Java Community Process (JCP) Elects New Members, Including First Associate Members

The election results are in! No, not that election. I'm talking about the 2016 Fall Executive Committee (EC) election of the Java Community Process (JCP).

Each year roughly half the seats of the 24-member EC are up for ratification/election. The EC oversees the work of the Expert Groups that define Java specifications, essentially guiding the evolution of Java. The committee picks the JSRs that will be developed, approves draft specs and final specs, approves Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) licenses, approves maintenance revisions and occasionally defers features to new JSRs, approves transfer of maintenance duties between members, and provides guidance to the Program Management Office (PMO).

In other words, who sits on this committee matters.

"This was the strongest slate of candidates since I've been in the job," JCP chair Patrick Curran told me when I caught up with him at the Devoxx Belgium Conference last week. (Thank you, Skype.) "It was really competitive this year."

This is also the first election held under the new JCP 2.10 rules, which, among other things, created two new seats on the committee for unaffiliated individuals. The new Associate Member seats are part of an ongoing effort by the JCP to get more Java jocks involved in the process. The JCP recently introduced Associate Membership, again, aimed at individuals who want to contribute to a Java Specification Request (JSR). There's no employer approval required and Associate Members get to vote for the two new Associate EC seats.

There are now three JCP membership levels: the new Associate level; the Partner level, which is for Java User Groups and other non-profit organizations; and Full Membership, which is for "legal entities who wish to join Expert Groups, lead JSRs, and/or vote or serve on the Executive Committee."

Curran says the JCP's recent recruitment effort has drawn several hundred new members in the past few months, largely in the Associate category. Although Associate membership doesn't include full JCP benefits, it does provide developers with an opportunity to build their reputations, Curran said.

"Previously the only way to participate in the JCP and get public recognition was to be on an Expert Group," he said. "Now, Associate members who participate, say, through the Adopt-a-JSR program or their local Java User Group, can get formal recognition for their work."

The JCP, of course, is the standards-development organization for Java. The organization has been making some serious changes over the past few years through a project called JCP.Next, and the new seats were part of that effort. JCP 2.10 reclassified two the existing Elected seats to provide for this new type of EC membership. The current EC was formed through JSR 355, which merged the SE/EE EC and the ME EC. The JCP continues to wrestle with the challenge of revising the Java Specification Participation Agreement (JSPA), which Curran has called "big and scary."

Today, the EC comprises 16 Ratified Seats, 6 Elected Seats, and the 2 new Associate Seats, as well as a permanent seat held by Oracle America, the official steward of Java. The Ratified Seats are filled by Full Members nominated by the PMO; the Elected and Associate Seats are filled by members nominated by Full and Partner Members.

So who got elected this time around?

The first two Associate Members of the EC are Java champion and enterprise software architect Ivar Grimstad, who is a member of the Expert Group for JSR 368 and JSR 372, and a member of the NetBeans dream team; and software architect and designer Werner Keil, who serves as senior test automation engineer at ING-DiBa, and who has contributed his insights to this blog more than once.

I reached out to EC member and London Java User Group leader Martijn Verburg, whose organization was also re-elected this year. I asked him about the EC's goals for the coming year, and he got back to me via e-mail.

"Our next immediate goal is to work with Oracle and OpenJDK to better align the open source model of development that is Java today (where everything is out in the open) with the requirements of the standards body (needing point in time specifications for purposes of IP flow as much as anything else)," he said. "There have already been some useful early stage discussions, but we'll have to wait for a few weeks before we can publicly comment. This will be an important step to helping Java get released more often."

The complete election results are available online here.

Last year I talked with Patrick Curran about the JCP, and one of his comments bears repeating here:

"The strength of the JCP is the fundamentally simple model of a group of interested experts defining specifications through a formal process that includes public review and oversight by an Executive Committee (EC). The process has always been flexible enough not to define exactly how the Expert Groups should do their work. This has permitted a natural evolution (with a little help and direction from the EC in the form of revisions to the Process) from the early days of relatively private deliberations by representatives of large corporations to the current, much more open and collaborative model. It's a Community Process, and that's its strength."

Posted by John K. Waters on November 15, 2016