Rich has been active in the Internet, distributed systems, and security sphere for over a decade. He has been a member of the IETF PKI and HTTP working groups, and is a named contributor to the HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 specs. He has also participated various OSF, IETF, W3C and OASIS standards projects, including HTTP, NNTP, ebXML, OCSP, SOAP, XKMS, SAML, and others. He is the Web Services "endpoints" columnist for O'Reilly's XML.com website.

He is the original author of INN, the world's most popular Usenet implementation, and ZSI, a leading SOAP implementation for the Python language.