Nicolas Vérité for Board 2009

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I am a candidate for the board of directors, because I care about the XSF, I am feeling concerned about its future, and I want to help.

Small intro about me

My name is Nicolas Vérité (Verite in ASCII), or Nÿco, born in 1974 (yes, XXth century), so being 35 years old, with 10 years of work experience as a profesionnal in the IT/IS (DBA, sysadmin, free/opensource software expert/consultant/architect). Oh yes, I have no more long hair, and I now wear glasses (translation: I look serious now).

I am not a coder, I only know two languages: french and english (and a tiny bit of german, ja ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch).

I live in Paris, France, and I practice roller (quad) and ice skating (solo freestyle, pairs and ice dance), and I love Nutella.

What I do for XMPP

I am an active member of the french-speaking JabberFr.org community since many years. We offer chatrooms, a wiki, forums, notification bot and several services, as a showroom for XMPP technologies. We try to help and document as much as we can, mainly software like clients, servers, libraries, but also hosted/running services (because specifications don't have to be widely covered since we have one central origin: xmpp.org).

I blog and microblog for:

  • the XSF: I have revived the XMPP Roundups (Jabber journal), with the help of stpeter. Please tell me how I can improve it. Of course, contributions are welcome and encouraged, since I can not cover all the XMPP news by myself (http://blog.xmpp.org)
  • LinuxFr.org social network, by contributing, editing, publishing news and discussions about XMPP, Linux, free/opensource software and neighbour subjects (in french, sorry, but a successful website, sometimes identified as being a Slashdot-like, but slightly more professional). This is legally held by an asociation, for which I am the president (http://LinuxFr.org)
  • ProcessOne my employer, in order to announce new products and features, or communicate on more general subjects in the XMPP sphere (http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/)
  • and myself of course at my personal blog, hosted by WordPress.com who is running XMPP services including PubSub (http://nyco.wordpress.com)

I do presentations on XMPP, free/opensource software and open standards, in french meetings and events like Solutions Linux or 10th anniversary of Jabber this year (http://www.slideshare.net/Nyco/).

I am a community guy, meeting people IRL and online, promoting and defending XMPP and open standards.

My main roster is only 400+ items long (far from the 2000+ of stpeter, I don't want to be his bandwidth provider), but I am regularly contacted everyday by many people using (or desiring to use) XMPP for many XMPP-related subjects (federation, near-real-time, push), like help, info push, and more general questions, technical or strategical.

And I am working for ProcessOne since April this year, mainly as a project manager, but I also do consulting, product design, corporate communication, and customer relationship, all of them directly related to XMPP.

How I plan to help the board

XMPP, ten years later, is everywhere: Google, Nokia, Oracle/Sun, Apple, Adobe, Cisco... even Microsoft! All these actors (and many many more I don't list here) have at least one product or service based on XMPP (or at least using it). So XMPP is everywhere, but... maybe not everywhere enough. The wide audience of internauts at large do not have that perception. Why? Because XMPP does not do the news, because XMPP does not touch them, because Google Talk, LiveJournal and Yandex are not enough, because there is still no Firefox of instant messaging.

Although there are more issues, I don't bring a solution for everything, but I am willing to help bring XMPP where it needs to be, where it helps.

Board

I am willing to:

  • add some dynamics to the board by constantly talking to other members
  • open up the board by staying in touch with council members, and community members, and be a relay
  • add tranparency to the board's activity, much like the council's activity, so that people can question and discuss its activity.
  • bring fresh blood

Members

As a board member, I would like to:

  • get more feedback from our members, that we have today. If needed, I will go myself, and pull it... hum well yes, I know push is better though...
  • initiate work, like documenting or code writing, since we, as a community (enough eyeballs, bugs shallow), can identify issues and address them by then gain contributions and publish very early proof-of-concepts, this can clearly lead to new and better specs and codebases
  • make our community members communicate more and better through their blogs, microblogs, MUC, by providing more, better info
  • be a realy between the board and members, a link between business-oriented persons and

Communication, communication, communication

We may need to:

  • explain more and better what those words mean, what this is, and what this is not: Jingle, BOSH, PubSub (no need to exlpain push, as it is being understood)
  • do stuff like community marketing (take a look at spreadfirefox example)
  • do more IRL meetings, but as it is expensive worldwide, we could promote more local initiatives
  • run contests, like find a pitch to put under the XMPP logo, or other creative promotion of XMPP
  • we have many local communities worldwide, which are very active, let's quote the Czech, Spanish, French, Russian communities, let's communicate more with them, promote their initiatives

Wanted features

People, real users, want features, maybe it's time to take that more into account, catalyze the XEP writing, ignite the software development. Because if the XSF does not encourage that, who will do it?

Features might be this non-exhaustive list:

  • Jingle File Transfer, file transfer that works everywhere (through proxies, NAT, with no intermediate server)
  • Whiteboard, for shared drawing
  • more generally, real-time collaborative editing, for code, presentations, spreadsheets, structured text...

ProcessOne

After thinking and discussing with Mickaël Rémond, CEO of ProcessOne, Board of Directors member and again candidate, we came to the conclusion that we offer different profiles to the board, him being CEO, and me being more community-oriented. Mickaël brings business knowledge, I will bring dynamics and relationship with the communities. For short, we are quite complemantary. Besides, we sometimes do not agree on a certain amount of subjects ;-)

Election

If I am elected, well... I will have to do what I have said. Aouch.

If I am not elected, at least I hope this short text has made you smile, and has brought some small ideas. But then I could freely, openly criticize the other's work ;-)

Contact

Please contact me if you need/want:

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