Axel Reimer Application 2022
About Me
- Name: Axel Reimer
- Mail address: axel [at] eversten [dot] net
- JID: axel@snikket.eversten.net
I am an information scientist who is interested in open source projects, especially tools which enhance the digital sovereignty. I am Linux user since the year 2000 or 2001.
Affiliations
In the years 2000 to 2005 I studied information science. Afterwards (2005-2014), I was working as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Oldenburg and OFFIS. Since the year 2014, I have been working for different companies as a project manager, development manager and requirements engineer.
Currently, I am working as a project manager and requirements engineer at BTC AG in Oldenburg (Germany).
My XMPP projects and activities
I started using Jabber/XMPP as an alternative to ICQ in autumn 2000. Since then, a good XMPP-client is a must-have installation on my PC. When I started using an Android smartphone, I did not watch out for XMPP clients at first. Then there came a day, when I was collecting votes (by talking to people in the streets) to receive a donation for a non-profit organization. I wrote a script to automatically determine the current number of votes (by parsing a website) and used XMPP to send those information to my smartphone. That was the time when I started to use XMPP on my smartphone. I recognized that centralized instant messengers are not a good solution for smartphones.
In 2021 I got more active in the XMPP community. I deployed my blog eversten.net which is available in German and English to help non-technical people to get started with XMPP. I test a lot of XMPP apps and I report bugs and inconsistencies to the developers.
Additionally, I operated a private ejabberd server in the years 2021 and 2022. In 2022, I decided to switch from ejabberd to Snikket as XMPP server software.
Other open source activities
Some time ago I was part of the PrOOo-Box (later LibreOffice-Box) team which created a DVD image for OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice users. I created the DVD-specific debian meta-packages and repository for the DVD to enable Debian/Ubuntu users to easily keep their office installations up-to-date (using the DVD).
Motivation
I think that it is important to support the development of tools and communities which use open standards to help people to enhance their digital sovereignty. In my opinion, XMPP offers nearly everything a normal user needs to replace centralized instant messaging services.