Fabio Forno for Council 2009

My jid is [xmpp:ff@jabber.bluendo.com ff@jabber.bluendo.com] if you need to contact me for any question about my candidature

= Who's FF = I'm Fabio Forno and this is the first time I apply for serving in Council. Although I'm XSF Member since 2008 only, I've around in the Jabber and XMPP community at least since 2001, 2002, when I started being interested in messaging applications. It was the time of the big hype about p2p protocols, among them I chose XMPP (which isn't exactly p2p) and history tells me that I picked the right one.

After the PhD at Politecnico di Torino in Computer Engineering I've been a post doc researcher for one year at the same university, and I worked in indoor localization and content push to mobile applications. Until 2008 I've been employed as a senior researcher at ISMB (ismb.it), in the Service & Applications group, where I worked on RFIDs, middleware (mainly on the messaging part) and mobile applications.

I now run my own company, Bluendo, whose aim is providing mobile solutions based on XMPP and I recently started a second company, Ooros, focused on mobile services (payments and social applications over XMPP)

= What I am doing in XMPP world = In the years I've directly contributed to a couple of XEPs (SOAP over XMPP and Stream Management), an Internet Draft (SIM/XMPP Group chat), to some hilarious XEPs such as the real Binary XML. Moreover I almost daily participate to the different XFS mailing lists and I review, propose enhancements to many other XEPs which are relevant to the scope of my work.

I also did some academic work related to XMPP when I took my PhD in the remote 2004, badly trying to explain the importance of XMPP in Context Aware Applications, whatever this catchy phrase could mean.

I produce and use a lot of opensource software using XMPP and several tracking systems contain my bug reports or discussions about enanchements (I do love Python and Twisted, therefore I'm a big support Ralph's work in wokkel & idavoll, with which I daily write bots and a lot of glue software exploiting XMPP).

Currently I'm the technical leader of the team which is providing Lampiro, an open source XMPP client for J2ME/Blackberries phones (we hope soon for Android and IPhone too) I'm also the maintainer of Proxy65, which powers the jabber.org proxy for file transfer. Finally at Bluendo we are developing an event based middleware (FreeDEM) which uses XMPP as messaging layer, and that can be employed for building distributed applications having pubsub as messaging hub)

= Why am I applying? = Because you need change! ;) Jokes a part I feel that being part of the Council is the best way for tackling some issues which are essential for making XMPP grow even more outside the Instant Messaging world. I think in fact that XMPP is the best available technology for realtime communication over the Internet that can make things communicate. In order to make it happen we must work for provide robust specs in area of rather new development:


 * mobile communications: in the last year we introduced roster versioning and compression now work almost everywhere, but there several other optimization that still need to be delivered, such as reliable connections, session resume, profiles for very limited devices
 * better integration of pubsub applications in clients (we are working on and RSS/Atom mobile reader and we think that there few aspects that need standardization)
 * social applications, which need some kind of support inside clients (the chat window is a simple and universal paradigm, but it is limiting for some actions and for keeping contexts of activity streams)
 * end to end encryption

= Method = I prefer making evaluations in things were I can write or directly test code, and I do love writing code.