2015 Candidate:
Ed Merks

Eclipse is an evolving diverse community driven by a broadening constellation of contributors: large and small commercial interests, educational institutions, and our dedicated committer community, i.e., people who do day-to-day development at Eclipse like you and me. With increasing diversity, particularly the shift from a small number of large commercial interests to a broad spectrum of organization types and sizes, our influence as individuals grows, presenting interesting challenges and exciting opportunities. Even the types of the projects hosted at Eclipse are diversifying to include things like Orion, i.e., projects that aren't written in Java and don't use OSGi. To facilitate healthy, long-term growth, we need more flexible licensing and infrastructure to ensure that Eclipse is an attractive place to host a broadening range of open-source projects. As your committer representative on the board, I will employ my eight years of experience to promote the rights and privileges of committers and to focus on such issues. I will continue to be a visible and approachable technical representative, who navigates the political landscape on your behalf. I feel I've demonstrated this with my long track record as your representative on the board. My background as a Canadian immigrant, born in the Netherlands, currently living in Berlin and learning Deutsch, sensitizes to me the fact that great communities span cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Cliche as it may sound, I believe strongly that helping is its own reward. I answer questions daily on a broad range of newsgroups, not just those for my own projects, I fix bugzillas quickly for the users of my software, and I develop cool new features whenever possible. A recent example is the Oomph technology Eike Stepper and I have been working on to help ease the installation and configuration of development IDEs. I am deeply honored to have received Eclipse's Lifetime Contribution Award in 2012. I feel my track record as an Eclipse committer since 2002 is demonstrated with deeds not merely with words. I focus on being a positive influence and on balancing the drive to fix problems and to make improvements with recognition of the fact that real problems are difficult to solve and that what constitutes improvement is often highly subjective.

I will continue to work hard to ensure that Eclipse's processes are the best they can be and are ever improving, e.g., streamlining the IP process with improvements such as raising the contribution limit. I believe in minimal processes that focus on best practices and achievable, pragmatic results. I oppose restrictions that seek to coerce compliance to arbitrary questionable rules, particularly rules that are primarily designed to exclude certain groups or to make first and second class citizens in our community, e.g., non-proportional committer voting. I can be counted upon as the person who will speak up diplomatically even when personal risk is involved. As your representative, I commit to working tirelessly to promote not only Eclipse itself but also the community that drives it. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve as your representative these past years. If reelected, you can count on the fact that Merks works for you.