2008 Candidate:
Ed Merks

Eclipse's momentum continues to build and that momentum is driven primarily by the committer community, i.e., by people like you and me. Our growing influence as individuals presents new and exciting opportunities. As a committer representative on the board, I will continue to promote the rights and privileges of committers and to take forward the issues and concerns that are near and dear to the developer's hearts. I intend to be a visible and approachable technical representative, not a politician.

I believe that helping others is its own reward. With many thousands of answers to questions across a wide range of Eclipse's newsgroups last year, and with active blogging to promote a sense of community, my track record of helpfulness speaks for itself.

I will continue to foster a diverse and growing community that encourages and strives for the type of excellence that has made Eclipse what it is today. The modeling project, something over which I have more direct control, is just one example of the exciting things that a diverse group of individuals can accomplish. Eclipse's release train process is yet another success story that demonstrates the kind of cooperation that can help our community strive for ever greater achievements.

I will work hard to ensure that Eclipse's processes are the best they can be and are ever improving. I believe in encouraging and rewarding positive behavior, and in defining minimal processes that focus on best practices and achievable realistic results. I oppose restrictions that seek to coerce compliance to arbitrary questionable rules, i.e., rules that are primarily designed to exclude certain groups or to make first and second class citizens in our community.

I like to lead by example, to have others do as I do, rather than set unrealistic benchmarks for others to follow and then sit back with the expectation that others should do my bidding. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well and it's worth participating. As your representative I commit to working tirelessly to promote not only Eclipse itself but also the community that drives it. Collectively, we are Eclipse and I would be honored to serve Eclipse for another term.

Ed Merks is the project lead of the Eclipse Modeling Framework project and a co-lead of the top-level Modeling project. He has many years of in-depth experience in the design and implementation of languages, frameworks, and application development environments. He has been an active committer at Eclipse since 2002, with more than 1/2 million lines of committed code, and was the winner of last year's top committer award. This year he is one of four finalists for the top ambassador award. He holds a Ph.D. in computing science and is a co-author of the authoritative "Eclipse Modeling Framework, A Developer's Guide" (Addison-Wesley 2003). He works for IBM Rational Software at the Toronto Lab.