Guus der Kinderen for Board 2026

Name: Guus der Kinderen

Location: Rosmalen, The Netherlands

Affiliation: Founder, GoodBytes

Contact: guus.der.kinderen@igniterealtime.org / guusdk@jabber.org

GitHub: github.com/guusdk

Statement

I'm standing for re-election to the XSF Board. I've served this past term, and I'd like to finish some of what it started.

My background hasn't changed much since last year. I run GoodBytes, doing XMPP consulting and development. I'm active in the Ignite Realtime community and have served on the Ignite Realtime Foundation board; that work on Openfire, Spark and related projects is where most of my sense of what maintainers and deployers actually need comes from. I started working with XMPP in the early 2000s and it turned into a job, a hobby, and eventually a community responsibility.

On the standards side I've authored or co-authored a number of XEPs, including XEP-0485 (PubSub Server Information), XEP-0495 (Happy Eyeballs), XEP-0483 (HTTP Online Meetings), and XEP-0377 (Spam Reporting). I also work on the XMPP Interop Framework, which aims to give implementers repeatable tests they can drop into CI so regressions surface early, the XMPP Network Graph eye-candy and xmpp.work, a small directory to help people and organisations working with XMPP find each other.

This past term, most of my Board effort went into two long-running questions. The first is the XSF's legal structure: I drafted the evaluation criteria for the proposals on the table and put the process to members for comment. The second is the Jabber trademark sublicensing programme, where I went back through what documentation we hold, published the full agreement to the website, and worked to break a discussion that had circled for months into questions the Board could actually answer one at a time. That produced a decision in September. It took longer than it should have.

That last point is the honest part of this statement. The Board made real decisions this year, but fewer than it should have, and several things that were raised with us are still waiting for an answer. Some of that is structural: thirty-minute meetings, items that vanish when a meeting is cancelled, and discussions that only happen when enough of us are in the room at the same time. I've started changing how we track outstanding work so that things carry forward rather than quietly disappear, and I've been pushing for more of our discussion to happen on the mailing lists, where members can actually participate, rather than only in meetings limited to whoever turns up.

I'd like another term to keep at that. Specifically: finishing the legal structure evaluation rather than letting it lapse into the status quo by default; getting the trademark question closed properly, including for existing licence holders; and giving the Board a way of working that produces decisions at a reasonable pace. I also think the Foundation needs to pay more attention to the load carried by a small number of volunteers, because that is not a problem that fixes itself.

Beyond that, my priorities are unchanged: better interoperability, real-world adoption, and keeping the Foundation approachable for people who just want to build things with XMPP. I still don't love politics. I still like getting things to work. If that sounds useful, I'd appreciate your support.