Blog post announcing Bill

Author: propensive

blog/_posts/2016-04-29-sc-community-representative.md

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+---
+layout: blog
+post-type: blog
+by: Jon Pretty
+title: Scala Center Appoints a Community Representative to the Advisory Board
+---
+
+At Scala Days, the Scala Center will hold its first Advisory Board meeting. The
+Advisory Board comprises primarily of delegates from our sponsors. But, we
+exist as an organization to support the *entire* Scala community, so for that
+reason, our founding documents allow for a "community representative" to sit on
+the board; someone who can speak for the whole community.
+
+Who should fulfil the role of community representative is an important choice
+for The Scala Center to make. The Scala community needs someone independent,
+technically capable, and universally respected. So Heather, Martin and I
+considered a few names we thought could take on the task.  It's an indication
+of the wealth of great people who actively involve themselves in our community
+that the three of us came up with so many potential candidates, but close to
+the top of everyone's shortlist was one person: Bill Venners. And we're
+delighted to announce today that Bill has accepted our invitation, and will be
+the community representative on the Advisory Board.
+
+Bill is best known as the author of the ScalaTest testing framework and
+co-author of the Programming in Scala book, soon to have its third edition
+published. But he also develops the Scalactic library, is a frequent speaker at
+Scala conferences, and offers training in Scala through Artima and Escalate
+Software.
+
+Bill has a long history of involvement in Scala, and I remember back to the
+early days of Scala's development when Bill would take the time to engage in
+long discussions with the other members on the Scala mailing lists as we tried,
+together, to figure out Scala, its various features, and how we could best
+employ them to our advantage. Looking back, I can't think of anyone who devoted
+more time to listening to and trying to understand the various different ideas
+(and Scala is a language that accommodates alternative perspectives more than
+almost any other!) being discussed within the Scala community.
+
+We are extremely happy that Bill is going to join the advisory board and
+continue providing his valued guidance on some of the important issues that
+Scala will face in the future.
+