Life at Eclipse

Each year, the Eclipse Foundation recognizes key contributors and committers amongst its community with awards. This year we created a new Lifetime Contribution Award to recognize an individual who has a long, sustained record of contribution to Eclipse as a whole. That is, all three communities of Eclipse: adopters, users, and committers. The award is chosen by the Eclipse Foundation Staff, and in our view is a recognition of the community member we feel has long made valuable contributions to the success of Eclipse. And we don’t mean technical contributions to projects, no matter how brilliant. We mean contributions which have impacted the success of the community.

The winner of the first ever Eclipse Foundation Lifetime Contribution Award is David Williams of IBM.

David Williams Accepting His Eclipse Lifetime Contribution Award

David has been a member of Eclipse since 2004, is a committer on 10 Eclipse Projects, Project Lead of 3, an active member of the Tools PMC, PMC Leader of the Web Tools Platform Project, and current chair of the Eclipse Planning Council. Above and beyond all that, though, David has helped all of Eclipse by leading many of the yearly Simultaneous Release trains: starting with the very first one, Callisto, setting in motion the vision and basic mechanisms that are still in place. While not the official lead of Europa or Ganymede David was still central to getting them done, on time. Finally, becoming Planning Council Chair during Galileo, he lead it to completion, then Helios, and now Indigo. David has successfully balanced being both mentor and task-master to keep everyone on track, meeting the requirements to form a common software site repository at Eclipse, which in turn is an enormous benefit to all three communities of Eclipse: adopters, users, and committers.

David is without a doubt one of the most highly regarded members of the Eclipse community. He is a tireless worker with a key focus on doing the right thing for the projects. His dedication is remarkable and I was pleased to see his recognition with the Lifetime Contribution Award this year.

I would like to thank IBM for supporting David’s continuing contributions to the future success of Eclipse.

Please join me in congratulating David!

I am pleased to announce the results of the 2011 Eclipse Foundation Board elections.

The elected Committer Member representatives for 2011 will be:

• Chris Aniszczyk
• Boris Bokowski
• Ed Merks

The elected Sustaining Member (e.g. Solution and Enterprise Member) representatives for 2011 will be:

• Eric Clayberg (Google)
• Hans Kamutzki (MicroDoc)
• Mik Kersten (Tasktop)

Please join me in extending a hearty congratulations to the winners!

I would also like to extend a warm “thank you” to the other candidates: Tim Barnes, Weber Canova, John Cunningham and Gunnar Wagenknecht.

In addition, I would like to recognize Adam Lieber (Intalio) for the past service he provided to the Eclipse Foundation as a Director. He has has been excellent representative for our community and will be missed.

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!