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Since activity for the upcoming EC election occurs throughout the month of October, the JavaOne conference offers a convenient opportunity to encourage the nomination of new candidates and inform the community about those already nominated. Toward that end, candidates were invited to explain their interest in running. At Monday evening?s ?Meet the Executive Committee Candidates? BOF session, several candidates introduced themselves.

Three candidates are running for ratified seats on the SE/EE EC. Ericsson AB is newly represented by Magnus Lönnroth. He said, “Our priority in the EC is to keep Java as a long-term project.” Ericsson is a 135 year old company, which now caters to half of the world, and wants to increase service to fifty billion devices by 2012. “We have a strongly vested interest in Java, and consider it the number-one developer language in the world,” he said. Magnus wants to see the EC operate more as a steering group, a leadership group, with Spec Leads making recommendations to the EC. Intel is represented by Anil Kumar, who is new to the JCP community, but not to standards bodies. “Intel is inside devices and wants to provide a seamless continuum of experience for users,” he said. “We fought for the openness of the JCP.” Anil started in hardware and moved to desktop/server performance. He was lead for three benchmarks, done openly. He has seen both pitfalls and good synchronization with cross-company teams. SAP is newly represented by Steve Winkler. SAP provides enterprise software to large companies, such as Coca-Cola. “We built own language in the ‘70s, then in 90s realized that was limited, so we supported the clients’ choice of Java. Now we’re dedicated to Java to support our customers.” SAP engineers have contributed to over 50 JSRs.

Three candidates are running for ratified seats on the ME EC. Nokia, represented by Erkki Rysa, and SK Telecom, represented by Hoojong Kim, could not attend. IBM continues to be represented by Mark Rogalski, but Jason Gartner spoke in Mark’s absence. IBM makes hardware and software, believes in standards, and depends on Java. CDC and modularity are key. IBM’s ME business is in feature phones. “Small Java needs to be part of our future,” Jason said.

Four candidates self-nominated for the SE/EE open elected seats. Azul Systems is represented by Gil Tene, the company’s CTO and cofounder 10 years ago. He is an outsider, with no ties to Oracle. An eight-year veteran member of the JCP community and Java licensee, Azul built and shipped J2EE JDK. Azul also introduced Pauseless Garbage Collection, Memory Elasticity, and Java Virtualization. Azul wants to shift from following the technology as it downstream to standardizing and driving the technology upstream. CloudBees, is represented by Steven Harris, who spent a lot of time as development lead on Java server technology and standards activities at Oracle. “I bring perspective that makes me a better advocate now that I’m on the outside, but understanding the inside,” he said. Software AG is represented by Greg Luck, Spec Lead JSRs 107. He founded Ehcache in 2003 and today acts as CTO Ehcache, Terracotta within Software AG. Software AG is Europe's second largest software company. “Our web methods implement over 100 JSRs, and we want to see the JCP and JSRs become more relevant,” he said. Central Ohio Java Users Group, is represented by Dan Sline, who was not present at the BOF session.

Two candidates were nominated for the ME open elected seats. Alex Terrazas is a psychologist and neuroscientist. He was involved with Java as a phone programmer, wrote a book on Java media programming, and is eager to work on “the evil JSPA.” He originally became involved in the Executive Committee out of intellectual curiosity about the process. He got 100% of the vote last time, running unopposed. Werner Keil is currently serving on the SE/EE EC and was Spec Lead for JSR 275. He develops enterprise systems using Java, JEE, Oracle or IBM, does Web design and development using Adobe, Ajax/JavaScript or dynamic languages like Ruby, PHP. He has the distinction of being the only individual member to host an EC meeting, the legendary “Boston Bar Meeting.”

By Wednesday morning, the candidate roster had expanded to include Twitter, represented by Attila Szegedi for the ME elected seat. Joining him on the Community Hub outdoor stage of the Mason Street Café, were Central Ohio Java Users Group, represented by Dan Sline for the elected SE/EE seat , and SAP, represented by Steve Winkler for the SE/EE ratified seat.

Attila is the JVM performance expert at Twitter, there for 15 months, making him a veteran. He referred to the previous day?s keynote address, which announced Twitter?s decision to join the JCP program and Open JDK and to run for an EC seat. Twitter is currently transitioning to be JVM based. ?We think of JVM as a platform, and we?re concerned with scalability and interoperability. We need to ensure that we have features we need since we are betting the house on JVM,? Atilla said. ?We discovered solutions that we think would be helpful to standardize. I look forward to participating and cooperating and learning from existing and old members. I?m hoping this is a great opportunity to ramp up our expertise in this.?

Dan intends to use his seat as a community-based position, not just to promote Ohio JUG?s perspective. He wants to help the language develop in the way it should go and encourage more people to join JCP program.

Steve repeated what he had said about SAP at the BOF session, and added, ?We?re on the EC already and hope to continue going forward.?

The PMO is always looking for ways to increase participation in the voting process. Votenet, the organization that runs the voting mechanism, says the JCP program already has one of the best voter turnout records, with an average of 25 percent of the community voting. However, the PMO wants to raise that bar higher by helping members become better informed about the candidates. Read more about these candidates and newer candidates here: http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/elections/2011-nominees.html

The PMO has planned additional conference calls to help the community with that. The first call is scheduled for Thursday, October 20 at 8:30 am PT. More details about those events will be posted on the JCP blog, Facebook page, and Twitter feed. Nominations for the elected seats close on October 13, and the ballot is open for voting 18-31 October.