Peter Saint Andre for Council 2005

History

I've been involved with the Jabber community since late 1999. I've been the JEP Editor since the JSF was founded in 2001 and the JSF's Executive Director since 2002.

Contributions

Since I'm not a great coder, my original contributions to the Jabber community were HOWTOs (e.g., for jabberd 1.4 and Winjab). Since 2001 I've mostly focused on documenting existing protocols and writing new protocol specs. As a result I edited the XMPP RFCs and have also written dozens of JEPs. I've also kept the JEP process humming since 2001 as JEP Editor.

Fourth Council Accomplishments

Until 2004 I was not a member of the Jabber Council because, well, power corrupts -- I didn't want to have the power of the JEP Editor, Executive Director, and Council Chair. However, in 2004 I ran for Council, was elected by the membership of the JSF, and was selected as Chair by the fourth Council. My program then was to "crack the whip" and get lots of protocols finished. I think the fourth Council has been quite productive, especially after the winter holidays (at least in the northern hemisphere), when past Councils have usually stopped working.

Fifth Council Priorities

My two disappointments with the fourth Council are that (1) we have not yet figured out a way to replace vcard-temp and (2) we have not yet settled on a really good protocol for end-to-end encryption. I've been working on these problems in the last few months by publishing JEP-0154 and modifying JEP-0116 (soon to be released), but we don't have solutions yet. I think those two areas need to be our main priorities for the fifth Council.

Naturally we also have some work to do on finishing up some existing protocols (avatars, roster item exchange, SOAP over XMPP, etc.), but most of those are close to completion. I'd also like to see us develop a stable protocol for shared roster groups (building on JEP-0144), but I think that will be fairly easy compared to vCard++ and e2e encryption.