Steve Smith Application 2005

I'm Steve Smith, and I'm applying for JSF Membership.

Work and Personalia
I'm developer and sysadmin for the University of Sydney Vislab in Australia. I have been a user and advocate of Jabber since 2001 when I deployed a server at a mortgage-broking company for communication and notification of website events. I have been a user and contributor to open-source projects since 1997. Since my becoming sysadmin in 2003 Vislab has moved almost completely to open-source infrastructure, and students are actively encouraged to use and enhance to open-source projects as part of their course-work (quote: "It's always summer-of-code here").

Code and Protocols
I have recently begun work importing functionality found in the AccessGrid to Jabber, including multicast audio/video streaming and shared-applications. To this end I am developing a cross-platform client based on Twisted, with pluggable user-interfaces. I am also developing modifications to Ejabberd to support this functionality.

A paper on these proposals is to be presented to the Australian APAC05 conference in September, at which point the code will be formally released.

JEPs
I am currently starting work on the first JEP for storage of room-private XML data on MUC servers. Further JEPs on storage and use of XMLised SDP will follow.

Other activities
I am active on the board of the Sydney chapter of Siggraph.

Why?
I am a fierce advocate of open-standards, and encourage their adoption over proprietary protocols wherever possible. Collaboration in increasingly becoming an important requirement for applications and it has long been recognised that Jabber/XMPP has the potential to be more than just a chat protocol, but it seems to be having problems moving into this phase. I hope that by actively contributing to the activities of the foundation as well as encouraging its use in academia I can help make Jabber/XMPP the preferred protocol collaborative communication.