David Crossley at Apache Software Foundation

I am a byte or two over 40 years old and have zero children. I share life with my partner, a few chooks, and a vegetable garden in Goulburn (between Sydney and Canberra) in New South Wales, Australia.

My career started as a cadastral land surveyor (involved with the positional and legal determination of land boundaries). In my early days of university i discovered that i had an affinity with computing. I satisfied that urge with programmable HP calculators to assist the surveying calculations. As soon as the Mac came out i was converted - brilliant for a small business.

After ten years of surveying i decided that it was not me, and did further education in computing. I worked in government for a while doing data management and UNIX systems work in the field of environmental and geographic information. I found the joy of using the Perl programming language and various UNIX facilities, and soon discovered the wonders of SGML for document management. A few years working in government was all that i could manage.

IndexGeo Pty Ltd is my business, specialising in document management services for geospatial metadata and network services to ensure search system configuration and reliability. Essentially this is done using XML document validation services and robots to interrogate Z39.50 (ISO 23950) search systems.

I discovered Apache Cocoon in late 2000. This was my first foray into ASF open source communities. I started by sending a few patches for documentation as i read it, then commenced addition of the wonderful Catalog Entity Resolver to the Cocoon framework (many thanks again to Norm Walsh). After a little while i was voted to be a committer in October 2001.

As soon as i heard that the Apache Forrest project was starting, i joined the forrest-dev list (early 2002) and became a committer soon after. Since Forrest became a top-level project (May 2004) i have served as the chair, doing infrastructure and management stuff to get it established and keep it operating.

The Apache Software Foundation is built on its volunteers. I do my share, recognising that a small effort on my part equates to manifold benefit for others.

The Apache Incubator requires much volunteer effort. I saw that it was not running efficiently, so developed Clutch which is a tool to gather and portray the status of the set of projects currently in incubation. It attempts to encourage and facilitate their progress. See the explanation of the colours of the table to assist colour-blind accessibility.

With all projects, i encourage and help to do documentation. I understand sufficient Java - with Cocoon that is enough, as there is plenty to be done with XML.

crossley <at> apache.org

See the location of those Australian ASF committers who have added themself to the map.

Yes, of course this web page was built using the excellent Apache Forrest. Here is a concise overview showing how i did it.

• The writings, philosophy, and software of Joshua Nathaniel Pritikin. See why-compete.org and aleader and "The Mechanism of Competition".
• The XML software and computing concepts of James Clark and David Megginson.