Well, it’s time today, the polls are open for the 2008 Eclipse Board Elections. I just wanted to say some things before I head out on vacation. There’s a lot of great people running this year, some new faces mixed in with the old. As a committer representative for last year, I’m proud what we managed to accomplish together in regards to things like the IP process. If you noticed, it’s a lot smoother to create CQs and work with them than it was in the past. There’s also been a big push to grant parallel IP for all projects, instead of just incubating one. Hopefully the fruits of our labor will result in parallel IP for everyone during the next term.
If I look back and figure out a couple things I accomplished that I’m proud of and could directly be attributed to me, this would be it:
- Transparency
- The first thing I did when elected to the board was setup a blog for the committer reps and wrote an entry on what happens in a typical Eclipse board meeting. With the help of Ed Merks, we also setup a newsgroup as a way for committers to get in touch with us. I also pushed other committer reps to blog when possible. In the end, my goal has always been to be transparent about our activities and keep an open communication channel. That’s something I will keep a focus on in the future.
- Eclipse Curriculum and University Outreach
- During one of our planning sessions on the board, I brought up the idea that Eclipse wasn’t getting enough traction within universities. As a result, there was funding put aside to develop an Eclipse curriculum to be used by universities. The curriculum is being worked on by a professor and should be available in the near future.
As for what I want accomplished in the future, the four main items would be:
- Job Opportunities
- Almost everyone I talk to is having difficulty finding Eclipse-related talent or finding an Eclipse-related job. This is something that needs to be addressed as it isn’t healthy for the Eclipse ecosystem to be in this position. Strategic conversations need to happen at the board level to see what we can do about this.
- Funding
- For those who don’t know, most of Eclipse’s funding comes from strategic members. Eclipse doesn’t have a lucky golden egg like Mozilla does when it comes to funding. It’s time to analyze other potential funding sources like certification or something else.
- Verticals
- Eclipse has done really well in the tools-space. If you look at the Eclipse membership, anyone who is building classy tools is a member. Recently, Eclipse has been growing in industry verticals like finance, health or embedded. I even managed to rope in a member (and awesome committer!) from the automative space. We need to push growth in these areas to further extend Eclipse’s reach as more than just a tools platform.
- Foundation Staff
- Eclipse has been adding members every year while the Foundation staff growth has been fairly stagnant over the years. The Foundation staff does an excellent job at pushing and growing Eclipse. If we desire to grow Eclipse faster, we should look at adding more members to the staff, especially from emerging areas like Asia or staff to focus on industry vertical membership.
It’s been an honor to represent the committers on the board last year. For those who know me, I always passionate about Eclipse and put it first. In the end, I’m the guy who adds your blog to PlanetEclipse, pushes to add flags to Eclipse Bugzilla and makes things like Eclipse BugDay happen. If you like that type of attitude, please consider voting for me 🙂