User:Larma/Council Candidacy 2019

General
Read about me on my user page.

Council Candidacy 2019
I don't consider the Council or any of its members an authority. The council uses its expertise to testify standard proposals using certain rules, but personal opinions are not part of it. If people say "X is not going to be accepted under the current council", there is something wrong with the current council or with the envisioned future council and both should be fixed.

XEP Handling
To me, the two main tasks of a Council members are
 * Testify if a XEP suffices the basic requirements for being accepted as experimental
 * Testify if a XEP suffices the requirements for approval as Draft as defined in XEP-0001

While these tasks do require certain technical know-how, they don't ask for the council member's personal opinion. As a council member, I will try to stick to the process without including my personal opinion. If I am uncertain about specific issues in the XEP I will gather additional input from the authors, other community members and SIGs

That said, my criteria for accepting a XEP as experimental would be:
 * It should be possible to implement the protocol described in the XEP with little additional guidance (ignoring ambiguity or issues alike). This is in line with the intention from XEP-0001 to encourage implementations of experimental XEPs.
 * It should be able to move to Draft within 12 months, according to rules in XEP-0001, i.e. it shouldn't look like the XEP is going to be in Deferred status a year later.
 * It should solve a problem. If it's not obvious which problem it solves, the problem must be outlined in the XEP itself. Personal opinions can be a valid problem description, as long as they are justified.

SIGs
I'd like to revive the concept of Special Interest Groups within the XSF. Among the reasons are:
 * SIGs increase the collaboration within the members and contribute to a more common understanding of their problem space
 * SIGs can produce XEPs as a team, reducing the work-load of each author while increasing the overall quality.
 * SIGs can provide feedback on XEPs to the council, if they fall in their expertise. This is specifically mentioned as criteria in XEP-0001, but probably wasn't used a lot for quite some time

For a start I can imagine any of the following SIGs to be established
 * Encryption SIG (OMEMO 2.0, full stanza encryption, "SeX")
 * Mobile SIG (battery and data usage)
 * Server/S2S SIG (MAM 2.0 etc)
 * Jingle/P2P SIG

Own XEP work
Should I be serving in the Council, I will obviously still continue authoring XEPs as needed. While I won't hand in proposals that I wouldn't accept myself otherwise, I pledge to always vote neutral on my own proposals to ensure neutrality.