I am continually impressed by the work of the XMPP community and look forward to contributing more.

Why I like XMPP
The flexibility, simplicity, and open nature of the protocol makes development a very rich experience. I also personally enjoy developing tools that help build communities, and to me XMPP is very people-centric.

Why I'm applying
I would like to become an XSF member because the XMPP community has provided us with so many great tools, and I'd like to be an active participant in its future. I hope to learn much more, and share my own experiences in working with XMPP from the perspective of educational collaboration.

Contact
xmpp/email: james.b.tomson@gmail.com