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Alexander Neumann: Top Ambassador Nominee

At 1:36 AM on Feb 13, 2007, Daniel Spiewak wrote:

Alexander Neumann (Editor Eclipse Magazine and Java Magazine, Frankfurt (Germany)) has been nominated for the Eclipse Top Ambassador Award . EclipseZone asked him a little about himself:

How did you first get involved with Eclipse, and how long ago?

By now this is more than three years ago. When I "jumped on board" of the pubishing house I am working for now, Software & Support Media, one of my first tasks was to write a little online article on EclipseCon in Anaheim. The article was primarily about the creation of the Eclipse Foundation and the initiation of Eclipse Plugin Central. I was breaking new ground on all this at that time, since I had worked in advertising and research (literature) before.

What Eclipse-related projects are you working on and what are you doing?

I am not involved in any eclipse.org projects. However, as an editor for the German-speaking Eclipse Magazine (eclipse-magazin.de), which was founded in 2004 as the first magazine devoted entirely to Eclipse, I deal with Eclipse on a day-to-day basis. I mean I do not use Eclipse as such, but I deal with everything that has to do with Eclipse: the market, news, articles, I am closely in contact with authors of the Eclipse Magazine, I prepare articles and – of course – I take care of the overall concept of the magazine, which has to satisfy the reader’s expectations.

In addition to this, I am a member of the program committee of our conference Eclipse Forum Europe (eclipseforumeurope.com) and therefore partly responsible for the content and organziation of the conference.

Last year a couple of other guys and myself helped Ralph Müller from the Eclipse Foundation to compile the program for Eclipse Summit Europe . Also, I moderate the Eclipse Forum at openBC/Xing with him.

What OSes do you do development on?

I am not a developer myself so I actually do not really use Eclipse. The whole dynamic of Eclipse fascinates me though as well as the obvious quality of the IDE and of most projects.

Are you attending EclipseCon or giving a talk this year?

I am not sure yet if I will report on EclipseCon myself. That really depends on my availability during this time since I have to take care of some more things also, such as the Java Magazine, our JAX conference and more. I would of course appreciate being on site, but California is not around the corner.

What Eclipse-related bookmarks/feeds (other than EclipseZone, of course) do you frequently use?

I use all relevant feeds and I do not really have the choice since I have to keep up-to-date to be able to provide the community with news under eclipse-magazin.de.

What do you get up to in life when you're not thinking about or working with Eclipse?

My first priority is my family, that is my girlfriend Andrea and my three-year-old daughter Marlene with whom I live in a house in Zwingenberg in southern Hesse (Zwingenberg is something like the center of Eclipse in Europe, because its European representative Ralph Müller lives here and Mike Milinkovic or Wayne Beaton come by now and then to visit our regular’s table ;-)). Secondly there is my great passion for music. I am an enthusiastic collector of CDs ad LPs and my collection should have crossed the mark of 2,000 by now. The music ranges from all kinds of Rock to Independent and Jazz. Besides that I like to read and I am a passionate jogger.

Lastly, how do you see yourself in the Eclipse community, and why should people vote for you?

In the first instance, I am a sort of a multiplicator of information being an editor - maybe the word 'ambassador' suits my role as well. The aspect of networking is pretty relevant also, you get to know and have contact to lots of people. As an editor I also have the possibility to pitch companies to topics such as Eclipse and to propagate it, although it has more and more become a fast-seller. On top of this I think it is important and even more interesting to follow and to contribute to Eclipse’s development as a platform beyond Java.

To me it is also important to clarify that Eclipse and its ecosystem are more than just a marketing platform for companies that have jumped on the train and called themselves a member of Eclipse and finally are not willing to make a contribution to it. I would like to point out the rather unknown but highly interesting dashboards of the Project Dash , where you can pretty well see what is going on in the respective projects and which companies are involved.

EclipseZone would like to thank those that took part, and please remember to vote for the individual awards prior to the closing date of February 16th 2007.

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