Simon Tennant for Board 2014

As part of this application I think it's worth thinking about the past and future of where we want the XSF to be.

Past
Where the XSF was Not good.
 * centralised: St Peter did everything.
 * closed: standards were developed by the XSF alone

Today
Where the XSF is today
 * working with outside groups (uPNP, IOT)
 * the Council is doing a great job of looking after standards
 * more decentralised: others have picked up tasks (e.g. Cridland looking after finance)
 * likes to play the not invented here game - for example "we can't possibly use commercial service X, I'll implement that for us... [day job gets in the way and service never gets implemented]"
 * we all have day-jobs that keep us busy. But people do pitch up and pitch in nevertheless - it's great seeing this
 * some very pragmatic fixers (eg xnyhps's security scanning and checking)
 * very relevant to telcos but mostly ignored by them

Future
Where the XSF should be
 * don't make any changes to the Council (perhaps clone Kev, but I have huge praise for their work)
 * think hard about our infrastructure. "Helper services" like https://xmpp.net benefit the entire community. We should do everything possible to enable and encourage more of them.
 * Increase our adoption funnel by reaching beyond mailing lists to help developers on Quora, StackExchange, Twitter
 * Reach out to external standards groups that we could work with more (eg: ITU, GSMA)

IMHO
This show us
 * decentralisation is good (but we knew that already)
 * we're good at standards (one would have hoped)
 * we need more outreach to external trade groups
 * we're not so good at leadership (sometimes the pleasing everyone approach means nothing gets updated e.g. The Github debates)

As an XSF Board Member
I'm standing because I believe that XMPP elegantly solves many realtime communication problems. However I still believe as a group we focus too much on "chat" and miss the bigger opportunities (like the uPnP and IOT outreach groups are starting to show us) that a federated messaging protocol can help. We're deep in the protocol valley and missing the wider view of the landscape.

To change this I'd like to spend the next year as a board member:
 * giving a voice to those that do stuff rather than promising (watch the feet not the lips). We're good at building processes and procedures. We're less good at helping others to help us (for example: the process someone has to go through to fix a typo on our website or a XEP)
 * continue the work on the new XSF website with Laura (this is designed with the idea that we *all* update it using pull requests)
 * pull more people into maintaining website topics (eg IOT sub sections)
 * bring more marketing resources to the foundation: make sure that we're clearly describing the benefits of using XMPP over protocol-x, working out how we can shout louder about this at conferences and getting more XMPP people to the right conferences and forums.

But why you?
In my day-job I run Buddycloud (a company that helps developers and enterprises build communication services on XMPP) and have to combine reaching out to non-XMPP people with working with people inside the XMPP fold. I would continue to apply these skills to help the XSF gain broader adoption.

Let's talk
Happy to answer questions on the mailing lists or at
 * XMPP xmpp:simon@buddycloud.com
 * EMAIL mailto:simon@buddycloud.com