Community is a superclass of Economy

The big scope

My personal "frustration" with Eclipse is that it is a technology focussed community and although I am a techie avant la lettre (yes I did program assembly on the Zilog Z80) I am also a business owner concerned to put food on the plates of my employees (I pause for a second so you can wipe your tears).

I want to bring Eclipse consumers and Eclipse providers together inside the Eclipse community so that we can create an Economy. With this I mean that there must be a place inside Eclipse where consumers can contact providers but providers can also make themselves visible for consumers and therefore Eclipse must know their consumers.

The first step

Since Eclipse is a community and all efforts arise from this community, there is no use barking against the Mighty Moon (MM pun intended) to make this happen. Instead I feel I/we have to do something.

I would like a "Community", "Collaboration" or "Community Collaboration" or "Community and Social Collaboration" top level project. In this project we place tools like Mylyn, the ECF collaboration projects and others (like a newsreader, read on) as a start and integrate this with the base Eclipse download.

The next steps

The next steps are to really focus on creating an Eclipse Economy after we have established the Eclipse Community; Community is a superclass of Economy. There are a lot of companies paying for Eclipse membership. We are a "$5000 a year" member.

Call us "the middle class".

Now that the times are hard, this middle class want to see some direct effect of this membership before we cancel and just take Eclipse like the rest of the world. My believe is that companies like ours must form the bigger part of the income of the Eclipse foundation just like the middle class is the base of any countries economy.

All bla bla?

Mostly, but I don't want to just talk about this. I am currently working an a newsreader project to give the community a voice from within the Eclipse workbench (see below if you want to give this Alpha project a spin).

The next project I want to work on is a (Google) map which is accessible from the Eclipse Help menu that shows where you can get Eclipse services in your region. The entries in the map are the companies that pay for Eclipse (like Remain, Industrial-TSI, Weigle-Wilczek, IBM and others :-).

I thank Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Eric Rizzo and Wayne Beaton for support and inspiration.

The newsreader project

Here is the RCP application of the newsreader project (windows). Remember, it is still Alpha software. You can read and reply but not yet post. This will be fixed in a couple of days.

Follow me on http://twitter.com/wimjongman for last minute info on the newsreader or check the Eclipse wiki for detailled info: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Newsreader

salvo.zip

It is pretty simple but here is a five minute instruction without audio: