Etienne Lavanant Application 2006

History

I am Etienne Lavanant, I am French and I am a 23 year old male. I have been doing an Engineering School in IT in France (near Paris). I am finishing my last year internship on 20th January and will start working the following week as an IT Engineer in the South of France.

When I entered my school three years ago, I discovered Free Softwares and I started using instant messaging. Pretty soon, I searched for an open instant messaging protocol and I found Jabber/XMPP.

JID: tiennou _AT_ jabber _DOT_ fr

e-mail: tiennou _AT_ gmail _DOT_ com

Projects

Admin work

• I administrate a Jabber Server for my school. I started with a jabberd2 server and we have now migrated to an ejabberd server.
• I have also been part of the admin team of the APINC Jabber server for a few months (a jabberd1.4 server). APINC is a French non for profit organisation providing ressources to non for profit projects over the Internet. It is believed to be the biggest non commercial Jabber Server in France with more than 10 000 subscribers.

Development projects

PyListC: a component providing mailing lists features to XMPP. First it was supposed to be just an interface component so that any plain jabber client could use a mailing list feature using pubsub as a background technology. Then I changed my mind and wrote my component to be standalone (no pubsub component required). I hope this component can be usefull as such to many people but I still believe it is only a first step to a mailing list feature for Jabber. On the long run, a JEP should be written so that this feature use pubsub.

Evangelism

• I wrote many articles (almost all of them in French) about Jabber for my school website and for the french jabber community website.
• I have a Jabber section on my blog
• I am rather active for user support in jabberfr.org forum and chat room
• I wander a lot on the web looking for communities using Jabber or interested in Jabber and I try to help them making the most of Jabber

Expectations

There are many things I would like to see in the future:

• About standardization: I would like to see a JEP to define how to provide Jabber with a mailing list feature using pubsub.
• About implementation: I am a strong believer of Jabber developing through communities using it as a communication tool and those communities able to communicate with each other thanks to Jabber. To achieve that, I think Jabber functionnalities should be added to softwares like blogs, wiki, CMS, etc. (jabber presence integrated in those tools, jabber notifications, being able to post through Jabber, etc.).
• About implementation: Also, I would like to see a reliable component able to sync a Jabber MUC room with an IRC room so that it is transparent to the user that not everybody is using the same protocol (not exactly a gateway). I know some projects having the same purpose already exist but I need to have a closer look at them. This would help transition from IRC to Jabber for some communities.
• More anti-spam tools and best practices. Right now spam is almost non-existant on the Jabber network but we'd better keep ahead of spammers as long as we can.
• Lots of others but it would be too long...

Why am I applying?

• To be part of talks about Jabber development
• To help representing the growing Jabber French community

• I like talking about me on the JSF web site ;-)
• Mum told me to do so ?