This was extracted (@ 2024-03-20 21:10) from a list of minutes
which have been approved by the Board.
Please Note
The Board typically approves the minutes of the previous meeting at the
beginning of every Board meeting; therefore, the list below does not
normally contain details from the minutes of the most recent Board meeting.
WARNING: these pages may omit some original contents of the minutes.
Meeting times vary, the exact schedule is available to ASF Members and Officers, search for "calendar" in the Foundation's private index page (svn:foundation/private-index.html).
Vision
Our mission is to support the creation and distribution of Open Source
software at no charge under the Apache License, as per our Bylaws. To
this end we provide project spaces and resources for like-minded
communities to flourish, produce and release software under our legal
umbrella.
We are strongly attached to our projects' independence from any external
influences, be they corporate, organizational or otherwise. This allows
us to provide a neutral space for our communities.
As a Foundation we do not have a technical strategy, we delegate that to
our projects.
The Foundation is managed and directed by its Members, who are
individual volunteers, as opposed to companies or organizations, who
cannot be Members of the Foundation nor take a direct role in our
projects.
We help our communities understand and practice the Apache Way, a
collection of best practices for collaboration and project
sustainability that we document and clarify on an ongoing basis.
Our community members act as individuals and their rights and
responsibilities are based their merit, defined by what they
individually do in project communities, not on any external affiliation,
title, or degree they may have, nor on their contributions to other
projects or organizations.
We provide very reliable and highly automated core infrastructure
services to our projects and encourage them to use some external
non-core services in addition to that, based on their specific needs,
when that helps keep our own services simple and focused. For
durability, all our critical data and services are managed or mirrored
on systems that we fully control.
Our marketing and outreach is focused on activities that directly
support our mission, along with fundraising-related activities that help
find and retain the sponsors on which our operations depend.
We provide legal and brand management services to our projects based on
demonstrated needs, and define branding guidelines to help our projects
benefit from the strong Apache brand in an appropriate way.
We welcome new projects via our Incubator, where experienced Mentors
help them learn to operate as an Apache community and project.
Incubation is where communities are defined, so we put a strong emphasis
on guidance during the incubation phase to preserve our core values as
the Foundation grows.
Objectives
1. Ensure that the services that the ASF offers to project communities
are clearly defined and can be reliably delivered in a manner that
meets their expectations.
2. Improve our success for identifying, attracting, welcoming and
developing “like-minded communities” that will be successful at the
ASF.
3. Effectively scale our operations and governance processes in such a
way that the ASF continues to be a light-process, light-governance,
largely decentralized organization whose central operations serve
projects in a manner consistent with the way PMCs are expected to
serve their communities.
4. Ensure the financial soundness of the ASF over the term of the plan
and establish the foundation for long-term stability.
ASF Services - Infrastructure
The ASF currently provides infrastructure services to project
communities including mailing list, website and scm hosting, Issue
trackers and a range of build and deployment tools. Many projects now
use GitHub and other “external” providers for some of these services.
Infrastructure services overall account for more than 80% of the total
ASF expense budget. Increasingly, project communities have
infrastructure requirements that strain the capabilities of the ASF. We
have, broadly speaking, three choices on how to plan the evolution of
ASF infrastructure services:
1. Limit incoming project communities to those with needs that we can
already service and plan using a simple growth forecast.
2. Provision for the demands of projects with unusually large needs and
increase budget forecasts accordingly.
3. Encourage more use of externally provided services by project
communities.
We believe that 3. Is the best option, using a simple growth forecast to
project expenses and effective governance and mentoring to ensure that
using externally provided services does not in any way present barriers
to entry to projects or reduce transparency, inclusiveness and diversity
in project decision-making. This requires that we make clear to project
communities the limitations of the services that they can expect from
the ASF and support and enable them to secure necessary infrastructure
support externally. We must also ensure that policies and practices for
using external services do not result in any loss of independence,
transparency or inclusiveness among ASF project communities. The ASF
Directed Sponsorship program should be considered as a first option for
projects in need of support beyond what ASF infrastructure provides.
From an infrastructure budget planning perspective, this means that we
can use conservative forecasts, based on simple project-count based
models. Moreover, we do not believe that limiting infrastructure
expense growth should be a consideration in our strategy for managing
inflow into the Incubator. In other words, we do not intend to use
Incubator inflow limitation as a strategy for infrastructure cost
management.
ASF Services - Marketing, Publicity and Brand Management
Services in this category are provided both at the foundation level and
to individual projects. To date, our focus has been primarily on
effectively responding to queries and press events, managing our ASF
public presence and supporting projects communities in promoting
achievements and events. We can expect the demand for these currently
provided services to scale over the next 5 years commensurately with the
growth in projects.
A challenge that has been identified as critical to our plan is the need
to ensure that the communities that we attract and welcome into the ASF
really are “like-minded” in the sense that they contribute positively to
the evolution of the Apache Way. There are two things that we should
plan to do to improve the effectiveness of community marketing and
development at the ASF:
1. Move from a mostly passive, “see what comes our way” approach to
project community marketing to a more proactive and strategic
approach Move to a selective intake model
2. Improve training and communication on the Apache Way
These items will require marketing and publicity resources beyond what
we have in place today. In addition to continuing strong contribution
by volunteers, we should plan, therefore, to increase our investment in
ASF marketing and communications. Both of these items will also require
more focus from the Board and the ASF membership on developing our
outreach, selection and mentoring practices.
ASF Services - Conferences and Community Development
The ASF has traditionally held annual conferences, often on multiple
continents. We believe that these conferences contribute to our mission
in (at least) two ways. First, they provide a venue for ASF volunteers
to meet face-to-face. In some cases, this is the only venue in which
ASF volunteers get to meet one another in person. Secondly, conferences
can be used to generate interest in Apache project communities. ASF
conferences have had two operational challenges. First, they have
generally lost money in recent years. This has contributed to the
second challenge, which is that it is difficult if not impossible to run
high-quality conferences using all volunteer resources. To put it
simply, if the conferences made money, commercial providers would run
them for us. They do not make money.
We plan to run an experiment in 2018, using ASF funds to remove the
profitability constraint from ASF conferences. If this experiment is
successful, we may agree on an annual subsidy that VP, Conferences can
plan to use to make up the difference between what ASF conferences cost
to produce and the revenue that they generate.
ASF-level conferences are not the only events that our communities use
to collaborate in-person. We believe that individual or group
project-level events also contribute to our mission and we should
support them. In some cases, project communities ask for and receive
support from commercial entities for project events. We want to
encourage this type of support and we want the process for enabling it
to be as simple and easy as possible for both the communities and the
sponsoring organizations. Given that not all project communities will
be able to find the funds for events that will benefit them, we will
agree on an annual budget to cover project-specific community
development initiatives. That budget will be administered by the
Community Development PMC.
ASF Services - Legal
ASF is fortunate to have pro bono legal counsel available that meets
most of our legal advice and representation needs. The exception to
this is trademarks-related costs, which we are no longer able to acquire
as a pro bono service. We need, therefore, to develop a strategy and
budget for this expense.
ASF Processes - PMC lifecycle
We believe that the processes for onboarding new communities via the
Incubator (or direct to TLP) channels are fit for purpose and can
continue to scale. We also believe that the core oversight processes
for operating PMCs can continue to serve the needs of the foundation
over at least the next five years. Finally, we believe that the Attic
provides an effective means for retiring no longer viable projects. In
each of these cases, however, we hope to make significant progress over
the next 5 years improving our implementation and execution (without
necessarily introducing new PMC lifecycle phases or governance
processes). Specifically, we hope to:
1. Improve the community mentoring and understanding of Apache Way
processes during the incubation process
2. Improve the success rate for podlings entering the Incubator. Here
“success” means timely graduation and evolution to become healthy
TLPs. We would like to reduce the time podlings spend in the
Incubator, as much as possible. Either by graduating them quickly, if
they are found to be a good fit for the ASF, or by failing them
quickly if they're not a good fit.
3. Reduce the need for Board intervention in PMC affairs
As the ASF scales, the ability for the Board and members with long
experience to engage with Incubator podlings and TLPs is becoming an
effective growth rate limiter. We need to either reduce the growth
rate, increase the speed with which new members can become effective
mentors, or improve processes and built-in controls so that the
objectives above are achieved without depending on increased ad hoc
interventions. Our aim is actually to decrease the need for
intervention in communities by ASF members not already substantively
engaged in those communities.
Our planning assumption is that the rate of new projects entering the
Incubator will continue to grow according to the trend of the last three
years. We do not expect the percentage of initial inquiries that lead
to entering podlings to decrease, but we hope to improve the
effectiveness of the outreach, intake and incubation processes. In
other words, our aim is not to be “more rigorous” in allowing podlings
into the Incubator, but rather to get a more-likely-to-succeed mix
entering the funnel and improving mentoring and access to resources for
podlings. We do not intend to artificially throttle the flow into or
out of the Incubator, but we will focus on improving mentoring and the
availability of active and engaged mentors is likely to become a
constraint to the growth rate. Regarding outreach, we believe that
investments in planned and structured marketing to help attract good
prospective communities is important and our intention is to make these
investments.
ASF Processes - Governance
As the ASF scales, our flat, direct-oversight governance model will
continue to face challenges. Over the next 5 years, we expect to need
to make some changes in how governance works, but our goal is to, as
much as possible, hold onto the basic model that exists today wherein
the only recognized organizational entities are PMCs, the Board, the
Membership, committers, the Officers and committees responsible for ASF
operations. In other words, we do not intend to insert organizational
layers such as groups of PMCs or different levels among Directors or
within the membership. We will continue to encourage TLPs that verge on
becoming “umbrellas” to split into multiple projects so that PMC members
can be expected to provide oversight to full project communities.
We expect the PMC reporting schedule to scale manageably over the next 5
years. The Board currently reviews approximately 80 reports per month
today and we expect that number to grow to approximately 100 by 2023.
Reviewing such a large number of reports may become difficult for
Directors and the amount of time taken in monthly meetings to give
attention to reports needing attention will become challenging. We
believe that we are already facing challenges giving sufficient time and
Director attention to strategic topics. We have been able to scale to
our current TLP count through innovations such as the rotation schedule
itself, the Whimsy agenda management tool, the shepherd model and
improvements in the reports themselves. We are going to need to develop
additional innovations to enable us to continue to scale while providing
strong oversight and foundation-level governance. Our plan is to focus
on process and tooling innovations to enable us to continue to scale,
rather than inserting layers or detaching the board from project-level
oversight. In addition, we hope to improve cohesion and consistency
among the Board and the membership in applying Apache Way principles to
practical problems. Better definition of the principles, illustrated in
examples, will need to be developed to support this objective.
The relationship between the Board and the Officers and Committees
responsible for ASF operations needs to continue to evolve from direct,
sometimes ambiguous, management to strategic direction, oversight and
approval of actions requiring approval by the Board. We have made
progress recently getting roles and responsibilities better defined, but
we still have work to do in this area. Over the next 5 years, we expect
to develop a Board - Officers operating model that is as well-defined as
the Board - PMC model in place today (which will itself evolve and
improve). Similarly to the model with PMC Chairs, our objective is for
the Board to provide high-level oversight but to delegate operational
responsibilities to Officers.
The relationship between the Board, PMCs and ASF officers responsible
for security, brand management and trademarks needs to be better defined
and managed. In some cases, VPs responsible for these areas are
empowered to make demands of PMCs on behalf of the foundation. We have
not been sufficiently clear what the scope and bounds of this authority
are. We will address this ambiguity in 2018 and improve the model over
the next 5 years. As a guiding principle, our objective is to
communicate (and take input on) PMC requirements effectively so that the
need for Officer intervention is rare. Moreover, we aim to limit the
requirements themselves to the minimum necessary to ensure that the core
interests of the PMCs and the Foundation are protected.
To promote healthy inflow of new ideas and connection with project
communities, we will also explore means to ensure that more members have
the opportunity to serve in Director and Officer roles.
ASF Budget and Finance - Finance operations
The ASF has effectively outsourced core financial operations to an
organization management firm. This has been a key element in our
ability to manage our growth and improve the quality and comprehension
of our financial controls and reporting without taking on paid staff to
manage these functions. The Treasurer role, which had become
intractable for a volunteer to execute responsibly, has now become an
oversight role that is being effectively managed by volunteers
(Treasurer and Assistant Treasurer). We do not anticipate the need to
change this arrangement over the next five years.
ASF Budget and Finance - Financial Analysis and Planning
The rigor and regularity of ASF financial planning and analysis
activities is improving and over the next 5 years, we expect to evolve a
set of leading and durable practices. Currently, we have annual
processes to determine the coming year’s budget and to update the 5-year
outlook. We will continue both of these practices. Focus for the next
year (2018) will be ensuring strategic alignment between both the
financial plan and the goals and priorities of the Foundation. The 2018
budget will conform overall to the 5-year plan in this document, but
lines may be modified to reflect consensus on priorities discussions
among the membership. Revision of the 5-year plan will begin
immediately following finalization of the 2018 budget and this cadence
will continue over the next five years with improvements each year in
proactive planning and discussion so that the budget and 5-year plan
update processes are less about tactical tradeoffs and debates over
individual lines and more about officer analysis and discretion applied
to make practical decisions consistent with agreed upon strategies.
Starting in 2018, we will also introduce a quarterly financial review,
which will extend and deepen the analysis included in monthly
Treasurer’s reports. This review will be open to the membership and
executed asynchronously.
ASF Budget and Finance - Fundraising
The financial plan presented below shows an increase from the 2017
expense budget of $1.2MM to $2.3MM in 2023. This presents a big
challenge for ASF fundraising. At the same time, the role, VP
Fundraising, is becoming difficult for a single volunteer to handle.
Outsourcing fundraising operations to our organization management
partner has helped but it is hard to see the current model as
sustainable and capable of meeting the increased demands that we
anticipate over the next 5 years. Therefore, we are planning to invest
significantly over the next 5 years in fundraising assistance. This
assistance will take one or more of the following three forms:
1. Additional services provided by our organization management partner
2. Addition of paid fundraising staff
3. Engagement of a partner specializing in fundraising
In 2018, our focus will be on exploring the first option and expanding
the leverage of Board members and other members in fundraising
activities. If by year-end 2018, we are meeting or exceeding
fundraising goals and VP, Fundraising has become a volunteer-manageable
position, we will limit any additional investment to 1. along with
marketing / communications in support of fundraising activities. If by
mid-year 2018, we have not achieved the current budget plan and / or the
challenges have become intractable, we will begin exploration of options
2. and 3.
In 2017, we made good progress getting better definition on practical
and legal aspects of the sponsorship program. We arrived at a set of
sponsor benefits that accurately reflect what the ASF can currently
provide and what different sponsorship levels entitle sponsors to. We
believe that in order to significantly expand the potential sponsor base
and to ensure consistent renewals, we need to define some more
compelling benefits for ASF sponsors. Several ideas have been discussed
in this area, but we have yet to achieve consensus on specific
improvements. Defining and implementing these improvements will be a
key focus for us over the next several years. At a minimum, we will
formally review and consider modifications to the program as part of the
strategic plan refresh each year.
In 2017, we began a partnership with a company providing digital and
payment processing services to promote and manage individual donations.
This partnership has been successful. Most importantly, we have the
beginnings of an individual donor relationship management system. We
expect that as our donor base grows and we better manage communications
with individual donors, we will be able to grow individual contributions
at a rate equal to or exceeding the growth in revenue from the
sponsorship program. This will require continued focus on ASF marketing
and communications and effective outreach and management of individual
donor relationships. In 2017, we executed one fundraising drive aimed
at soliciting individual contributions. In 2018, we will do this at
least twice and in subsequent years, we will increase the frequency
contacts with existing and prospective individual donors, leveraging our
marketing, fundraising and finance operations partners to plan and
execute campaigns.
ASF Budget and Finance - External Partnerships
We considered a proposal in 2017 to form a revenue-generating joint
venture, managed via a separate legal entity. The proposal was to
partner with a commercial company to produce ASF-certified training
materials, with a portion of the revenue returned to the ASF. The Board
rejected this proposal. It is important to note, however, that we did
not conclude that no commercial partnership returning revenue to the ASF
could ever be approved. The proposal was rejected because it would in
our estimation make misleading use of ASF brands and also “pick winners”
inconsistently with our principles. We hope to consider alternative
proposals to fairly, honestly and consistently with our principles raise
revenue for the ASF. As noted above, conferences have not been a source
of positive income for us in the recent past, but they are an example of
a commercial activity that can be done consistently with our principles.
We hope to define at least one new revenue stream resulting from
commercially valuable activities that contribute to our mission over the
next five years. The current 5-year financial plan does not include any
revenue projections from these activities.
ASF Budget and Finance - 5-year Financial Plan
Details (with updated numbers) of the 5-year financial plan are
presented below. In aggregate, we expect expenses to grow from $1.42MM
in FY 2018 to $2.2MM in FY 2023. Income is projected to grow from
$1.23MM to $1.91MM over the same period. This will result in our
FY18 cash reserve of $1.77MM being reduced to $1.16MM by the end of
FY 2023. The plan, as currently formulated also does not include the
increments in funding suggested above for Community Development, nor
does it separate a legal defense reserve.
Budget lines currently forecast to have the largest increases are
fundraising (515% increase) brand (152%), and publicity (113%). The
largest component of our expense base, infrastructure, is forecast to
increase by only 34%. The increase in fundraising is justified by the
commensurate forecasted increase in income from donations, which is
currently forecast at 57%. In absolute terms, the fundraising increment
is $237k per year, which is expected to return (a portion of) the
forecasted increase of $690k per year in total donations. We should be
able to improve that ratio.