Here's a heads up for the Eclipse community: The Eclipse Foundation is looking for an Eclipse Evangelist.

Those are some interesting job duties. It's unfortunate that software development is not part of the job description. I think it might be very valuable for an evangelist to be working on an open source[1] Eclipse plugin or Rich Client Platform project 5-10 hours a week while they write about the platform. James Robertson does a great job evangelizing the Smalltalk platform and Cincom, mostly because he's using the Smalltalk language/platform to write real applications. That makes him credible.

Not only would a project give the evangelist invaluable experience with the Eclipse platform and something to blog about but it would also help them sympathize with developers, the exact people they are evangelizing to. It would put the evangelist on equal footing with other developers -- the evangelist wouldn't just be some suit telling me to use a platform because of x,y and z.

Blogging is all about credibility -- fewer people are going to read a fluff blog from an evangelist that sounds like a marketing "drone" and is not actually using the platform in production anywhere. People will see right through that and dismiss it.

I don't mean to pick on Robert Scoble but the fact that he's not in the developer trenches is sometimes a disadvantage for him. He often has useful insights but other times his lack of knowledge in certain technical areas is obvious. I like Scoble's blog but he's a different kind of evangelist than what the Eclipse Foundation is looking for, I think.

Eclipse is a developer platform and not a bunch of end-user products like Microsoft's. The Eclipse Foundation may be best served by an evangelist that is a developer working on a real Eclipse-based product ... and this evangelist could be given time to work on this product as part of his job, since it enhances his overall credibility.

Update 3:33PM James Robertson agrees with me and reinforces the point.

[1] Why an open source project? A few reasons: It's a lot easier to blog about a project if you don't have to worry about licensing issues or revealing too much detail of a closed-source project. Other people can check out the code to see how good of a programmer you are (credibility). The developer/evangelist can reuse the project code in tutorials, presentations, etc. Other people can reuse the project's code in their own projects if it is released under an EPL or BSD-style open source license, like the Eclipse platform itself.