Introducing the Eclipse Architecture Council

I have an action item from the last Eclipse Architecture council meeting: Announce ourselves and describe what we are trying to achieve.

We believe that there are committers out there who do not know that the council exists. We are working to change this.

Who is the Architecture Council?
The council is composed of senior Committers with a proven track record of innovation, motivation and dedication to Eclipse. A list is available here.

What is the Architecture Council?
Cynically you could say it is a bunch of people who have worked on Eclipse for a long time and like talking to each other once a month.
While these might be two of the identifying traits of the council :-) we are actually on a group mission:

From [1], the council is "... responsible for the development, articulation, and maintenance of the Eclipse Platform Architecture and ensuring the Principles of the Development Process through mentorship."

From [2] the council is "... involved in both technical and process aspects of the projects in its quest to ensure the long-term technical health of the Eclipse platforms because the social and process structure of a project has been shown to have a direct impact on the technical quality of its extensible frameworks and exemplary tools."

For more please read here.

How is the Architecture Council going to achieve its mission?
"The Council will be as effective and useful as we make it." Rather obvious but it is amazing how often the simple truisms are overlooked.
We all have varied reasons for being involved with Eclipse but we all share a common goal: the desire to see continued technological success and innovation occur at Eclipse fostered by a healthy and vibrant Committer community.
The job of the Council is to look out beyond the current work and ensure that our processes and environment foster success rather than impede progress. Instead of just listing the problems (which is always the easiest path), we need to tackle head-on the issues that impact Eclipse, including but definitely not limited to release trains, UI consistency and project diversity.

The Eclipse committers can contribute to the success of the council by keeping us accountable and ensuring we are responding to any issues with the viability and evolution of Eclipse. Committers can communicate issues to the council using the eclipse.org-committers@eclipse.org mailing list or a Bugzilla entry against the Community product and the Architecture Council component.

To be successful on our mission the council needs to react to the current and future successes and challenges to Eclipse and to keep informed of developments from the committers. As well, we are tasked to lead by example within our own projects and within the role of mentor.

Please watch our work...it is guaranteed to be interesting...

Building picture credit: http://www.bigfoto.com/themes/architecture/index.htm