Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, stunned the Eclipse community today with the announcement that wiki creator Ward Cunningham would be joining the staff of the Eclipse Foundation. Ward will be Eclipse's 10th employee.

Increasing collaboration
Milinkovich says that up to now, Eclipse has been focused on creating the process and infrastructure for committers. This effort has been lead largely by Bjorn Freeman-Benson, who managed proposals for new projects and created tools to keep track of existing projects. However, as Eclipse has grown it's become obvious that just wasn't enough. "A high functioning committer community is about more than just sharing servers," according to Milinkovich. It's about "collaboration and cooperation between the project silos."

Although the various bodies within the Foundation such as the Architecture and Planning Councils have been doing an "admirable job" of coordinating the different projects, a culture of collaboration and cooperation between committers on different projects has not quite gelled. That's where Ward comes in.

Ward's interests in open source and developing developer communities "are a perfect match for the work we need to do at Eclipse" says Milinkovich. "Ward will lead the effort to create a more cohesive Eclipse committer community by working with developers in order to enhance Eclipse as 'the place to be'."

Focus on community
Among the secondary goals for Ward is to raise the reputation of Eclipse in the eyes of the broader community of developers. The Foundation wants developers to be attracted to Eclipse because it's an interesting community in its own right. "We want the Eclipse committer community to become a model for how other developer and open source communities are structured", says Milinkovich.

That sounds all well and good, but what does that mean exactly? Eclipse's strategy will be based on simplicity and enabling tools. Throughout the short history of the Internet, simple ideas and artifacts (like HTML and wikis) have significantly changed the way that people talk to each other. Ward will lead the effort to create a more cohesive Eclipse committer community through leading by example, working with other developers to create simple artifacts and tools that change the way conversations between the various parties are carried out.

Ward Cunningham will be working closely with Bjorn Freeman-Benson in the Portland area. He was previously at Microsoft in the patterns and practices group.

Ed's evaluation
Eclipse has scored quite a coup in getting someone as well known as Ward Cunningham to join the Foundation. If nothing else it'll be great PR for Eclipse, but I hope it will be more than that.

Eclipse the tools framework is in great shape but Eclipse the exemplary IDE that competes with mono-sourced offerings from NetBeans and Visual Studio is showing signs of growing pains. Eclipse is trying to build a large system without a Linux-style benevolent dictator, in fact with dozens of corporate interests large and small that don't necessarily share the same vision. The result has been that offerings such as Web Tools and Profiling have not been as well integrated as the base Java development environment.

Like children, developers are generally apolitical until taught to be that way by their environment or employers. Perhaps by increasing developer-to-developer contacts, a widely respected figure like Ward can go around the politics to point out the common bonds that everyone working on Eclipse (in fact, everyone working with Java) should share.