.NET Foundation Welcomes Executive Director Martin Woodward
Time flies. Exactly one year ago today, Microsoft Corp. announced the creation of an independent .NET Foundation to foster open development and collaboration around the Microsoft .NET development framework. At the end of February we announced our Advisory Council, a group of nine leaders who are bringing their passion and experience to help steward the future of .NET as an open source community. Today, I am pleased to announce that the .NET Foundation Board appointed a full time Executive Director to the .NET Foundation: Martin Woodward.
In his new role, Martin will remain an employee of Microsoft, where he has been involved in the open source world for some time. He came from the Microsoft MVP community where he worked on Eclipse, Java, Unix and Mac tooling for Team Foundation Server, bringing this functionality to Microsoft’s Developer Division. He helped drive the introduction of Git to Microsoft and ensured it was done in collaboration with the open source community. Behind the scenes, Martin lent his expertise to several Microsoft open source initiatives that you’re familiar with, including some of the projects brought into the .NET Foundation. Additionally, he has been part of a cross-company effort to improve the internal processes and tooling at Microsoft, enabling the company to do more in the open source space.
Over the past year, we have been honored by the level of community involvement in the .NET Foundation. Community collaboration levels are frankly staggering. While Microsoft has utilized its full engineering teams, including the Core CLR, Core Framework, ASP.NET, F# and Roslyn Compiler teams, working in the open on GitHub, more than 60 percent of pull requests approved for those repositories are coming from outside of Microsoft. The core project teams remain heavily focused on being responsive to those pull requests, often responding in a matter of minutes.
More important, however, is the passion of the volunteers in the .NET community that is driving the success of those projects. Until now, the .NET Foundation Board of Directors has relied on a team effort to manage the organization. But with the scale of activity that we have seen in the last year, it is time to bring someone to the team who can be fully dedicated to ensuring the rapid growth and continued innovation of the .NET open source ecosystem. I’m thrilled to have Martin onboard to do just that.
Please join me in welcoming our new executive director, Martin Woodward, to the .NET Foundation team and community!
Jay Schmelzer
President, .NET Foundation
Director Program Management, Microsoft