Peter Saint-Andre for Council 2007

History

I've been involved with the Jabber community since late 1999. I've been the managing editor of our community standards process since the JSF (now XSF) was founded in 2001, the XSF's Executive Director since 2002, and Chair of the XMPP Council for 2004-2005, 2005-2006, and 2006-2007.

Contributions

Since I'm not a great coder, my original contributions to the Jabber community were HOWTOs for software like jabberd 1.4 and Winjab back in 2000 and 2001. Since 2001 I've mostly focused on documenting existing protocols and writing new protocol specs. As a result I edited the XMPP RFCs and have also written dozens of XMPP Extension Protocols (XEPs).

Sixth Council Achievements

In last year's Council elections, I claimed that during the Sixth Council we could stabilize pubsub and PEP, make good progress on end-to-end encryption ("e2e"), complete revisions to the XMPP RFCs at the IETF, advance more XEPs from Draft to Final (e.g., XEP-0045 and XEP-0060), and deprecate XEPs that people are not using (e.g., XEP-0013).

Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way. We made some good progress on e2e but have spent more time than we really wanted to cleaning up pubsub and entity capabilities, as well as proposed modifications to the XMPP RFCs. Work on these core protocols has kept us from making more progress on more advanced features. However, work on entity capabilities is finished, work on pubsub should be finished before the end of the 6th Council term, and work on rfc3920bis and rfc3921bis is nearly complete.

Seventh Council Priorities

Here is what I think the Council needs to accomplish during its next term:

• We simply must complete work on Jingle. I think we're close, but we need to push for completion in the next month or two.
• Advance rfc3920bis and rfc3921bis to RFC status in the IETF.
• Make serious progress in improving the security profile of XMPP technologies through work on end-to-end encryption, TLS deployment via the XMPP ICA, and spam-prevention technologies.
• Develop a file transfer approach that will solve the NAT traversal problem and be 99% reliable (probably including HTTP upload/download with IBB as a fallback for smaller files, negotiated via Jingle).
• Lay the groundwork for shared editing (e.g., whiteboarding) over XMPP.
• Push more specs from Draft to Final (see post)

Why I'm Running Again

I'm running for Council again because I think I've done a good job of pushing the Council in 2004-2007, and I think I can do that again for 2007-2008.

Contact

As always, if you have questions or comments, ping me via email or Jabber at stpeter@jabber.org :-)