Remko Tronçon Application 2008

About
My name is Remko, and I am a software engineer, living in Leuven, Belgium.

After finishing my computer science master's at the Catholic University of Leuven in 2001, I stuck around and did a PhD in Engineering at the same university. Since early 2007, I am employed as a software engineer at CoWare, an EDA company designing tools targeted towards embedded system chip designers.

I have been an active free software developer and contributor ever since I learned to write my first few lines of code in a language that didn't end with the letters 'BASIC', and will probably be so for the rest of my life.

Jabber/XMPP Activities
I am a member of the lead development team of Psi since early 2004, after having contributed regularly since 2003. In 2004, I joined the XMPP Software Foundation (in the good old days when it still was called the JSF).

Besides development for Psi, I also contribute to various other Jabber OSS projects, including Openfire and PyMSN-t.

Although I hang around on the XMPP mailing lists and do my best to contribute constructively to protocol (and other) discussions, my official protocol spec contributions are limited to the following XEPs:
 * XEP-0115: Entity Capabilities
 * XEP-0146: Remote Controlling Clients
 * XEP-0209: Metacontacts

I try to attend as many XMPP meetings as my (personal) budget allows me. So far, this has brought me to EuroOSCON and to 2 XMPP summits.

Motivation
I have always been very passionate about (protocol) standardization. XMPP is probably the greatest place to be for working on protocols, not only because of the applicability and the potential, but because the community is extremely open to contributions from about anybody who wants to. I would like to take my involvement on defining and documenting XMPP to the next level, both as a personal challenge and as a favor to the community.

Plan
Here is a list of the things I would like the council to spend time on during the next year:
 * Jingle: A lot of progress has been done in the past years on this front, we just need to bite the bullet and polish off the last few bits.
 * Security: After having investigated several approaches to allow secure communications (OpenPGP, ESessions, ...), the time has come to formalize some final protocols for secure end-to-end communication, based on proven secure technologies.
 * Emerging technologies: XMPP is being considered and used in several emerging hip technologies, including microblogging and social networking. We should make sure that we have the facilities to become the de facto standard for these technologies.

Contact
If you're interested in discussing my application with me, feel free to contact me.