Re: NetBeans Governance Board Questions

Hello All,

Please see my responses inline.

On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 8:18 PM, Tom Wheeler <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am writing because you have been nominated to serve on the NetBeans
> Governance Board.
>
> If you're planning to accept the nomination and stand for election, I
> would also like to invite you to respond to a few questions on behalf
> of the NetBeans community.  I'm asking exactly the same questions of
> each candidate.  I will gather all responses sent to me by 14:00 GMT
> on Wednesday (5 October) and will post them to the nbdiscuss mailing
> list.  This will give the NetBeans community an opportunity to better
> know each candidate before voting begins.
>
> Here are the questions:
>
>
> 1)  What do you think is the most important issue the Governance Board
> can solve during your term and what will you do to solve it?
>
>
I am not sure what the most pressing issue is for the governance board at
the moment. As an EE developer, I do have a vested interest in making sure
that EE support is the best among all the major IDEs (Eclipse, IntelliJ). I
would like to push to make sure that we continue to have first class support
for the EE platform.



>
> 2)  As NetBeans is an open source project, its users have an
> obligation to help make it better.  What is your plan to get the
> community more involved in contributing to NetBeans?
>

As a JUG leader, and a multiple community lead on Java.net, I believe that
the lowest hanging fruit for user involvement is to submit bug reports and
enhancements. However, I don't want to put the cart before the horse. It is
more important to get people to use the platform. As a natural consequence
the bug reporting and and enhancement requests will follow. I will continue
to use NetBeans for demonstrations at JUG events, and technical talks. I
will encourage other JUG leaders who are NetBeans fans to do so as well.

Additionally, I think that it takes some encouragement from community
leaders to motivate people to participate in projects; NetBeans, or
otherwise. Large F/OSS projects have a barrier to entry that new developers
are afraid of: a large code base. The first step is to find developers in
the community, and connect them to people on the NetBeans development team
to mentor/partner, or communicate with. That way they have someone to
discuss the issue in detail with. It also gives them a reference point to
start from when trying to fix bugs.

I also pass along to my JUG the importance of blogging, and encourage them
to create tutorials. This not only helps them to understand the IDE better,
but contributes to the NetBeans knowledge base. I also ask them to
participate in the NetBeans user forums, and to help their fellow developers
with questions which they may have the answer to.


>
>
> 3)  The NetBeans project does not have a mission statement.  Do you
> think it should, and if so, what should it be?
>
>
Yes. The NetBeans IDE and Platform should be a developers first choice in
learning and developing in new Java SE and EE technologies.



>
> Best regards,
>
> Tom
>
> --
> Tom Wheeler
> http://www.tomwheeler.com/
>



-- 
John Yeary
--
http://javaevangelist.blogspot.com
http://www.johnyeary.com
*@jyeary*

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