2017 Candidate:
Mickael Istria

Our community performs very well. I do not think it requires any kind of revolution to keep getting better and better. However, a key factor of success is that it has been able to evolve with time - introducing working groups, relaxing IP and infrastructure constraints, FEEP… -, and I would like the Community to keep on progressing as it is used to.

Here are the topics I’d like to bring forward as goals and top-priority work items to our Community to be even more productive, effective, and welcoming:

• Infrastructure: The Eclipse.org infrastructure is increasingly stressed by the needs of projects and processes. We're often seeing some services fail and become blockers for many projects and contributors. Our current workflows require a more stable infrastructure. I’ll keep urging that a reliable infrastructure is one of the most important expectations for our Community. I want to make sure that all solutions are evaluated, and would like to encourage the Foundation to reuse external hosting or SaaS in its infrastructure if it happens to be more reliable, sustainable or performant than the traditional “host our own services” approach.
• More Community consultancy: Some decisions in our Community are taken by councils of nominated people. Despite all the effort, those councils cannot be considered as representing the whole Community. Some of these decisions should use votes and other open metrics -gathered from Bugzilla or any existing data source- treating all contributors as equal. This would help some of them to feel more involved and attached to the Community, and more likely to give back. At the moment, it could be simply by making such polls happen more and more easily and frequently on project initiative to give data facts to projects as soon as they are needed. The poll results wouldn't enforce a decision but at least, they would allow diverging opinions to be easily heard. This is the approach we introduced to select proposals at EclipseCon France 2016, without any difficulty and that I perceived as a success.
• User oriented: I’d like our Community’s first target to be the users of Eclipse projects. The number of users is the main indicator of the success of a project, so helping projects to be successful means helping them get more users. First, projects should be automatically provided with public metrics of usage/downloads in order to help them set up some “user recruitment” campaigns and easily see the effects of their efforts. Then, I would like the Foundation to help project marketing by driving contributors to create more marketing resources to publish, by producing marketing content and by assisting projects in setting up a marketing plan. I’d also like to see people representing Eclipse projects more present in main conferences; this could mean having the Foundation send staff or sponsor individuals to conferences to present Eclipse projects.
• Regular community performance reports: I’d like to encourage the Foundation to publish monthly community performance metrics, including interesting numbers and trends such as newly registered members, new bugs reported/closed, first-time participants to discussions, etc., and whatever can help us as a Community to plainly realize when things are great, to find out as soon as possible when we need to react to some bad trends, and evaluate the impact of some changes we’ve made.
• Making it easier to contribute for everyone: keeping placing bridges and lowering barriers to turn users into bug reporters, bug reporters into code contributors, code contributors into committer… This can start with links from bugtracker to project’s contribution guides and mailing-lists, or with setting up an open opt-out “eclipse-all” mailing-list for all community members where anyone can ask anything and be driven to a more specific media (mailing-list, forum, bugzilla…).
• Motivating contributors: Some people are not expected to work on OSS in their job description, some are not part of a team/company with OSS culture, some are not mentored to properly interact with OSS communities, others don’t earn anything substantial from contributing… but they would be pretty happy to try. Our community needs to be welcoming for these people as well. They need to be motivated and guided in order to become efficient OSS contributors, and rewarded for their efforts. Introducing automated rewards (even a thank you!) or gamification (via points and badges) are ways to provide motivation and guidelines.