Sam Whited for Council 2017

About

 * Name: Sam Whited
 * Mail address: [mailto:sam@samwhited.com sam@samwhited.com]
 * JID: [xmpp:sam@samwhited.com?message sam@samwhited.com]
 * Company: Cloudflare

I am a current council member running again for 2017. This will be my second term on the council.

Overview
For a quick overview of my involvement in general XMPP and XSF related business, see "Sam Whited Application 2017". Aside from authoring XEPs, working on an XMPP client and server library, and participating in XSF discussions and other business, I have a few goals that I would like to specifically address while on the council:

Reduce duplication in XEPs
Currently there are many XEPs in draft or final status that cause confusion by duplicating functionality. I would like to try and reduce this. I started this in the previous term by pushing for the deprecation of XEP-0016: Privacy Lists (replaced by XEP-0191: Blocking Command and by pushing MAM forward (in progress) after a failed vote to deprecate the legacy Message Archiving spec (which I will revisit once MAM has been debated).

It is my opinion that we should stop waiting for feature parity in replacements to legacy XEPs before we stop recommending that developers implement them, and I will continue to push for reduced confusion by deprecating or obsoleting old XEPs where I can.

Better recommendations
Another way in which I have tried to reduce confusion among developers this past term is by pushing forward the 2017 Compliance Suites. Once the 2017 suites are accepted (after the current last call) I would like to begin working on the 2018 suites and hopefully have them moved forward sometime during the beginning of the next council term. Afterwards, I would like to consider other ways that they can be helpful as a guide to developers.

Push forward formatting work
Unfortunately, the current method for doing formatting in XMPP, XHTML-IM has a history of security flaws and requires a full layout system to do simple formatting tasks such as bold and italic. I would like to continue to push for its deprecation by getting a group together and working on a replacement XEP.