Building Open Source Communities: One Contributor at a Time

Doug Schaefer (Wind River Systems), Ed Merks (IBM), Ian Skerrett (Eclipse Foundation), Christian Dupuis (SpringSource), Mik Kersten (Tasktop Technologies)

Committer And Contributor · Long Talk

Wednesday, 13:30, 50 minutes | Theatre |

Doug Schaefer

Ed Merks

Christian Dupuis

Mik Kersten

A significant benefit of open source projects are the communities that develop around successful projects. These communities can often help provide testing resource, documentation, ideas for future features, future committers, and technology evangelism. Successful open source projects have engaged, vibrant open communities associated with them. In this panel discussion, we will investigate what it take to create and nuture growing open source communities. How do you encourage people to contribute back to the project and recommend the technology to their friends? The panelist have all been involved in successful open source projects that are known to have great community involvement.

Panelist include:

Mik Kersten, Mylyn
Christian Dupuis, SpringIDE
Doug Schaefer, CDT
Ed Merks, Modeling Project
plus another participant from outside the Eclipse community

Doug started his work on Eclipse as one of the original contributors to the CDT project as it launched in 2002. He led the team that built the CDT indexing and managed build frameworks at IBM/Rational. He later went on to join QNX and became the project lead for the CDT. Today, he is an engineering manager at Wind River Systems leading the Install and Licensing Technology team and continues in his role as the CDT Project Lead.

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 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.

Ian is the Director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation.

Christian joined SpringSource, the company behind the popular Spring Framework, in 2008 as a Senior Software Engineer and is a member of the tools team based in Vancouver. Since 2004 Christian is the lead of the Spring IDE (http://springide.org) open source project that provides development tools for the Spring Portfolio.

He has been developing Java enterprise applications since 1997. During this time, Christian designed complex software architectures with a focus on multi-tiered, web-based, client-server applications using enterprise Java technologies and the Spring Framework.

Prior to joining SpringSource, Christian worked as consultant and project manager for one of the leading global technology consulting firms in the financial sector in central Europe.

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.