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[ve-dev] FW: Committer Representation on Eclipse Board
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Title: Message
All,
The
Eclipse Foundation has now been formally incorporated as an independent legal
entity! The hard work of lots of people thinking hard to clearly define
Eclipse's identity and processes has now come to fruition. There are now
approximately 50 member companies in the new Eclipse Foundation and
counting.
"All fine and
good," you say, "but what does this have to do with me other than to be amused
and watch grown men and women pat themselves on the back?"
;-)
If you're a committer to VEP, you now have a clear
"say" in the day-to-day decisions of Eclipse.org. Previously, this was
limited only to companies represented on the Board of Stewards. With the
new structure, *every committer* now has the opportunity to influence Eclipse's
strategic and tactical decisions.
Personally, I'm excited to watch Eclipse embark on this
new journey. I think that the decisions that the Board made about how to
structure the voting and the representation were very well thought-out and
amazingly forward-looking, especially given that IBM still holds about 80% of
the committer seats (see below for details). Consequently I'm really
optimistic about what we can do together.
I'd encourage everyone here who is a committer (or who
thinks they might want to be) to read the enclosed email from John Duimovich,
the leader of our subproject (Eclipse.tools), describing the voting process and
to start thinking about how you will be (or become)
involved.
If you're not yet a committer in VEP, but want to be,
we'll shortly be creating a new mentoring structure to help those who want to be
committers to come up to speed on the code base. (Thanks to Gili for the
great idea.) Stay tuned for more details in the near
future.
Warmest Regards,
Dave Orme
VEP subproject lead
<snip/>
The election process is a bit arcane, but designed
to ensure that smaller companies and independent committers have a voice.
All committers who work for a member company of eclipse.org (of which
there are over fifty at last count!), share a single vote per company.
Independent committers WHO HAVE SIGNED THE MEMBERSHIP AGREEMENT get a
single vote each. The voting process is being decided now, but will likely
be single transferable vote.
As an example, if Sara, Bob and
Joe all work for ACME Widgets, which is an Eclipse member, then they together
share one single transferable vote (ie in effect a preference list of nominees).
The mechanism for carrying out the voting is still being decided, but I
think the inclination is to find a way to just collect individual votes from
each committer and then let eclipse.org do the company consolidation during the
tally, as opposed to having a two tier vote. But stay tuned.
One thing which I
hope is clear is that there is an opportunity for small projects with a diverse
representation (eg many of the Tools projects) to have a real impact on the
vote. In particular, IBM with probably 60% or more of the committer
population will have ONE vote. IBM and the other large members all
supported this plan because they wanted it to be clear that they felt the
committer population should be adequately represented. So it would be
shame after all this if the franchise was not exercised.
What I would ask you
to do is:
1. make sure your committers know this is happening
2.
make the independent committers aware they
need to sign the membership agreement to vote (whether they choose to sign or
not is clearly their business)
3. think about nominees for the 2 positions. The more nominees the
better. There will be a call for nominations soon, likely this
week.
4. send me a list of
active committers for your project so I can validate against the voter list
compiled from the CVS records. Note, the commiters are listed at
www.eclipse.org/tools/commit.html which will be the list Eclipse starts from.
If
you have any questions please ask. Thanks.
John
