Since 2003, David Orme has been a recognized thought leader in the Eclipse community. Recently, he is becoming recognized for his efforts in the Chicago Scala community as well.
Eclipse
Eclipse board member: 2003-2004
Founded the Visual Editor Project, the first non-IBM project at Eclipse; led the project from 2003-2006.
Founded the the CompositeTable table control in Eclipse's Nebula project. This is a high performance custom SWT widget enabling developers to easily create interactive validated tabular data entry forms in Eclipse RCP applications.
Committer on Eclipse Platform and Nebula projects.
Scala
A regular speaker at the Chicago Scala meetup, including recent talks on Monads and DSLs in Scala.