2007 Candidate:
Ed Merks

Eclipse's momentum is driven primarily by the committer community, and that's you and me. We live in a very exciting world that's rapidly changing in ways that ensure that the individual has more influence than ever before.

As a committer representative on the board, I intend to help promote the rights and privileges of committers and to take forward the issues and concerns that are brought to me. I intend to be a visible and approachable technical representative, not a politician.

I believe that helping others is its own reward and with more than 3,000 answers to questions on Eclipse's newsgroups last year, my track record of helpfulness speaks for itself.

Rights and privileges certainly don't come without responsibilities and that's something every committer should take very seriously. We are collectively responsible for fostering a diverse, growing community that encourages and strives for the type of excellence that has made Eclipse what it is today. But our stellar reputation is easily tarnished by the actions of a small few, so that's something we should all guard against.

I'm a firm believer in the right balance of rules: not so many as to be exclusionary or overly restrictive, as if there were a formula for goodness, but enough to ensure that the system functions smoothly. I believe that last year's coordinated release of Callisto is a great example of how well a diverse community can cooperate to achieve a common goal with just the right balance of restrictions and freedoms; Callisto was the single largest coordinated multi-vendor software release our planet has ever seen, which I believe represents a turning point in our industry.

This year's Europa release will set an even higher benchmark, and I'd like to think my team and I can help in some small way to further this goal. As your representative I commit to working tirelessly to promote not only Eclipse itself but also the community that drives it. We are Eclipse!

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 one of the three finalists for last year's top committer 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.