
<boardmember id="kersten" type="committer">

      <name>Mik Kersten</name>
      
      <title>President and CTO</title>
      
      <image>kersten.jpg</image>
      
      <email>mik.kersten@tasktop.com</email>
      
      <phone>604-727-4004</phone>
      
      <contact> <![CDATA[
Tasktop Technologies<br>
700 - 510 West Hastings St.<br>
Vancouver, BC V6B 1L8<br>
Canada
      ]]> </contact>
      
      <eclipse_affiliation> <![CDATA[
Mylyn Project Lead<br>
AspectJ Project Committer<br>
AJDT Project Committer<br>
Architecture Council Member
      ]]> </eclipse_affiliation>
      
      <vision>  <![CDATA[

<p>I have been an Eclipse committer since early 2002 when I co-created the AspectJ project.  Like many others at the time, I was hedging my bets and developing extensions for multiple IDEs.  But after a few weeks of experience building on it, it became clear to me that Eclipse was going to be the <a href="http://tasktop.com/blog/?p=5">platform for innovation</a> in the tools space.  At that time I based this judgment almost entirely on the modularity and openness of the Platform.  Since then, I have learned a lot about the critical part that collaboration tools and community involvement play in fostering a successful ecosystem.  If elected, in addition to fulfilling the usual obligations of Committer Representative, my first priority will be evolving the tool support that facilitates collaboration in our community, and my second priority will be helping committers improve the cross-project usability of the tools that we produce.</p>

<h4>Tools and Community</h4>
  
<p>Being an Eclipse committer is a challenging task, due to the amount of input that comes in through project planning and community channels.  In addition, the Eclipse frameworks that we work with daily add up to millions of lines of code.  As an Eclipse committer, one of my motivations for creating and contributing Mylyn was to facilitate development and collaboration within the Eclipse ecosystem.  To date Mylyn has been successful at enabling many committers to work more productively on their projects and to process much more community feedback than was previously possible.  This has been a key factor in the success of the Mylyn project to date, since it has enabled a small number of committers to resolve thousands of bug reports.</p>

<p>The Eclipse Foundation has been doing an amazing job in providing the infrastructure and web services that are the backbone of our community.  As Committer Representative I plan on coordinating improvements to the tool support that we use to make us more productive when using these services.  Key areas I see for improvement include:
<ul>
<li>Better integrating Eclipse.org facilities for committers, including bugs.eclipse.org and IPZilla integration with the IDE.  We spend a large portion of our time using these repositories, and the easier it is for us to use them within Eclipse the more productive we become.
</li>
<li>Ensuring that there is an <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/epp/">EPP</a> distribution that supports committers and contributors.  This used to be the Eclipse Classic download, but thanks to innovation within Eclipse there is an increasing number of other projects and tools that are now relevant to committers.
</li>
<li>Coordinating additional tool support for facilitating Eclipse project development.  This can include things such as include IRC integration from ECF, easier applying of patches and sharing of Mylyn contexts, as well as default configurations for <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/PDE_UI_Incubator_ApiTools">PDE's API Tools</a>.
</li>
<li>Improving the user community feedback channels.  This includes better integrated support for bug reporting (e.g. <a href="https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=205196">EPP distribution specific reporting</a>) and <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylyn_FAQ#Which_usage_monitoring_framework_should_I_use.3F">usage monitoring</a>. 
</li>
</ul>

<p>While I have put some effort into each of these areas already, as Committer Representative I will drive additional progress via contributions, getting help from the Eclipse Foundation and coordination of community resources (e.g. a summer of code project on improving tool support for committers).</p>

<h4>UI Quality and Usability</h4>

<p>We have a culture of diversity and quality at Eclipse and I would follow the lead of the previous Committer Representatives before me in supporting that.  But while we have become very good at ensuring the cross-project quality of frameworks and APIs, we are not yet as good at ensuring cross-project UI quality and usability.  The Platform has set a high bar for us, but thanks to their efforts in making the workbench UI facilities reusable, the <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/UI_Checklist">User Interface Guidelines</a> we have and the <a href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/User_Interface_Best_Practices_Working_Group">UI Best Practices Working Group efforts</a>, with additional visibility and some coordinated effort I believe that it is possible for all Eclipse projects with a UI component to attain similar levels of usability and for our very diverse ecosystem to work towards improved UI consistency.</p>

I believe that for the coming year, the above priorities are key to helping Eclipse move along it's trajectory of being the leading platform and ecosystem of tools.  In order to make these efforts transparent easy for committers to consume, I would blog periodically on progress towards these goals in addition to <a href="http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/eclipse.org-planning-council/msg01049.html">driving discussion</a> within the existing community channels.
</p>
      ]]> </vision>
      
      <bio> <![CDATA[
      Mik Kersten is the President and CTO of Tasktop Technologies, lead of the
Eclipse Mylyn project, committer on the AspectJ project, and member of the
Eclipse Architecture Council. While a research scientist at Xerox PARC, Mik
implemented the first aspect-oriented programming tool support with AspectJ
plug-ins for JBuilder, NetBeans, Visual Studio, and Emacs. He then created
Mylyn and the Task-Focused Interface technology while completing his PhD at
the University of British Columbia. Mik's passion is building Eclipse-based
tools that offload our brains and make it easier to get creative work done.
      ]]> </bio>
      
      <affiliation> <![CDATA[
<a href="http://tasktop.com/">Tasktop Technologies</a>
      ]]>
      </affiliation>
      
</boardmember>