<boardmember id="merks" type="committer">
      <name>Ed Merks</name>
      <title>Senior Technical Staff Member</title>
      <image> merks.jpg </image>
      <email>merks@ca.ibm.com</email>
      <phone> 905.413.3265 </phone>
      <contact> <![CDATA[
D3/0RB8/8200/MKM<br>
IBM Toronto Software Lab<br>
8200 Warden Ave.<br>
Markham, Ont.<br>
L6G 1C7
      ]]> </contact>
      <eclipse_affiliation> <![CDATA[
Eclipse Modeling Project Co-lead<br>
Eclipse Modeling Framework Project Lead
      ]]> </eclipse_affiliation>
      <vision>  <![CDATA[
<p>Eclipse's momentum is driven primarily by the committer community, and
that's you and me.
We live in a very exciting world that's rapidly changing in ways that
ensure that the individual has more influence than ever before.</p>
<p>As a committer representative on the board, I intend to help promote the
rights and privileges of committers and to take forward the issues and
concerns that are brought to me.
I intend to be a visible and approachable technical representative, not a
politician.</p>
<p>I believe that helping others is its own reward and with more than 3,000
answers to questions on Eclipse's newsgroups last year, my track record of
helpfulness speaks for itself.</p>

<p>Rights and privileges certainly don't come without responsibilities and
that's something every committer should take very seriously.
We are collectively responsible for fostering a diverse, growing community
that encourages and strives for the type of excellence that has made
Eclipse what it is today.
But our stellar reputation is easily tarnished by the actions of a small
few, so that's something we should all guard against.</p>
<p>I'm a firm believer in the right balance of rules: not so many as to be
exclusionary or overly restrictive, as if there were a formula for
goodness, but enough to ensure that the system functions smoothly.
I believe that last year's coordinated release of Callisto is a great
example of how well a diverse community can cooperate to achieve a common
goal
with just the right balance of restrictions and freedoms;
Callisto was the single largest coordinated multi-vendor software release
our planet has ever seen, which I believe represents a turning point in our
industry.</p>
<p>This year's Europa release will set an even higher benchmark, and I'd like
to think my team and I can help in some small way to further this goal.
As your representative I commit to working tirelessly to promote not only
Eclipse itself but also the community that drives it.
We are Eclipse!</p>
      ]]> </vision>
      <bio> <![CDATA[
<p>Ed Merks is the project lead of the Eclipse Modeling Framework project and
a co-lead of the top-level Modeling project. He has many years of in-depth
experience in the design and implementation of languages, frameworks, and
application development environments. He has been an active committer at
Eclipse since 2002, with more than 1/2 million lines of committed code, and
was one of the three finalists for last year's top committer award.  He
holds a Ph.D. in computing science and is a co-author of the authoritative
"Eclipse Modeling Framework, A Developer's Guide" (Addison-Wesley 2003). He
works for IBM Rational Software at the Toronto Lab.</p>
      ]]> </bio>
      <affiliation> <![CDATA[
IBM Rational Software, Toronto Lab
      ]]>
      </affiliation>
</boardmember>