Boyd Fletcher Application 2008
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.fletcher (at) navy.mil or boyd.fletcher (at) gmail.com
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." (now a draft XEP). Our project has been a major contributor to the XMPP community including:
- Funded Extended Stanza Addressing additions to Jabber XCP and Jive Wildfire
- Added PubSub client support to Smack
- Funded PubSub Server Support in OpenFire
- Funded Improved LDAP Support to OpenFire
- Funding HTTP Bind support to OpenFire
- Funding a Web Chat client (SparkWeb) for OpenFire
- Published a specification for SVG whiteboarding over XMPP protocol (http://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/whiteboard2.html)
We frequently release new versions of our TransVerse client and our whiteboard plugin for OpenFire (both available at https://xmpp.je.jfcom.mil)
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
- http://www.afcea.org/signal/articles/templates/SIGNAL_Article_Template.asp?articleid=1439&zoneid=60
Future
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:
- Working within the XSF to come to consensus on a standard for whiteboarding over XMPP. This year we adding cursor control, geo-rectification, shared/coordinate view control to our whiteboarding specification and hopefully will be able to get it standardized.
- 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...)
Thank you consideration of my application for membership in the JSF.