Life at Eclipse

Voting begins today for the 2011 Eclipse Foundation Board of Director elections. We have a great slate of candidates, each of whom brings a great deal of knowledge and experience with the Eclipse community to the table. I highly encourage everyone to get involved with this process and vote! I cannot overstate how important these elected directors are to the functioning of the Board, the Foundation and the community.

If you are eligible to vote, you should soon be receiving an email with your voting credentials. If you believe you are eligible, but do not receive credentials, please contact webmaster@eclipse.org.

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, the nominations are in, and the “campaign” phase of our 2011 Board of Director elections in now in full swing.

I have to say that I am particularly impressed with the quality of the candidates this year. There are a lot of well-known and well-respected community leaders who have thrown their hats into the ring. Every one of them should be commended for volunteering their time and energy to improving the Eclipse community and its governance.

The Eclipse Foundation has a unique governance model in the open source world, and one which I believe works extremely well. As I recently commented on the OpenJDK governance conversation:

The Eclipse Board explicitly has a mix of business-centric and community-centric representatives on it. In practice, it has actually worked well because the diversity of views have generally speaking resulted in better decisions. Diversity takes many forms, but it is almost always a force for good.

The people running in this election are your community-centric representatives. They have an enormously positive influence on the Board’s decisions, and the elected directors past and present have been a big part of our collective success.

I strongly encourage everyone within the Eclipse community to check out the candidates pages, ask questions on the foundation forum and vote in the coming weeks!