Thursday, April 19, 2007

The First 100 Days

The term of the new class of committer representatives officially started on April 1. To their credit, the reps had already established several channels of communication before the term even started.

To get the party started, I posted a few questions on the committer reps newsgroup today asking about their action plan for the near future.

Of course, for them to have an agenda that represents the committers' needs, we all have to chime in to provide input and feedback.

In an effort to initiate a dialogue, I asked the following questions:
  1. What is the single most important issue that you would like to push for and bring up for debate in the first 100 days of your term (ie. in the first face-to-face board meeting)? Why do you feel it's so important?
  2. If issue stated in question #1 was still unresolved at the end of the year, would you consider that to be a failed term? More generally, how do we (and you) quantitate success of a term?
  3. Now that you have had some orientation by the Eclipse Foundation as to what role you are able to play, are there items that you listed on your nomination vision statement that you think is out of the scope of your responsibilities? Another way to ask the question would be: is the position so far what you thought it was going to be or were you in for a surprise?
  4. Being a committer rep on the Board of Directors is a coveted position. You get to add 'Director of Eclipse Foundation' to your LinkedIn profile, you get to add it to your EclipseCon biography and you get a chance to start every conversation by saying "Now that I am on the board of directors..." and annoy the heck out of your co-workers. So in short, it must be a lot of fun :).Yet for some reason, it's clear that not too many committers care about that. The vote turnout is low and the nomination field was not very crowded. Why do you think that is and do you plan to do anything about it?

This should make for an interesting thread, but let's keep it in the newsgroup.