| <boardmember id="swanson" type="committer"> |
| <name>Darin Swanson</name> |
| <title>Senior Software Engineer </title> |
| <image>swanson.jpg</image> |
| <email>Darin_Swanson@us.ibm.com</email> |
| <phone>1.503.578.3252</phone> |
| |
| <contact> <![CDATA[ |
| 15400 SW Koll Parkway<br> |
| Beaverton, OR<br> |
| USA, 97006-6063 |
| ]]> </contact> |
| |
| <eclipse_affiliation> <![CDATA[ |
| Platform Ant Team Lead<br> |
| Platform Debug and JDT Debug Committer<br> |
| Platform UI Committer ]]> |
| </eclipse_affiliation> |
| |
| <vision> <![CDATA[ |
| <p>One of the key strengths of Eclipse is its community. This community has been fostered and nourished with care by |
| the Eclipse foundation and flourished with the input and work by the Eclipse committers.</p> |
| <p>As we move forward, I see several key points related to our community that need attention.</p> |
| |
| <p><b>Strengthen the committers:</b> Over the past 5 years, I have had the privilege of working with many of the talented |
| committers who are involved with Eclipse. I feel we need to make the committer's tasks easier in order for their |
| continued success and enjoyment in developing Eclipse. I would work to:</p> |
| <ul> |
| <li>Assign mentors for new Eclipse committers from the established, successful Eclipse committers. |
| New projects in the Eclipse ecosystem work with mentors as outlined in the exiting development process so |
| let us take this a step further and help new committers as well. Within the Eclipse Debug team this has |
| been our established model for the past 5 years. We should extend beyond mentoring just within a team to |
| enable more cross project interactions and always foster the "Culture of Quality". |
| The EMO could create a database of existing committers who would be willing to work with committers from |
| completely unrelated projects. The mentorship would involve guidance regarding Eclipse principals such as openness, |
| quality and change.</li> |
| <li>Help with the intellectual property challenges of dealing with Eclipse contributions through all possible |
| streamlining and simplification of the process. We all need education in this continually evolving area.</li> |
| <li>Enable ease of reuse of other open source software with a structured process and timeline for resolution. |
| With each new version of Ant that I have integrated within Eclipse, the process has become more defined and |
| reproducible but has greatly increased in the time it takes and has become difficult to determine when a |
| decision will be reached on whether to move forward using the third party software.</li> |
| <li>Have the EMO organize committer meetings and code camps throughout the year in many different locations. |
| The meetings and code camps I have attended have been warmly received by the community but have required extensive |
| overhead in the planning and preparation of the committers involved. We should look to promoting the talents of the |
| EMO staff to ease the overhead for these gatherings.</li> |
| <li>Help committers to have better awareness and to fully utilize the support from the Eclipse board and |
| EMO and their committer representatives. Quarterly reports to committer mailing lists similar to the |
| webmaster / infrastructure report would help the committers to know who and what is happening via the EMO, |
| the board and the committer representatives.</li> |
| </ul> |
| |
| |
| <p><b>Promote committer diversity:</b> An Eclipse committer is made, not born. To become a committer, one must |
| first be a contributor. There are numerous people who really do want to help but yet find it difficult to |
| know where to begin. I would work to:</p> |
| <ul> |
| <li>Offer and promote presentations for individuals interested in becoming contributors or committers. |
| I attended just such a presentation at EclipseCon 2006 which detailed how to be an Eclipse contributor and start |
| down the path to contributor. This talk was very well attended. To many people in the crowd most of the presentation was |
| new information. As an original committer on the Eclipse project, I often need to be reminded that parts of our process |
| are more implicit than explicit to our community and may appear that we have less than fully open elements within our process. |
| A whole track at EclipseCon 2008 on the Eclipse way and development process is something I would work towards.</li> |
| <li>Organize events strictly to promote Eclipse contributions coupled with directed follow-up from established committers. |
| I spent a considerable amount of time fostering a relationship with an Eclipse contributor for the Eclipse Ant integration. |
| It was worth the effort as many high quality contributions to Eclipse that provided new features that would have not otherwise |
| been implemented due to time constraints of the main development team.</li> |
| </ul> |
| |
| <p><b>Cross community engagements:</b> Eclipse Members and the ecosystem live in multiple open source communities either |
| exclusively or mixed with commercial software products. As well, the Eclipse ecosystem is large enough to require |
| and benefit from cross project interactions. I believe this will help to increase awareness of each projects challenges and |
| successes. I would work to:</p> |
| <ul> |
| <li>Ease any barriers through meetings and associated code camp so we can learn from each other, both internal and |
| external to Eclipse. Encourage usage of each others offerings. My experience of watching how the Apache Ant project is |
| organized has often allowed me to suggest possible improvements to my team's process. Their model of openness for |
| planning and resolution of conflicts is something I believe Eclipse can learn from.</li> |
| </ul> |
| |
| <p><b>Strengthen and grow the existing community:</b> We have a strong vibrant Eclipse community. We need to continue to empower and |
| grow this community. I would |
| work to:</p> |
| <ul> |
| <li>Ensure that we continue to improve the Eclipse web presence and its ease of navigation. |
| Within my posts on the Eclipse newsgroups I often find it difficult to quickly find the helper documentation |
| I wish to point the user to, even when I was the creator of this documentation.</li> |
| <li>Streamline the Eclipse contribution process to be easy to understand and execute.</li> |
| <li>Foster the openness of all projects and make them more inviting. We have formal procedures in the development |
| process but we always need to encourage an attitude of acceptance and openness within all the projects and committers.</li> |
| <li>Address the "Resolved Later" Bugzilla issue. I do not currently have a solution but I do know that it is bothering |
| many people in the community and I think it is time we tackled the problem head on.</li> |
| </ul> |
| |
| <p>All of these items can be summarized with ensuring that we fully utilize the power of the Eclipse |
| ecosystem to enable continued success. I would like to offer my experience and talents to help make this a reality.</p> |
| ]]> |
| |
| </vision> |
| |
| <bio> <![CDATA[ |
| <p>Darin Swanson is one of the original committers on the Eclipse project, working as the Ant Component |
| lead for the Eclipse Platform Project and as a key committer for the Eclipse debug support. |
| He was also involved in the development of Eclipse's precursors: VisualAge Micro Edition Java IDE and the |
| Visual Age for Java product.</p> |
| <p>Darin has presented numerous Eclipse tutorials and talks at several conferences and has helped organize |
| and participated in numerous code camps. He actively fields questions in the Eclipse newsgroups and has been |
| nominated as a top committer.</p> |
| <p>He is also active in other open source arenas having participated in mailing list discussions, reported bugs and |
| supplied patches to the CruiseControl and Apache Ant projects.</p> |
| ]]> |
| </bio> |
| |
| <affiliation> <![CDATA[IBM]]> |
| </affiliation> |
| </boardmember> |