Dave Cridland Application 2020

Dave Cridland

According to XEP-0345, I need to include certain information here. I mean, it's languishing in Proposed, so maybe I don't have to, but given I wrote it I feel I ought to conform.

Are you a Natural Person?

Yes. I was made entirely naturally, and any suggestion I was lab grown in a vat is slander.

What's your name?

On my passport it says I'm "David Alan Cridland". But most people call me "Dave", and I often go by the obscure initialism "dwd".

What are your mandatory contact details?

I keep those at User:dwd along with a potted history of how amazing I am. (Not very). It's not entirely clear if I can incorporate those by reference in the application. Maybe we need to patch XEP-0345 before we make it active?

What are your affiliations?

They're the ways in which I'm associated with various organisations.

Yes. But, I meant, you know, what are they?

Oh, I see.

I'm employed by Forward Clinical Ltd, who trade as Forward Health.

I'm also on a Board or two, which is really quite odd. These are the Ignite Realtime Foundation (or "Those Openfire and Smack people"), and The Open Standards Board of Her Majesty's Government, which sounds so much more impressive than it is.

What is your "More Useful Background"?

I've spent an awfully long time working in two inter-related areas. Firstly, low-bandwidth (and high latency) connections, where I started in email and moved onto in XMPP. Secondly in what I tend to call Critical Messaging, which I'm meant to give some sensible definition for, aren't I?

What is this Critical Messaging of which you speak?

If I send a message about, say, a patient in a hospital, and that message doesn't make it - and I don't know it's been lost - then that patient might die.

If I send a message warning about an Improvised Explosive Device spotted by the roadside, and that message is lost, quite a few people might die.

My work (programming and standards) is focused on such cases. Critical Messaging is what I call the case where if the message is lost, people come to actual harm.

This might sounds incredibly high stress, but actually I find it challenging, meaningful, and strangely enjoyable. But then, I haven't killed anyone yet.

Why should I vote for you?

Well, obviously, you don't have to. But I do work hard both on and with the XSF. I try to encourage interest in XMPP as a whole, and I try to engage people outside our community. I try to ensure that the XSF is as functional as possible, and that our defined procedures reflect what we're doing anyway.

And if you vote me out of the XSF, I might have to leave Council, which'd be very irritating. But fascinating from a procedural standpoint.