David Banes for Board 2008

History
I have many years experience in IT starting in the UK before moving to North America and then Australia. I'm responsible for my company (Cleartext) strategy, planning and overseeing the services we offer from technology to sales and marketing.

My blog is here and I've held positions at, in reverse chronological order;


 * Cleartext, Co-Founder and CEO/Managing Director
 * MessageLabs Asia Pacific (Technical Director, Media Spokesperson & Public Speaker, Member of Global Strategy Group)
 * Symantec Asia Pacific (Regional Manager Security Response, Media Spokesperson)
 * Cool Bananas Ventures (Managing Director, Web and Software developer)
 * Loadplan Australia (Marketing Manager)
 * Dr Solomons Anti-Virus (Now McAfee)(VP Operations & Customer Service North America, Global Head of Product Management, Product Manager Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit, Manager R&D, Technical Support Manager)

I'm serving a third term as a Director, Secretary and Member of the Board at the Internet Industry Association (IIA). I've been actively involved in task forces working on the National Anti-Spam Initiative, National Authentication Initiative. I'm also a Vice President of AVAR.

I like writing but I've no RFC's or XEP's to my name. I was co-author of CipherIM, architect for the security functionality and designing the client side GUI. I was asked to write the forward for the Syngress book 'Configuring Symantec AntiVirus, Corporate Edition' (ISBN 1-931836-81-7) in 2003.

Why I'm standing
Well, obviously I've a knack for getting nominated for positions on non-profit organisations. This may be because people think I have lots of spare time, I don't, but I'm fairly good at coming up with good ideas to get organisations moving along and have been hanging around the XMPP scene since it started in 1999.

Since 2005 I've been running my own MSP and SaaS business which uses all my skills, technical, sales, marketing, product management and operational. I'm proud to say that Cleartext is profitable and debt free.

In short I can cover the breadth of technical issues that the XMPP Foundation will come across and bring business skills to the Board which I hope to use to help move the Foundation on to become a technology lobby group in parallel to its current technical standards focus. I believe XMPP needs this to accelerate the standards adoption in mainstream IT communication and collaboration systems.

Other interests

 * Tarmac Rallying particularly Targa Tasmania
 * Classic and Fast Cars

Other reasons to vote for me

 * It's a legal requirement to have at least one Dave on the Board. :)