Dave Cridland for Council 2018

Dave Cridland

Hey! I'm Dave.

I've been working with messaging now for... erm... A long time. Since the last century, in fact. I currently work for Threads (or, more formally, Threads Styling Ltd), working on our messaging fabric for chat commerce. Previously, I've worked on mission critical messaging in military and government. It's more similar than you might think - and the reason that's so is because it's all XMPP.

XMPP has been my primary career now for about a decade, with a short break concentrating on email - less instant messaging. Before the XMPP stuff came along, I was doing email then. And I started off programming working on old-school Internet BBS systems, with instant messaging as part of that. Almost all of my career, though, has been dependent on Open Standards, and quite often, Open Standard messaging.

Council is a big task - it takes significant time to do right, and it's frighteningly easy to do badly. I've done it badly before, but I hope that - on balance - I do it right most of the time. And I feel I should put in the time, because it's a good way of giving back. Also, I happen to enjoy it, and it's a great way of finding an excuse to read documents I never would otherwise. I have served on the Council for a number of years (off and on) as well as the Board. Last year I tried being the Chair for the first time.

This year in Council, I'd like to do a bit of meta work, so that Council becomes a little easier to manage. The Spreadsheet Of Doom was something of a start in this direction, but it involves lots of copying and pasting - I think we can improve this quite a bit. I'm hoping that this will also mean that Council can process votes faster and that we can pass the actions on the Editors more efficiently.