2017 Candidate:
Matthias Zimmermann

Eclipse is a great community for a wide variety of reasons. What is fundamentally driving the success of the Eclipse ecosystem are the communities around individual Eclipse projects and Eclipse working groups with its corresponding Eclipse members. To continue the success story of Eclipse it is not enough to keep the existing community happy. The future of the whole Eclipse ecosystem is linked to its ability to convince new open source projects and its communities that it is the best possible home for them too. It is therefore great news that projects such as Eclipse MicroProfile are starting to choose Eclipse as their future home.

However, in discussions with people not familiar with the Eclipse ecosystem we often face the strong belief that Eclipse is "only" about the IDE, tooling and the RCP desktop platform. Many of these people are then positively surprised when we then talk about industry collaboration in Eclipse working groups or mention the recent collaboration of Eclipse and European research projects. This misconception about the current state of the Eclipse ecosystem is harmful for its future and needs to be corrected.

As a sustaining member representative for 2017/18 I would like to continue my efforts to support the Eclipse foundation in its transition to a first class citizen among the general open source organization. In my point of view getting out the word about this tranistion of the Eclipse foundtation is vital for its success in the future.

Matthias has joined BSI in 2006 starting in the role of a project manager. He has played an important role in convincing BSI to open source its Scout framework at Eclipse. Since 2010 Matthias is co-lead of the Scout project and has focused on growing the open source community and increasing the commercial adoption of the Scout framework. In addition, he is a founding member of the Swiss Eclipse User Group and is involved in organizing Eclipse events in Zurich and Munich. In 2015 and 2016 Matthias has been a member of the program committee for Eclipsecon Europe and has been member of the board for the 2016/2017 term.

Matthias holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Bern in Switzerland and loves exploring new open source technologis in the domains of IoT, machine learning and blockchain. In his free time he enjoys having time with his family, tinkering with IoT and giving flying lessons. You find him via @ZimMatthias.