Ralph Meijer for Council 2006

Me and Jabber
I've been active in the Jabber community since late 2000, and my involvement with, and contributions to, the community and the JSF in particular, has increased over time as witnessed by my recent JSF Membership Application. Current focusses include working on the XMPP support in the Twisted networking framework and a Jabber server based on that.

Fifth Council
I believe the fifth Jabber Council again did a fine job in reviewing and progressing JEPs within the JSF's standards process. The important issues I mentioned in my position statement (end-to-end encryption, vcard replacement, pubsub) for last year did get touched on, but most of them are still not as far along as I had hoped. On the other hand, we have worked in other important areas like the Jingle prototol family and again were productive during the whole term.

Sixth Council Priorities
A strong focus on security. This includes using certificates for both clients and servers, and finally solving end-to-end encryption.

The publish-subscribe specification is pretty solid now, and we do not expect major changes here, so we can move that to Final status. The so-called PEP specification for easing the use of pubsub for both implementors and end-users is the next focus and I expect to reach broad consensus during the sixth council's term. This should make it easier to find a suitable replacement for vCards.

There is a strong need for good file transfer and audio and video streaming and we should reach consensus on a good solution for this area. The Jingle specification that was introduced last year covers this area and is a good candidate for being the chosen solution. Jingle and some of the basic profiles for it, should be brought to draft status soon to convince implementors (both within and outside our community) to use it.

As always, the focus should be to provide generic building blocks for builing useful services, both for Jabber IM as well as non-IM. Protocol work should be supported by code, to gain hands-on experience and avoid being cought in theoretical debates without progress.

Why me?
I believe I can continue contributing productively in reviewing and progressing Jabber protocols by offering my expertises to the Jabber Council for a third term.