2006BudgetPrograms

We're currently going through the process of creating an Eclipse Foundation budget for next year. A major part of this process is deciding what programs we want to support.

I would like to get community feedback on the programs we're currently thinking about. Better yet, I would love to get some ideas for programs that we haven't thought about.

So here's what we're thinking. For simplicity, I've lumped them into two categories: (a) those for the committers and projects and (b) those for the membership and ecosystem. The latter category would be traditionally thought of as "marketing."

To be clear, there is no way we have the resources to do all of these, so feedback on prioritization would be helpful as well.

So in no particular order, here we go:

Projects and Committers

• Facilitate project-oriented (e.g. CDT) and topic-oriented (e.g. multi-language support) technical symposiums.
• Upon request, help facilitate project meetings. In particular, provide the necessary support for virtual and face-to-face Callisto release train coordination meetings beyond the scope of the council meetings if required.
• Invite new project members to committer meetings and code camps to help them get started. Investigate the possibility of running new distinct events for new projects at pre-determinted locations. (We cannot scale enough to travel out to each new project to help them get started; they will need to come to us.)
  In addition, look at ways to better mentor new and/or struggling projects from EMO and community resources.
• Continue to evolve and improve the development tools made available to the projects. Examples include:
  • Project dashboards to provide rapid public feedback about important 'project heath' metrics. Define/use additional metrics for: community development, API/app quality, strategic importance of technology area addressed by project.
  • Investigate the possibility of building additional features into Bugzilla.
  • better collaboration tools (wikis, IM, ...)
  • investigate how to improve committer productivity around areas such as bug triage.
• Bjorn and Ward want to write articles on “The Eclipse Way” on best practices for development and process for Eclipse projects. Collaboration from as many committers as possible will be gratefully accepted. The primary intent here is to promote best practice development processes consisently across all projects.
• Continue to invest in improving and streamlining the approvals process for contributions to projects.
• Schedule committer meetings at least once per quarter in various locales where we pull together people from a number of projects in a particular city. Location choices include Boston, Ottawa, San Francisco, Toronto, Portland. The Foundation would send someone to attend and facilitate, and pay for the meeting room (if needed) and pizza, etc.
• Committer code camps. Wherever possible, the code camps will be combined with the Committer Meetings to create a single, multi-day event.
• Committer community development: Led by Ward Cunningham, put effort into creating a cohesive and collaborative Eclipse committer community across all the projects.

Members and Ecosystem

• Have a stock of Eclipse logoware. (We don't right now, and it's a drag sometimes.)
• Provide an Eclipse community portal for plug-ins with a focus on driving value for plug-in providers via the eclipse.org website. Spend some funds on advertising to drive demand to the portal.
• In conjunction with interested members, develop and execute a series of seminars in North America targeted at growing awareness within the user developer community.
  This program may also include user code camps, plug-in fests, etc.
• In conjunction with interested members, develop and execute a series of webinars focused on Java and embedded topic areas.
• Develop and execute a series of developer-focused contests targeted at growing awareness within the user developer community. For one example of such a contest, see the MySQL 5.0 contest.
• Develop customer success case studies which illustrate the successful adoption of commercial products based on Eclipse technology. The commercial products selected will be from member companies.
• Continue to look for, and where appropriate fund, the development of quality Eclipse technical content. This will include translations from articles in other languages (e.g. German).
• Raise the profile of the Eclipse Foundation in Europe.
• Jointly fund on-going market research on the growth of the Eclipse installed base and ecosystem.
• Arrange for booths and staffing for members to exhibit at events such as JavaOne, LinuxWorld and Embedded Systems. Ensure that the Eclipse Foundation has a presence at open source events such as OSCON.
• Arrange for at least two marketing symposiums for the Eclipse Membership in 2006. (One in North America, one in Europe.)
• Develop common Eclipse marketing collateral for use by all member companies.
• Develop case studies which illustrate how member companies have achieved commercial success by their participation with Eclipse.
• Develop public collateral documents illustrating the various business models successfully applied by member companies.
• Devise and execute a program inspired by the “Google Summer of Code” and/or the existing “Eclipse Innovation Grants” targeted at raising the profile of Eclipse within the open source development community.