Boyd Fletcher Application 2006

About Me

I am a systems engineer for the U.S. Department of Navy, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center. I graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Old Dominion University in 1993. I have spent much of professional life designing and implementing large scale synchronous and asynchronous collaboration systems for U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Recently I have been focused on how to build open standards based collaboration systems that leverage a high assurance security architecture (frequently using SE Linux) to enhance information sharing with our partners.

I can be reached at:

• JID: boyd.fletcher (at) xmpp.je.jfcom.mil
• Email: boyd (at) spawar.navy.mil

History

In 2002, I started working with XMPP for DoD looking at how to replace proprietary collaboration systems with open standards technology. Since then our project and its related activities have been instrumental in increasing XMPP's adoption across the DoD.

I co-authored the DoD standards definition document that made XMPP the first and only mandated IM/Text Chat protocol in the DoD.

I am the co-author of "XEP-0127: Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Over XMPP" and "XEP-0171:Language Translation."

Our project has been a major contributor to the XMPP community including:

• Funded Extended Stanza Addressing additions to Jabber XCP and Jive Wildfire
• Add PubSub client support to Smack
• Funded PubSub Server Support in Wildfire
• Funded Improved LDAP Support to Wildfire
• Funding HTTP Bind support to Wildfire
• Funding JWChat improvements and integration into Wildfire

Frequently I am called on to present at DOD and government conferences on the use of open source, open standards (XMPP in particular), and secure computing technology in the government. Some examples include:

• http://www.afei.org/brochure/6a04/documents/Fletcher_AFEI_Conference.pdf
• http://www.dodccrp.org/events/10th_ICCRTS/CD/papers/213.pdf
• http://www.sensornet.gov/net_ready_workshop/Boyd_Fletcher_CDCIE_XMPP_Overview_for_NetReadySensors_Conf.pdf
• http://selinux-symposium.org/2006/slides/05-cdcie.pdf

Future

In the future we hope release our state of the art, Java based XMPP client called TransVerse, which serves as our testbed for our Language Translation and Whiteboard technologies. TransVerse is based on Buddyspace and we are currently working through the wickets to release its source as a community project. As part of our work on whiteboarding, we have developed a Wildfire plugin that implements multi-user Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) based whiteboarding over XMPP with full support for multi-user file transfer for binary image transmission. This code will be released in the near future. It is being used as a testbed for different ideas on how to best implement whiteboarding over XMPP.

I see XMPP as the foundation protocol for a wide range of collaboration technologies and hopefully in the next year we as a community will be able to extend XMPP to support the types of capabilities that are required of enterprise class collaboration systems.

As a member of JSF, I plan to work with the community to expand XMPP to add enterprise class capabilities such as:

• Adding support for signaling over XMPP for multi-user audio chat using SRTP and Speex
• Adding support for signaling over XMPP for application casting (1-to-many) or application sharing (many-to-many)
• Collaborative Places - A way to discover, describe, and schedule collaborative sessions (text chat, whiteboard, audio, video, file sharing, wiki, etc...)
• Large group (1000+ user) whiteboarding with support for presentations.

Thank you consideration of my application for membership in the JSF.