Stepping down

Over the past year it has become increasingly clear that I no longer have enough time to dedicate to the task of effectively leading the WebDAV Working Group. This is perhaps inevitable. When I started the WebDAV Working Group I was a PhD student, and could dedicate significant blocks of time to this project. Now, as an Assistant Professor with 8 PhD students of my own (as well as two small children at home), this is no longer the case. The final straw was me taking on the role of General Chair (organizer) of the ACM Hypertext 2004 conference, itself an enormously time consuming volunteer role.

WebDAV Working Group is very close to completing its original technical agenda, a tremendous accomplishment. Many standards development efforts never come close to this, or have the adoption and impact of WebDAV. Still, we do have some final work to complete. There is the bindings specification, and the redirect references protocol. Moving 2518 to Draft Standard is still as important as ever. DASL is already effectively at a Proposed Standard level of adoption, and needs to be finished to ensure greater adoption. WebDAV WG needs a steady hand to bring these to completion, and, alas, that's no longer me.

As a result, effective today, I am stepping down as Co-Chair of the WebDAV Working Group. Ted Hardie, our Applications Area Director, will be appointing Patrik Faltstrom (a former AD of the WebDAV WG) to take my place. Lisa Dusseault will be continuing her excellent work as Co-Chair. I very much encourage you to work with Patrik and Lisa (as will I) to complete the WebDAV agenda. 

I still intend to continue contributing to the WebDAV community. Several of my ongoing research projects have a WebDAV aspect to them, including the Catacomb server, and the Prestan performance analysis suite. I will continue to contribute to the webdav.org site, as well as help with additional explanation of the contributions and uses of the protocol. Finally, I also hope to work to interest people in building new protocols on top of WebDAV -- calendaring is one area that seems long overdue. I'm certainly not turning my back on the WebDAV community. Rather I'm acknowledging that I'm no longer the right person to lead protocol development efforts to completion.

- Jim Whitehead

Received on Thursday, 18 March 2004 11:52:23 UTC