This was extracted (@ 2024-12-18 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).
It's been a fairly quiet month at the board level - which means it's been a good time to work on some improvements for project services. Astute readers of the board minutes may have noticed some PMCs are piloting a new, simplified quarterly board report format. This pilot program is designed to simplify writing reports for PMC Chairs, while still providing an overview of community and brand health around projects. We've also implemented a simpler system for PMCs to add new PMC members, or to remove someone who has resigned. The Project Management Committee concept is part of the ASF's bylaws and is officially how projects are governed, so keeping the roster is important - and much easier now. I attended Open Forum Academy Symposium this month, and was on a panel discussing Open Source Research In The World, and how academic researchers and FOSS practitioners can learn from each other. Since the ASF is a common subject of research studies, it was heartening to see how much researchers appreciated our openness. This is also an opportunity to help researchers focus their work on topics that could provide answers to improve community health. It was also gratifying to hear someone shout out "Plus one! I agree with everything you said!" during the event.
We continued to celebrate #ASF25Years as our flagship Community Over Code conference returned this month to Denver, where our conference volunteers organized four packed days of keynotes and sessions. It's always a great reminder of the many personal connections and shared values contributors across the ASF have when we get to meet in person. Those connections were a key asset in the security response tabletop exercise that an invited speaker led a number of ASF committers through, which also highlighted some key technical knowledge and resiliency our policies and operations team provide. Our M&P team also posted the ASF's FY24 Annual Report [1] with some of the Foundation's key work in the past year, including providing feedback to legislation, improving our policies around the use of AI, and improving services to projects. And of course, five new projects graduated in the past year to become official Apache projects! Also, four projects determined they didn't have sufficient PMC members to continue maintenance, were deprecated, and put in the Apache Attic as read only. A key ethos at the ASF is that all software releases and project assets (websites, mailing lists, documentation, etc.) will be preserved at consistent URLs for perpetuity, even when they reach end of life. The EU's official adoption of the Cyber Resilience Act this months means the clock is ticking, since the CRA's processes will be required by law in the EU in 36 months. Our VP, Public Affairs and others are working with the Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group [1] to ensure the specific guidelines for "open source stewards" are suitable for the ASF to implement. And our VP, Tooling has begun the planning work to ensure the ASF has the capacity and tooling to provide the services to all our PMCs to meet the CRA. The scope and timeline for this work will be a major project for many of the ASF's operations teams for the next few years. [1] https://news.apache.org/foundation/entry/apache-software-foundation-initiatives-to-fuel-the-next-25-years-of-open-source-innovation [2] https://orcwg.org/
We thank Christofer Dutz for his over two years of service on the board; in that short time he's done amazing work at researching project processes and needs, and has worked tirelessly in mentoring and proposing tooling suggestions to help our projects. Sadly, Christofer resigned as Director this month. I've placed a resolution on today's board agenda to appoint an ASF Member to fill the vacant Director seat at our meeting. The ASF has seen a burst of discussions and activity around some of our internal processes, and our branding, including forming a PMC to work on logo ideas. While it's great to see volunteers showing up to work on the latest big project, it's also important that we continue to educate the Membership about our many other volunteer roles that also need care and attention. One of the Board's focus areas is improving officer and director runbooks - these are important both for continuity of operations, as well as reminding our Membership and communities about all of the organizational work that happens behind the scenes. Ensuring corporate, legal, financial, and internal governance tasks are well explained helps potential volunteers know what's needed and where they might be able to help.
One of the great strengths of the ASF is our worldwide group of volunteers. While several project reports this month discuss the usual Northern Hemisphere slowdown in work, we also have plenty of projects with more activity than ever forging forward. We've also seen a few projects testing out a pilot program to simplify PMC reporting, which looks promising to both simplify work for PMCs while keeping good communication up with the board.
The ASF’s President David Nalley was invited to speak before the UN at OSPOs for Good 2024 [1] a two day symposium about “open source networks as enablers of global cooperation”. Participating in the Open Source at Work in the World panel [2] for the UN’s Envoy on Technology showcases the importance of the ASF and our software to the world outside of the merely technical sphere; but rather, as a social and global public good. A critical part of the ASF’s ethos and reputation is our independent, community-led, vendor neutral governance for all projects. Unique among FOSS Foundations, the ASF has three pillars that ensure the independence of all our projects’ governance even in the face of commercial pressures: - Our hundreds of ASF Members [3] are individuals (never corporations) from around the world and from all walks of life. Members are nominated internally and elected by other members based on their positive contributions to ASF projects, and their willingness to promote the public good when making decisions for their projects. These hundreds of Members provide a technical and community mentoring backbone to all of our projects, as well as a focus on our mission for the public good. - The ASF owns all trademarks on behalf of our project communities [4]. The Apache brand benefits our projects and the ASF as a whole, given our strong brand recognition for independent and welcoming communities building software openly. Potential contributors know what to expect from any Apache project, and that with their contributions to the project, they’ll have a fair chance at being elected to help govern the project in the future. The nine member ASF Board is elected annually from within the ASF Membership. Board elections are competitive and are based on Directors contributions to the ASF as a whole, not for outside activities and never for commercial affiliations. Every ASF project reports quarterly directly to the Board, so the Board can provide active oversight to project governance. - From time to time some commercial vendors have abused the ASF’s trademarks and goodwill for a vendor’s sole benefit, at a cost to the community as a whole. At other times, vendors have worked to bend project governance for their own benefit, either by hiring project contributors or by having their employees who are contributors unduly influence project direction. In each of these cases, the independent ASF Board serves as a backstop to ensure projects are governed for the public good, and that Apache trademarks are respected and reserved for the actual project communities that have done the work. The Board and our many volunteer officers’ efforts to preserve project independence are not always visible publicly, but rest assured: Apache projects are governed for the public good [5]. We are also starting a regular Board program of reviewing strategic plans and needs of all operations officers, continuing this month with our VP of Brand Management and issues with efficiently protecting ASF trademarks. [1] https://www.un.org/techenvoy/content/ospos-good-2024 [2] https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k1q/k1qmxhno3c?kalturaStartTime=1731 [3] https://apache.org/foundation/governance/members.html [4] https://apache.org/foundation/marks/ [5] https://community.apache.org/projectIndependence.html
Our board face to face strategy meeting was a success, and enabled the board as a whole to gel together and build consensus on some of the strategic issues facing the ASF. Directors, officers, and guests attending all collaborated incredibly well to get us through the whole agenda on time, and got us to some sort of consensus as to next steps on all items. Our VP, Public Affairs and President provided key F2F briefings on legislative changes coming to open source, from CRA, AI Act, CIRCIA, and more. These legal changes to how software can be built and released to the market will force far-reaching changes one processes for all of our project communities. The board is committed to building the operational infrastructure and tooling needed to ensure complying with the CRA will be as simple as we can make it for ASF projects. VP. Marketing & Publicity also briefed the board on various branding activities happening around our #ASF25Years anniversary, and is ensuring we have ample plans and messaging to smoothly capitalize on this campaign through the year. Having plenty of in person time in our F2F meeting allowed the board to dig deeply into questions around our strategy, where the ASF is heading, and how we can truly be a better home with improved services for our project communities. I look towards all our volunteers to find the time this summer to refine and implement some of the process and tooling improvements we're exploring, so we can make it easier for all projects to ship more software.
Planning our board face to face strategy meeting gives new appreciation for conference planners everywhere. Especially our volunteer Community Over Code Bratislava conference team that is aptly managing our conference immediately following our board meeting! Many thanks to the directors and officers who have thoughtfully proposed F2F agenda items or new organizational changes to help the ASF scale in the future, technically, socially, and governance-wise. There are a number of related ideas being proposed that point to real improvements we can build now to ensure we're prepared to help our projects navigate any future ecosystem shifts. Thanks also to PMC members in various projects asking the right questions and working to keep their projects healthy - or to lead their project in an organized fashion to the Apache Attic, when a community is no longer active enough to fully support their project. One small but important improvement I plan to implement soon will be calendar reminder and process fixes, to ensure various groups know when planning or reporting actions are expected.
We are celebrating the ASF's twenty-fifth anniversary with our M&P team launching the #ASF25Years series of posts about our open and welcoming communities and the public good they bring. It's truly inspiring to see our all-volunteer led organization continue to grow, and provide more software that the world relies on. We send our heartfelt thanks to the countless volunteers on all Apache projects, and our own small staff behind the scenes who keeping our corporate being and online services healthy and running. With the advancement of the EU's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) in the US, attention on software development processes is at an all time high. Our VP of Public Affairs, Dirk-Willem van Gulik, is joining with counterparts at other major open source foundations to establish common specifications for secure software development based on open source best practices [1]. This critical policy work starts with our organizations' existing open source processes and will improve them to meet future legislative requirements. Many thanks to all the volunteers at the ASF and other foundations involved, and to the Eclipse Foundation AISBL for hosting this work that will help the open source ecosystem as a whole. I plan to continue the efforts our past chair Sander and other Members have been working on to improve our project-facing processes. Ensuring processes are simple for our projects to follow, and are scalable and transparent enough that our board can provide oversight is important for healthy growth. I also will continue the drive to keep the board focused on organized communication, so we can efficiently make as many decisions asynchronously as practical. This effort will start with planning our annual Board face to face meeting, held this June along with our flagship Community Over Code event in Bratislava. Agenda planning includes writing up detailed proposals and leading on-list discussions well before the face to face meeting, so in-person time is saved for truly difficult questions. I'm also very thankful to the rest of our directors who have entrusted me as Chair for the upcoming board term. There are many big shoes to fill from past Chairs, so it's definitely a bit intimidating! But I know we can get the board working even more effectively going forward, to have more time to tackle the larger issues facing us in the world ahead. [1] https://news.apache.org/foundation/entry/open-source-community-unites-to-build-cra-compliant-cybersecurity-processes
Earlier this month we had our Annual Members Meeting. I am happy to
note that we could invite 60 new Members and welcome back 1 emeritus
Member.
The members had a reasonable number of candidates to chose from this
round and we ended up with a new board composed of two new directors
and seven that already served as director in a prior term:
https://www.apache.org/history/directors.html
I'd like to thank Bertrand Delacretaz for his for his commitment in
serving on the board, and the contributions he has made during that
time. Similarly I would like to thank Sharan Foga for her dedication
as well as the support she gave me as Vice Chair.
And I'd like to welcome Jeff Jirsa and Jean-Baptiste Onofré. They
have already started to engage and put in effort into preparation for
todays meeting. I'm looking forward to hearing their views on items
before the board.
The process for the members meeting was the same as last year. This
time the messaging was clarified, and this helped with members getting
attendence proxies and their votes in. While I personally would call
the meeting a success, I am still not happy with its synchronous
nature, nor the platform we used. When given the opportunity I will
make further changes to solve these two aspects.
Next month my focus is back on the board meetings. I would like to
resume our path of doing more asynchronously, and keep the Discussion
Items section empty unless it is absolutely required to discuss
something synchronously, e.g. because the topic requires executive
session.
I have sent the notifications for our annual Members Meeting on March 7th. Proxies are being registered, at this time we still require 70 members to turn up at the start of the meeting. Ideally we get more proxies over the line. It is clear we can still make some improvements to our messaging around this yearly event. Nominations are happening for new members as well as for new directors for the board. This is paired with civil discussions, which are all helpful in understanding different perspectives within the membership. For this month's meeting we saw automated reminders triggered by the board agenda creation, causing some projects to even report early. I'm sure more tweaks can be done to our processes, one step at a time. Like last month I will be using the new board agenda tool to drive the meeting as much as possible.
Welcome to 2024. The new year was off to an exciting start, with some of the tools used for our monthly board meeting were unavailable. It once again shows how much the Whimsy project has moved the needle in reducing overhead for projects and ourselves, to the point that allowed us to scale with our existing methods. At the same time it shows our reliance on these tools. The board agenda tool is progressing nicely, and I intend to use it to run today's board meeting. Once we're happy that it supports that, we can look at other functionality that is in the critical path of the meeting, e.g. creation of the monthly agenda. From next month on, we should also see automated reminders be triggered by agenda creation. There is a direct correlation between reminders having been sent and the amount of projects submitting reports on schedule. I'm looking forward to this automation having a lasting impact. Lastly, I've begun preparation of our annual Members Meeting scheduled for March 7th. Last years process triggered some desire for improvement, part of which should be addressed by updates to the tools and templates. I expect that at least one more iteration beyond upcoming meeting is necessary to get it to the level that no major changes will be needed.
First of all I'd like to thank Sharan for running last months' meeting in my absense. We now have a date set for our annual members meeting, which I'll start preparations for over the holidays. I observe there is only 11 more days in 2023. Between world events and personal challenges I don't mind to put this year behind us. That said I am grateful for all of the great people in our community that contribute creating software for the public good. I would like to wish everyone a healthy 2024!
No report was submitted.
In October I attended Community Over Code in Halifax. I am grateful for all the time spent with remarkable individuals. Individuals that either I have known for years, but also that I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time. As my travel frequency has gone down significantly after 2019, I cherish these moments and connections. If you're able to attend a next Apache Software Foundation event, do so, and be sure to make lasting connections beyond purely the technical.
Due to personal circumstances I regrettably have little to report this month. We are a volunteer led organization, and I remain extremely grateful for the time and energy everyone dedicates to the Foundation month over month.
There is a lot of activity within the Foundation, as can be read in the reports. Currently I have no additional updates to report. My current focus is following up on our June face to face meeting.
On June 20-21st we had a board face to face meeting in Berlin. I'd like to thank Sharan Foga for her persistence in making the event happen in the first place. And I'd like to thank the participants for making the time in their schedules and to travel for the occasion. I will also call out Willem Ning Jiang, who couldn't make it in person and participated through video call the entire meeting. I really appreciated the positive and constructive engagement of all present. Having polled directors and observers, the perception was overwhelmingly positive. I still have notes and actions to process, and to update the membership on take aways.
Most of this month has been spent on preparing on the Board face to face meeting, which is currently in progress. There are learnings to be had from this meeting, which we'll look back on next month.
Since the incorporation of the foundation a lot has changed. Use of open source is not frowned upon anymore, but rather a given. We keep adapting to the changing landscape. At every point in time it is tempting to create (one set of) rules that set in stone how software is being created, maintained, consumed. As rules are made I am always concerned about capturing the intent and whether the rule will still have the intended effect through time. Especially given that our project communities are diverse. This sentiment also applies to the European Cyber Resilience Act that is under development, and similar developments in the US. The best intentions here to could result in having a negative effect on what has been achieved thusfar with open source when not carefully considered. Closer to home, the Apache Software Foundation, we've gotten by with a small, narrow set of rules at its core. Aside from that, trust and empowerment have served us well for decades - and to this day helps our community develop software for the public good at an incredible scale. As our community grows, and our foundation ages, we too need to remain conscious and careful with introducing new rules or codifying best practices too strictly. We need to remind ourselves the foundation exists to enable its project communities to make great open source software available to the public.
It's been a fairly calm month for me. Or rather I've been reorganizing my calendar with sustainability in mind. The Vice Chair is kindly offered to take on tasks and is taking on the responsibility of sending out the meeting summaries after each board meeting. The EU's Cyber Resiliency Act required attention this month. The time for today's board meeting was cause for some confusion, as the time defaulted to last years schedule which shifted the meeting by 9 hours. We're setting a new time this month with predictability in mind. On the note of timing, I believe we can time our members meeting and budget process to align better. This year we had our meeting early March. And while the March agenda was pretty full this year, we should aim to have that be the month in which we review draft budget. My observation is that the level of engagement of individual directors is high currently on the committee reports. A number of useful discussions are happening with respect to what would be useful information in the committee reports. In closing I've admittedly focused more on reviewing reports, requesting reports and grooming the agenda than on submitting my own report.
Earlier this month we had our Annual Members Meeting. I am happy to note that we could invite 49 new Members and welcome back 1 emeritus Member. While the members had a good number of candidates to chose from that hadn't served before we ended up with a new board composed of individuals that had already served as director in a prior term: https://www.apache.org/history/directors.html I'd like to thank Sam Ruby for his commitment in serving on the board, and the contributions he has made during that time. Similarly I would like to thank Roy Fielding for the structure he brought as Chair and continued to bring after. Lastly I want to thank Roman for his contributions as director next to his role as VP, Legal Affairs. The process for the members meeting was different to prior years, and allowed for more time for voting. Personally I call the meeting a success and would like to continue down the path of making it more asynchronous. Several process improvements have been suggested after the meeting. I will follow up on these while there is momentum. Next month my focus is back on the board meetings.
Preparation for the the upcoming annual members meeting continues. In March the membership will elect a new board and vote in additional members. This month we have more committee reports to review due to a larger number of missed reports in January. I remain impressed with reports that contain self-reflection. In particular when projects that recognize where they are in their lifecycle and decisions on whether to continue or not are in play. I believe this keeps our Foundation healthy.
We're currently two weeks into the new year. Every year tends to bring its own unique challenges and opportunities. This year will be no different. I'm confident the ASF will continue to remain true and focused on its mission to deliver software for the public good, as it has for the past decades. Every year our members elect a new board of directors and nominate new members to the foundation. I've started preparation for the annual members meeting in March. This is the first annual meeting following a new process with different timings and steps. I'm going to solicit some assistance to get the tools we use for the meeting to align. This being the first meeting of the year shows once more how reminders have become relied on in part of the reporting process. I believe this to be a natural consequence of the reminders having been sent for quite a while on a quarterly basis to each project. As reminders didn't go out at the usual time due to errors on my part, I think we have a record number of reports not yet submitted less than a week before the meeting. This may lead to some additional review load in February. I've taken additional steps to prevent this for the remainder of the year.
December has been a challenging month in terms of getting to my action items and to prepare for this month's meeting due to myself and family members having caught year end bugs. Reporting reminders went out late for the December meeting. That in combination with end of year leaves us with a good number of reports missing this month. No reason for concern as the majority has reported last quarter. We have an exceptionally large number of resolutions to establish new projects this month, six in total. This is as many projects as we have retired the entire year. I'd like to thank everyone for their contributions and efforts in 2022. I'm looking forward to making 2023 another great year for the Foundation together.
As daylight savings time ended, our meeting shifts by an hour. For me personally it is a welcome change, as starting at midnight did not feel sustainable. I am strangely looking forward to the 2023 Members Meeting due to the change in logistics of the meeting. While the preparations may be just as intense, the meeting itself should be simpler to manage and more efficient. This month we have 23 reports missing less than 6 hours before the meeting, which is significantly more than September (18) and October (13). While not all project reports coming in on their schedule is not a direct concern, I prefer this number trending down or stable at a low number.
I had the pleasure to attend ApacheCon NA in New Orleans. Apart from having to get used to travel and shifting through timezones again, I am glad that I did make the trip over. For the great content, for the opportunity to talk to people as well as to witness the very engaged attendants. Next to familiar faces it was a pleasure to also see many new faces. I am always pleased to see the Infrastructure team at ApacheCon, with this year not being an exception. I attended their Birds of a Feather session in Ask Me Anything style that was well attended. I was given the opportunity to sit down with an individual on our Infrastructure team, where I answered questions on the board agenda tool. I am definitely looking forward to trying it out once previews are available.
The Secretary can not be with us today, I'd like to thank Craig L Russell, Assistant Secretary, for covering this meeting. This month I've added a resolution to the agenda so that we can reduce the time to add additional people to a Project Management Committee. I'm already looking forward to next months Conferences report with the anticipation that ApacheCon NA 2022 will be as much a success as ApacheCon Asia.
I'd like to draw attention to the Conferences report, I'm really impressed. Thanks for everyone putting in all the hard work to make these events happen. Once again the ratio of missing reports, reports requiring follow up and reports that are timely and receiving plenty of pre-approvals appears fairly stable. Project reports are doing better than executive officer reports in that regard.
I consider the Special Members Meeting of last month a success, both in terms of running the meeting as well as addressing quorum concerns for future meetings. I intend to use the same process for next Annual Members Meeting. The ratio of missing reports, reports requiring follow up and reports that are timely and receiving plenty of pre-approvals appears fairly stable. Due to some personal distractions I don't have a lot to report in addition this month.
We have a Special Members Meeting just preceding this Board meeting which should address quorum concerns for future meetings. We're also running the meeting in a slightly different way, which if proven successful I intend to use for next Annual Members Meeting. This month we see projects reporting more timely than executive officers. I aim to have this addressed as one of my goals during this board period.
May has taken me slightly by surprise. I've had some unexpected travel last week; a first for me since the start of COVID-19. Having had a reminder of what face-to-face contact is like again, I can only imagine that ApacheCon NA 2022 is going to be a great experience again. It is also worth exploring having the board gather face to face. Regarding the board meeting, I'd like to express my thanks to the directors for their diligence. The vast majority of reports is in, and has seen enough pre-approvals for swift coverage during the meeting. In March we agreed to have a special members meeting in June. I'm in the process of preparing the notice. My intent is to keep the meeting agenda simple and focused. If this process works well, there is no reason to not have another meeting in say September, if so desired.
Following the Members Meeting in March I am thankful for the many suggestions that have been raised to improve our meeting. I am grateful for the few that are following through on their proposals. I would like to thank everyone that helped in preparing the budget that is on the agenda this month. I am looking forward to the discussion. I lost some time this month that I anticipated to spend differently, which unfortunately has impacted my attention on timely reports.
The past years COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on our lives. Things we once took for granted became a challenge. We had to adapt. Since last month more that I took for granted no longer is. The war in Ukraine will have its impact for a long time to come. Two weeks ago we had our annual ASF Members meeting. As a result we’re in a position to welcome a significant number of new members. The members also elected a new board. First of all I’d like to thank Craig Russell, Justin Mclean, Sheng Wu for their services on the board. I hereby welcome two new directors to their first board meeting: Christofer Dutz and Willem Jiang. I also welcome back Rich Bowen. I’m looking forward to your perspectives this term. When taking on the role of Chair last year I was told that much of the effort in the Chair’s role lies in the Members meeting, I did experience that for the first time. The meeting didn’t quite go as smooth and efficient as I would have liked. We didn’t have enough proxies or attendance to reach quorum instantly. I am open to and supportive of all efforts that have begun to ensure that we will not run into this issue next year. Item 8C on the agenda, to schedule another meeting in June, is an example of that. I am definitely set on improving our board processes further. To that end, I’ve refined some of the requirements on the board agenda tool. The board agenda tool, in combination with deliberate delegation, is what allows our board to scale. Infrastructure is assuming responsibility for the board agenda tool this year, ensuring continuity of this crucial tool. This past term we have reduced the duration of our meetings further. This should make it easier to schedule the meeting, and even if it's not a the ideal time, keep it tolerable. More importantly, the reduction of time on common tasks, gives us room to go a bit deeper on comments and questions on executive officer reports. To that end I will resume my push for timely reports again, including my own, and to have these in by the second Wednesday, giving directors enough time to comment and ask questions.
This turns out to be a busy period of the month. We are having our anual members meeting in 2 weeks, which I'm preparing for. I'd like to thank our President, David Nalley, for representing us at the US Senate Committee for Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs hearing "Responding to and Learning from the Log4Shell Vulnerability".
As can be read from the officer reports, there have been several topics that needed attention since December. The Log4j issue has triggered numerous conversations and engagements. I want to express my gratitude to those who have been contributing their time and expertise, including over the holidays. I cannot stress enough that the ASF is full of competent and qualified individuals that one way or another donate their time to help deliver software for the public good. This is an impressive reality for well over 20 years. The ASF continues to scale, and enable collaboration. 2022 will undoubtedly be one of more challenges, but I am confident the Foundation will grow because of it.
December is always one of those months. At least my personal experience is that both too much and too little happens. This year is no different. COVID-19 is still with us, and keeps impacting daily life. In short, life remains interesting. With that in mind I remain impressed with the ability of our community to keep providing software for the public good.
Daylight savings time - every year there are a few weeks in which clocks around the globe are further or closer apart than during the rest of the year. Our meeting time will have shifted, I for one look forward to adjourning before midnight as opposed to starting at midnight. The board agenda tools have been instrumental in preparing and running our meetings efficiently. I've recently had to correct some of the tool's output which emphasizes how much of a productivity booster it is when it functions, and at the same time can cause a bit of work if it is slightly off. I'm going to explore how we can expedite ownership and support by our operations team, to ensure this critical tool continues to contribute to the scaling of the board.
I remain impressed with how we adapted to different circumstances, specifically when it comes to events. I ask for some extra attention to the Conferences report this month, and would like to thanks all volunteers, speakers and sponsors for making this happen. While our meetings are now consistently short, thanks to all the pre-work by everyone leading up to the meeting, I am happy to say that this is our final meeting this year with Daylight Savings Time in effect.
Reflecting back on the past six months, it has been reasonable calm in terms of items requiring board level attention and action. Meetings are running smoothly, additional process tweaks are not urgent. With respect to timely reporting, one of my recurring topics, I admit that September snuck up on me. Clearly the calendar told me that the first of the month is a Wednesday, but that didn't register as a need to take action and get reminders out early. I'm pleased to see that a number of projects already submitted their report without prompting. Recently a point was raised about use of jargon in board reports. As a organization welcoming contributions from all over the world I think it is good to be conscious about this, such that reports are as legible and accessible as possible by our entire community.
I have little to report beyond the agenda. I am going not going to bother with the process of settling on a new time with only three more board meetings until summer time ends. I am once again grateful for all the timely reports. I observe that we are still seeing a relatively high number of missing reports.
Other than the agenda, I have very little to report. Meetings have been running smoothly, and I'm confident they will continue as such. Pre-approvals are working well. The amount of missing reports is roughly the same as last month, despite not receiving a second reminder this month. My push for timely submissions has not been strong this month.
Other than the agenda, I have very little to report in my role as Chair this month. I notice that we are missing a higher number of reports than usual at the time of this writing. I will continue to push for timely submissions, and may experiment with process tweaks during the remainder of the year. Obviously part of getting timely submissions is to set the right example, which I unfortunately did not do this month. I implore all executive officers to submit their reports on time for the July meeting - to help set that right example, and to allow maximum time for review. Due to a number of unforeseen life events, I haven’t been able to hit a goal I set for myself for this meeting with respect to the tool we use for board feedback on reports.
I have little to report outside of the agenda. My interest in making further tweaks to the board meeting process remains. I will continue to push for timely reports, giving us more time to review and ask questions. I am aiming to have some tweaks to the agenda tool to assist with this by next meeting.
The ASF has recently celebrated its 22nd anniversary. I would like to extend my appreciation and gratitude to everyone who has contributed to the Foundation's continued success. The board meetings have been running smoothly and efficiently in the past year. Roy T. Fielding has gotten us into a routine based on clear expectations. The excellent Whimsy Board Agenda tool remains crucial in supporting our process. To ensure continuity on our tooling, I would like to explore having the functionality of the Board Agenda tool be provided and supported by our operations team in the long run. Initial conversations between Sam Ruby, the primary author of the tool, and Infrastructure have started. In the upcoming year I will focus on ensuring our board defaults to asynchronous communication. I intend to continue the efforts that were started in the past year to also support actions outside of the monthly meetings more easily.
I am happy to report that the Annual Members Meeting took place on schedule, 9-11 March, without a hitch. My thanks to Daniel Gruno for organizing the voting process using Apache STeVe, our vote monitors for their oversight, and to all of our officers and members for showing up on time (in person or by proxy) so that we could finish in 40 minutes. Thanks also to our outgoing directors Shane Curcuru, Niclas Hedhman, and Patricia Shanahan for their effectiveness over the past year in helping the ASF get through crazy times. Congratulations to our new directors, Sharan Foga and Sheng Wu, and also to our returning director Roman Shaposhnik. I am looking forward to the new perspectives you will bring to our deliberations. As mentioned previously, this will be my final meeting as Board Chair. I have to say that this is "just in time", since the combination of dealing with repercussions from the last board meeting while organizing a members meeting immediately followed by the first board meeting are just a little too much for me to handle. I am exhausted. I suggest that next year's annual meeting be planned for 1-3 March instead, just to give the new Board two weeks (instead of one) to get started.
I have set up and sent notice for the annual members meeting, to be held on IRC on 9 March 2021, with votes concluding on 11 March. In spite of the wild year 2020-21 has been, it doesn't seem like it has been a full year, partly because moving the date earlier has reduced us to 11 meetings. Please be sure to send in nominations before they close on February 28. I am happy to report that I finally managed to update our Bylaws page with Amendment II, as we approved in September, and sent the required notification to the members-notify list. Thanks to everyone who proposed or reviewed the changes on members-info. I set the bylaws change to take effect on 11 March 2021 so that it overlaps with the annual members meeting (maximizing implied consensus).
I had a nice discussion with Ian Buck, VP at NVIDIA, and we resolved the longstanding issue impacting MXNet regarding our distribution of binaries compiled by NVIDIA's CUDA SDK. Other than that, my free time has been consumed by the HTTP specifications which are now in working group last call at the IETF. I hope to get more Apache work done this month.
Everything seems to be going fine, which is also amazing given all that is going on in the world. I had a second brush fire rip through the hills near my house and once again barely missed having to evacuate, so it seems only yesterday that we had the last meeting. It has now been several months since I stopped doing the consent agenda and there has been little difference in terms of how long our meetings run. I think we can safely do without it until we have a much larger slate of things on the agenda.
Well, this has been an interesting month. I've had an 80mph wildfire blow by my house, voted in the longest election day of my lifetime, babbled through endless consternation, and haven't quite prepared for the coming pandemic winter. In spite of all that, we seem to be doing fine. Thanks to everyone who has been helping the ASF run smoothly throughout these turbulent times. I still have a number of action items on my list, as indicated in my last report, but at least the backlog hasn't increased. Somewhat related, the QUIC and HTTP/3 protocols [1] are currently in last call within the IETF. I am also long overdue for completing the core HTTP specifications [2], which are supposed to be published at the same time, so that is going to absorb most of my free time until we get it done. [1] "https://quicwg.org/" [2] "https://httpwg.org/http-core/"
Congratulations to the Conferences team for an incredibly
successful first run of ApacheCon @Home! Please see Rich Bowen's
report under Conferences (Attachment 5) for the details.
I have nothing new to report. I do have a number of action items
(actual and implied) that are beginning to pile up:
1) prepare a notice for the members regarding the bylaws
amendment approved last month so that the formal approval
clock can commence;
2) work on the binary release policy;
3) find a way to make use of our github repo to assist with
collaborative writing of ASF documentation and provide a
place for meaningful tracking of board issues that is better
than my officer's report.
After technical difficulties last month (and lack of sleep), I am going back to the normal agenda (without a consent agenda) to see if it makes any difference for a light meeting.
I don't have anything to report this month aside from the meeting agenda. If we have enough preapprovals, I will skip ahead to the consent agenda (7A) after the roll call to confirm those items that already have consensus, and then we can spend the bulk of the meeting on the remaining discussion items. I expect this to be another 30 minute meeting, but try to reserve the full hour just in case. I hope to start experimenting with a private GitHub repository over the next month to see if a more familiar authoring and issue tracking tool can improve our development and tracking of foundation policy, possibly leading to another data source for the agenda tool.
In a bizarre twist of fate, the past month has seemed almost "normal" for the ASF, at least in contrast to the previous few months. The world has bigger concerns than open source software, and our project communities continue to do their part (and more) in reaching out and helping where it is needed most. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic looks to be getting worse for everyone because of the few who ignored public health warnings. We are all in this together, whether we all agree or not, so stay safe, stay home, and prepare for the long haul. Speaking of which, the new ApacheCon @Home finally has a green light, thanks to the perseverance and hard work of Rich Bowen and our conference volunteers. It will be exciting to see how well we can expand the scope and breadth of ApacheCon when we don't have to worry about parallel sessions and room limitations. Although there has been quite a bit of work summarizing the current status of binary builds and releases, we have yet to take any action that would clarify or remove restrictions on our projects. Hopefully, that can be discussed further (see item 10A) and accomplished over the next month. Our agenda remains light for this month's meeting. If we have enough preapprovals, I will skip ahead to the consent agenda (7A) after the roll call to confirm those items that already have consensus, and then we can spend the bulk of the meeting on the remaining discussion items. I expect this to be another 30 minute meeting, but try to reserve the full hour just in case we need it.
This has been a tumultuous month, in so many ways. Our foundation's normal challenges and concerns seem tiny by comparison. Fortunately, we accomplished the bulk of the board's annual business at the last meeting, and only have a short list of items to discuss for this one. Since the agenda is light and our projects need forgiveness more than rules, I haven't been moving late reports off of our agenda. Instead, I will skip the Consent Agenda this month and we'll run through the normal agenda as in the past. However, we still won't be summarizing reports or performing roll call votes, unless either is requested by a director.
I have been pursuing multiple initiatives this month to make
it easier for our geographically diverse board to agree on a
time to hold our monthly meetings. Part of that is finding a
fair time to meet when all of us can attend, and the rest is
reducing the time spent on the teleconference to only those
discussions that require our synchronous attendance.
Bertrand deserves credit for putting together a Javascript
page for visual scheduling across time zones, and thanks go
to the entire board and executive officers for participating
through manual data entry. It all became a nice team exercise,
without much falling backwards.
For this meeting, the board will attempt to preapprove most of
the items on our agenda during the week prior to the meeting.
Technically, what that means is that we will open discussion
on the board list and within the agenda tool for all of the
items for which we have information supplied in the agenda.
As usual, directors will review the reports, make comments,
mark them for approval, and/or flag them for discussion.
Similarly, if we haven't already discussed a resolution on list,
a formal discuss thread will be started for that item.
If we have comments on a report that are intended for the
reporting officer, we should forward them during the review
and attempt to complete any associated action items as well.
This will give them an opportunity to expand on their report
if additional details are requested prior to the meeting.
Over the course of the week, I will construct a "consent agenda"
within a special item (or in parallel to avoid breaking the tools)
consisting of pointers to those agenda items which:
1) have not been flagged for discussion by any director; and,
2) either:
a) have been explicitly marked as approved by all directors; or,
b) appear to have general consent of the board AND
all relevant materials have been available in the agenda
for at least five days prior to the start of the meeting
(i.e., Friday at 21:30 UTC for this meeting).
When the meeting starts (after roll call), directors will be
given an opportunity to "remove items from the consent agenda",
which essentially means flagging them for normal discussion.
A director that wants to vote "no" on a resolution should flag it.
I will then ask for any objections to approving the remaining items
by general consent and, assuming that passes, the Secretary will
minute all of those remaining items as having been approved by
general consent, as if we had discussed them during the meeting.
For our own sanity, I think we will do that by reference rather
than attempt to move items around in the agenda/minutes.
We will then work our way through whatever is left in the agenda,
and hopefully finish just in time for a short executive session.
Yay! If not, we will reconvene after the executive session to
continue the remaining discussion items.
Eventually, much of this will be automated, similar to how the
reports are approved/commented/flagged already. Sam has made a
lot of progress on migrating Whimsy's agenda tool to a Node.js
version that will hopefully attract more developers. I will
commit myself to learning that over the next month.
Likewise, I think a proper issue management system will be
necessary to allow both directors and non-directors to create
trackable issues for the board, with or without the formalities
of a meeting, as well as more consistent tracking of action
items after a meeting. That means we use something like Jira
or Github for our issues, or we find new volunteers for the
Whimsy project who don't mind reinventing a custom wheel.
Bertrand has been opening Jira issues and Sander has been
experimenting with Jira workflows for managing and recording
director votes within those issues. It is a bit too messy
right now for real board work, but it looks like Jira can be
extensively customized by someone with the right auth
permissions and knowledge of Velocity/Java. However,
I haven't had time to pursue it further.
We held the 2020 Annual Members Meeting at the end of March and elected a new board and voted to invite 34 new members to join us. Congratulations to the new board and thanks to all members who helped with the pre-, during-, and post-meeting technology that helped make the meeting run smoothly. The IRS-inspired Conflict of Interest policy was approved by the board, and board members and executive officers will need to confirm annually that they have read and understood it. The pandemic has not yet directly affected the operations of the Foundation except for postponement or cancellation of some face-to-face events and the possible postponement or cancellation of this year's ApacheCon that is currently scheduled for late September. But we also recognize that our sponsors may be less able to contribute, and we may need to adjust our expectations.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had several effects on the operation of the Foundation. Many face-to-face conferences and meetings have been postponed or canceled, including Apache conferences and other open source and vendor conferences. More cancellations are expected before the situation is resolved. Considering that most of Apache's work communication happens via email, the functioning of the individual projects seems to continue with minimum disruption. If any member of the Apache community needs help dealing with the pandemic, they should let us know. The annual Members Meeting is on track and is expected to be conducted as normal. A reminder will be sent for everyone to submit a proxy if they are not sure they can attend the first part of the meeting via IRC. The membership will be asked to vote on recommending that the board update the Bylaws to change gender-specific terms to gender-neutral terms. Thanks to Patricia Shanahan for leading the effort to adopt a formal Conflict of Interest policy, which will be voted on shortly.
The Foundation continues to operate financially conservatively. A new budget proposal is being developed for the next fiscal year. We understand that Sam Ruby intends to step down as President, and is working with David Nalley on a transition plan. The coronavirus has significantly affected all Chinese people, and we hope that they can resolve the issue quickly and resume normal activity. We are working on developing a policy for Conflict of Interest. While we have no current issues, it is expected that foundations like the ASF will enforce a CoI policy.
The foundation continues to run financially conservatively and we foresee no significant issues. I have accepted a speaking engagement at the Huawei Developer Conference in Shenzhen in February.
Work continues to better understand how Apache can be more welcoming to underrepresented communities. The 2019 Apache Diversity Survey has been released. All committers should have received a personal invitation to take the survey. If you have not done so already, please help by taking the survey. This has been a milestone year in many ways. I would like to thank our sponsors, members, officers, contractors, contributors, and all our volunteers for making Apache The Best Software Foundation. Raise a glass for freedom; something they can never take away!
Kudos to the conference organizers for another excellent ApacheCon EU in Berlin. I had the honor of giving a keynote speech at the first Tencent Tech Echo (Techo) conference in Beijing. I also gave a presentation at Tsinghua University to an audience consisting mostly of undergraduate students. Special thanks to Sally Khudairi for her invaluable help in preparing these presentations. While in Beijing, I met with several people about how to make Apache projects more accessible to Chinese community members, including users, contributors, and committers. One result of these meetings is continuation of dialog to implement a bot to facilitate communications among e.g. mail lists, WeChat groups, Slack, Dingding, and issue tracking systems like GitHub and JIRA. The group is currently deciding on next steps.
We are all looking forward to ApacheCon EU 2019 in Berlin next week for the 20th Anniversary celebration. We accepted with regret Joan Touzet's resignation from the board of directors. We really appreciate her contributions to the board and hope to see her in future. We elected Dave Fisher to the board as Joan's replacement. I'm pleased to see that Diversity and Inclusion is making good progress, with approval of budgeted contracts with Bitergia. As board chair, I accepted an invitation to speak at the keynote session of Tencent Cloud Techo developer conference in Beijing in November.
Kudos to the ApacheCon NA 2019 planning and execution team for a well-organized event in Las Vegas. A number of board members were able to attend the celebration and had many informal chats about how to work better together. No official meeting was held. Several of the IPMC members met with some of the podlings with a large Chinese membership and we discussed some of the challenges of integrating The Apache Way into the Chinese culture. Social barriers include the preference for synchronous social media communications and technical barriers include the sad performance of apache.org web sites in China mainland. The incubator DISCLAIMER-WIP was informally approved by the board to make it easier for podlings to make early releases that are not in accordance with a standard Apache release while making it clear to downstream users that there are unresolved issues. We're looking forward to another great ApacheCon EU next month in Berlin.
Several board members plan to attend the 20th anniversary celebration at ApacheCon NA in Las Vegas. Timing does not work for a regular board meeting during the conference but there will be ample opportunity for individual directors to meet informally. Work continues to better understand how Apache can be more welcoming to underrepresented communities. A call from the Diversity and Inclusion VP was issued to solicit volunteer mentors to work with Outreachy to engage mentees. All Apache communities are encouraged to participate. https://s.apache.org/seeking-mentors The incubator has made progress on a new DISCLAIMER-WIP for non-compliant podling releases. See discussion topic 8A. Discussion continues on how to make board@apache.org a productive environment to conduct the board's work. Discussion continues on socializing the concept of non-code contributions being a factor in moving contributors along the path to become committers.
Planning is well underway for our 20 year celebrations at ApacheCon NA in Las Vegas and ApacheCon EU in Berlin. Kudos to all the volunteers who are making this happen. We are on solid financial footing thanks to our generous sponsors and prudent spending. The FY2020 budget was approved and we are once again tracking actuals to budget. This month saw good progress on Apache's new initiative for equity, diversity, and inclusion, including the start of a partnership with Outreachy to help us understand better the barriers to contribution to our projects. Thanks to IBM who chose to sponsor up to three interns at Outreachy to work on Apache projects. We will shortly open a call to participation for all PMCs to nominate mentors for the Outreachy program. I encourage all PMCs to consider participating. With this on track, there are still obstacles to the smooth operation of this initiative. I'd like to thank Gris Cuevas for her leadership and look forward to her continuing to drive progress here. Apache was contacted by the European Commission Directorate-General for Competition and asked to comment on the proposed acquisition of Red Hat by IBM. Both companies are Apache sponsors. After deliberating openly on the board list, we decided to let the invitation lapse without responding.
At the May board meeting, we accepted the resignations of two board members and one executive officer. All had served with distinction and their resignations were accepted with regret. All positions were filled according to past practice and we are now at full staffing. Regular order business continues. During the transition of the Chairman to Craig Russell, a Request for Information from the EU was dropped and the June 4 deadline was missed. Corrective action is being taken. We entered the fiscal year with a substantial surplus. The budget proposes to spend down part of the surplus (run a deficit for the year). We will carefully review the proposed budget and expect to update/approve it shortly.
The board and executive officers are gathered this week for our F2F meeting to plan strategy and improve our decision-making and communications for internal operations. Along with our 20th anniversary, growth in our projects, and many ApacheCon and Roadshow events planned for the year, we have a lot of positive things going on. The board extends an *immense* thank you to Phil Steitz (who recently stepped down as Chairman) and Ross Gardler (recently stepped down as EVP), and recognize the years of thoughtful service they have performed in those and prior roles. Shane Curcuru, as Vice Chairman, will Chair this week's meetings as per our bylaws #6.2.
This month, we welcomed four first-time directors to the board and one returning director. We held an orientation session and finalized the date and location of a face-to-face meeting to be held next month. We also continued discussion of budget priorities, which we will need to complete in the coming months.
This month, we will celebrate our 20th anniversary on the same date as the annual members meeting. We also published an important blog post this month [1], elucidating the core concepts underlying the Apache Way. This statement represents the collaborative work of quite a few ASF members and represents a big step forward in getting better clarity for ASF volunteers and others interested in understanding the Foundation. Many thanks to those who contributed and for the overall positive and productive discussion around the post. [1] https://s.apache.org/GhnI
This month, we began preparation for the annual membership meeting to be held next month, March 26, with reconvene on March 28. We are still seeking vote monitors and proxies to help with the meeting. We continued discussion this on how, if at all, the ASF should engage in the external dialog on open source licensing and business models. We do have consensus that any statement we make should confirm our commitment to the Apache License, possibly explaining how it supports and enables our mission. I would like to thank the members who participated for the constructive discussion started this month about how the mission statement might be slightly improved and the connection between the license, the mission and our core principles.
Progress continued slowly last month on updating the 5-year plan. I am hoping we can get drafts for all sections and the updated financials to review next month. I have also started planning for the 2019 Members meeting, which will coincide with our 20th anniversary. The Treasurer's report indicates that the ASF is in very good shape financially, 8 months into this fiscal year. We are approximately $400k ahead on revenue and $300k under in expense. Some of this is timing, but we are on track to grow our reserve significantly this year. I plan to spend some time this month working with Tom (as VP, Finance) on options for reserve management (e.g. endowment).
This month, we continued some important discussions on where we are going as a foundation, how we are going to operate and how Officers and Directors should represent the foundation externally. We continued slow progress on the 5-year plan update. My hope is that in the coming month, we will make enough progress that as we enter budget planning for the next fiscal year, we will have consensus views on what our priorities are and we can use the draft plan update as a guide in making budget decisions. This month we received very good reports from Beam, Incubator, Olingo and Pulsar. PMC chairs and other interested community members are encouraged to look at these reports as examples of the kinds of things we like to see in project reports. Comments this month focused on the usual topics, reminding PMCs to discuss issues that we had seen on private or dev lists, keeping things that can be public public, and making sure that synchronous meetings get reported back to public lists. Best wishes to all for a joyous holiday season and many, many thanks to all whose volunteer efforts have made this a great year for the ASF!
We continued to make slow but steady progress last month on strategic topics. Research into endowment options is nearing completion with an initial recommendation to be posted for discussion on the finance list. I incorporated feedback from the kickoff meeting on the 5-year plan into a revised set of objectives and set up the wiki site [1]. Some good discussions around ASF vision, assuring that contributors understand their obligations under the ICLA and the status of binary releases began this month. I am happy to report that the tone of these discussions has been positive. Thanks in advance to all who participate to keep it that way as we work through these and other important issues in the coming months. Three reports were complemented for their thoughtfulness and / or comprehension this month: Flume, Ant and Incubator. In a few cases, issues like those handled thoughtfully in those reports were observed by Directors reviewing list activity in other projects and they were encouraged to cover them in their reports. Constructive feedback related to ensuring oversight, moving toward release and keeping discussion public whenever possible. [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ASFP/5-Year+Strategic+Plan+for+the+Apache+Software+Foundation
This month saw a lot of growth and some great steps forward for the ASF. Apachecon, North America was a great success, thanks to hard planning and execution work by quite a few ASF volunteers. Special thanks to Ruth Suehle for her leadership on this event. We also made good progress evaluating options for long-term financing of the ASF. The plans here are in early stages, but strong progress was made over the last month due to great collaborative effort by ASF Fundraising and Finance. Finally, we held a kickoff meeting to start work on the update to the 5-year strategic plan for the ASF. Project reports this month showed growth in quite a few projects and some success reinvigorating communities that had previously been struggling. Reports from Avro, Incubator, Jclouds, Nutch and Streams were all complimented by Directors. Several communities were encouraged to share best practices and / or success stories on dev@community or in a success@apache blog post. There was not much critical feedback this month - mostly just encouragement to continue community growth or to help people move along from contributor to committer to PMC member.
This month's reports show a huge amount of activity, some of the usual challenges and some solid progress addressing community challenges. The following reports were acknowledged to include good examples / strategies that other communities could learn from: Beam, Mynewt, Incubator and Storm. Constructive feedback included the following items: * Reminder to always use links to lists.apache.org for mail archive references * Reminder to enclose sensitive items in <private> markers (since board reports become public when minutes are published) * Reminder to always include the date of the last release and last committer and PMC additions My personal focus last month was on getting started on the 5-year plan refresh and continuing research into nonprofit finance best practices. Watch members@ for updates.
This month, we had a lot of good discussion on some core issues facing the foundation, including contributions from quite a few members. I would like to thank those who are participating constructively and encourage all to, as Rich reminded us, consistently assume positive intent and encourage others to express their views and develop policies and plans in an atmosphere of mutual respect and support. Let's try to stay focused on the issues in context today rather than "who gets to decide" or "how things have always been" or explicit or implicit ad hominems. We are all often individually wrong. The strength of our software and our foundation rests on our ability to get things right when we work together. This month we had some very good reports. Geode, Sycope and HTTP Server all received positive comments. In several cases, Directors encouraged PMCs to share solutions to problems more broadly. All are encouraged to participate in comdev and to consider "Success at Apache" blog posts to share ideas on what works. The usual comments about keeping things public, adding committers and ensuring sufficient PMC oversight were made on a few reports this month, as well as some comments on omitting statistics unless they support a point being made. A good example of digging into the stats to really assess community health and future trajectory can be found in this month's HTTP Server report.
Feedback on project reports this month was generally very positive. All of the following reports were complimented for their completeness and/or concision: Calcite, Carbon Data, Hbase, Mina, Nifi and Nutch. Constructive feedback from Directors followed some familiar themes, along with promoting some ideas developed in the Beam community. * Helping people progress along the path from contributor to committer to PMC member eases the pressure on committers and PMC members to review PRs and manage releases. * Beam suggestions on community development: https://s.apache.org/4rVt * Making sure that private discussions are moved to public lists unless they really have to be private. My personal focus this month was to continue studying non-profit finance, to begin planning for the update of the 5-year plan and continued work on organizing ASF policy documents. I did not make the progess on the last two items that I had hoped. Over the next month, I will put some materials in the Wiki for review and collaboration.
This month, I worked on educating myself on non-profit finance and worked with Sam and others on the idea for a VP, Finance to establish a financial analysis and planning function at the ASF. This is necessary now that we are considering long-term finance strategies such as an endowment. I expect to spend a significant amount of time over the next several months helping develop and support the finance function at the ASF. I will also continue to work on educating myself and helping interested members come up to speed and participate in financial analysis and planning. I did not make the progress that I hoped to make last month on progressing the policy roadmap. I hope to get back to this in the current month. This month’s reports included some very good ones: Bean, Bloodhound, DeltaSpike and Felix were all complimented for their comprehension and thoughtfulness. In addition to the usual comments about long lapses since new committer / PMC member additions and reminder that jira / commit / mail volume stats are not useful unless supporting a specific point, there were a few less common comments this month: * Reminder to copy trademarks@ when dealing with potential infringement issues * Reminder that individuals contribute to ASF projects, not companies * Observation that some important discussions on dev or private lists were missing from project reports.
This month, we had several very good reports. Brooklyn, Geode, HTTP Server and Phoenix all submitted exemplary reports. Several PMCs were thanked for responding to feedback and dealing with issues that they or the board called out in prior reports and / or improving the quality of their reports. Thanks to all who contributed to developing project reports this month. Other than general thanks and praise for good reporting, comments this month were all in one of the following categories: * Requests to ensure that projects with low activity have effective PMC oversight * Reminders to keep everything that can be public, public * Request to include in board reports description of how projects managed problems * Reminder to include basic information on committer / PMC roster changes After getting general agreement on the concept and initial list of policies to work on, I started work this month on the policy roadmap. Working with Bertrand, my goal is to get started on discussing the first one (release) this month and also agree on how the review and approval process will work and where approved policies will be hosted.
This month, we welcome Roman Shaposhnik and Isabel Drost-Fromm as new board members (though Isabel has served in the past) and we, once again, thank departing members, Jim Jagielski and Chris Mattmann for their service. We had a brief meeting of the new board on April 11, where we agreed on officer appointments and had an informal discussion of what each of us thought were important topics for the board in the coming year. Each board member provided one or more items for consideration. We did not make any decisions or discuss any of these items in detail. We agreed that substantive discussion and decision-making should happen on ASF lists and/or regularly scheduled ASF Board meetings. The full list of items is in the minutes, linked in this month's agenda. We agreed to ask all current officers to continue in their roles and I am happy to report that all have agreed. To fill the Vice Chair vacancy created by Jim's departure, we appointed Shane Curcuru as Vice Chair. Thank you, Shane, for agreeing to take on this role. This month's reports included some very good ones: Fineract, Hbase and Nifi among them. Each of these provided thoughtful insight into project state, problems and plans. Comments on individual reports continued to hit the following common themes: * Responding to the "long tail" contribution / committer bottleneck by making it faster / easier to earn commit * Same as above regarding PMC membership * Request to provide a more thoughtful project health summary * Reminder to follow IP clearance process for substantial contributions not developed inside the project * Reminder to be careful with synchronous meetings, always summarizing on list, etc. * Reminder to include date last committer and PMC member were added to the project
This month, we prepared and are in process of running the Annual Mambers Meeting. We are also preparing the 2019 budget. The timing of the decisions that we have to make, coincident with the election of a new board and new members has created some stress among the officers, directors and membership. That stress manifested in behaviours on members@ and board@ that were not what we expect of ourselves. I expect that we will do better moving forward. The usual themes were repeated in some of the report comments this month - remember to always include dates of most recent commmitter / PMC additions and releases, keep discussions that can be on the public dev list public, focus on helping new contributors earn merit so that they can be voted in as committers and committers to PMC members. This month, several projects were commmended and / or advised on handling of security issues. A great resource for this is https://www.apache.org/security/committers.html. The Storm project submitted a very good report this month. In the Activity and Health sections, there is good discussion of community health, practical problems that the community is dealing with, and actions taken. The Axis report was also very good this month, showing continued progress restoring that community to a healthy and active state.
Over the last month, I began preparations for the Members Meeting (date to be confirmed at today's meeting) and worked with the other Officers and Directors preparing the 5-year strategic plan which we will review at today's meeting. Many thanks to all who contributed and commented on drafts of the document. Here is a summary of comments made on this month's project reports. The Http Server project report was, once again, a great example of what we like to see in project reports. The community health section uses data to thoughtfully assess the state of the community. Instead of just presenting statistics, the report includes discussion of the pattern of contributions and inferences made by the PMC about what they might do to encourage more people to contribute. One PMC was commended for keeping discussion that can be public on the public dev list. Specifically, we saw and appreciated some instances of moving a discussion that starts on private@ but can be public moved to dev@. Two PMCs were encouraged to limit discussion of or influence by commercial vendors in their reports. What vendors do with our products is their business. We certainly encourage all manner of use and onward distribution; but project reports (and decisions) should focus on project communities and their activities. The usual question about activity level was asked of a couple of PMCs. This usually takes the form of "Are there 3 active PMC members in the community?" We ask this question because it takes 3 binding +1 votes to make a release. In two cases, we noted the long time since the last release from a project and asked how the community could remain engaged without release activity.
At last month's meeting, we continued discussion of the 5-year plan. This has frankly been difficult for us to complete. Bertrand suggested that we might do better to focus first on the high-level vision and objectives before debating specific decision points. Bertrand drafted a vision statement that we were able to agree on and which I hope will be formally approved at today's meeting. I proposed the following objectives for the 5-year plan. We have not reached consensus yet on these, so they should be viewed as draft at this point: 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 We need to start planning the 2019 budget soon, so my hope is that we can complete the 5-year plan, including the financial projections, by next month's meeting. The quality of the project reports this month was overall very good. Many thanks to the PMC chairs and PMC members who contributed. There were quite a few very good reports this month. I will call out two as as exemplary: CarbonData and Fineract. In each case, challenges as well as progress are called out and a complete picture of the state of the project is presented. One thing that we often mention is that just presenting mailing list stats is not necessary and should be omitted unless they add something to the report. This month's Hbase report provides an example of using ML stats to support the ideas in a report. Several projects discussed their challenges with imbalance between contributors and committers - i.e., large numbers of PRs and not enough committers to keep up with them. In each case, the feedback from the board was to try to find ways to get contributors on a faster path to committership. In some cases, commenters asked for a more complete picture of project activity and community health. PMCs were reminded that project reports are public and are the public record of the state of the project, so its best to include more than just the basic facts about releases, committer / PMC changes, etc. As part of review of projects, we often look at project mailing lists. This month, some comments were made about topics from dev or private lists that would have been good to include in reports. For example, one project dealt with a LGPL dependency issue. Including a summary of the issue and how it was dealt with in the report would have been good. One comment asked that a PMC be careful with how its private repo is used. Like private mailing lists, private repos should be used only for things that really have to be private. Finally, we had to repeat the reminder that reports should always include the dates of the last committer addition, the last PMC member addition and the last release. Thanks again to all PMC chairs for taking the time to develop reports this month and to my fellow board members for doing such a complete and thoughtful review of the reports submitted.
This month, I created a draft 5-year plan document. The document is under review, along with the budget projection that Sam and the Officers produced. I also posted a draft document retention and access policy. Time permitting, we will begin discussion of the 5-year plan at this meeting. The draft plan and policy documents are posted in the Board team drive in ASF GSuite. Any interested member can request access to this space. Many thanks to the members preparing and submitting reports this month. There were some very good ones, including descriptions of challenges and how PMCs are handling them. We encourage and appreciate focus on problems like volunteers leaving, decisions about backward compatibility / legacy support, chair rotation and community conflicts. The Beam report, for example, does a great job calling out both challenges and achievements. The TomEE report includes a great example of a PMC addressing conflict directly and practically. Director comments this month repeated the themes from last month: use private lists only for things that need to be private, consider a lower bar to increase the flow of new committers into a project, and reminders to always include the date of last committer and PMC additions. Two PMCs were reminded that in general company names don't belong in reports (unless there is something specific to them) and it was recommended to use durable message links from lists.apache.org (Ponymail) when these are used in reports.
I had calls with Sam and Greg this past month, discussing a range of topics relating to the two things that I am working on at the foundation level now: 1) the 5-year strategic plan and 2) ASF document retention and access policy. I received some great feedback on the members list on the strategic plan components and I have started work on a plan draft, which I will make available in the ASF GoogleDocs space. I would like to reserve time at next month’s board meeting to discuss the plan. There has been some discussion recently on how to streamline communications between the Board and PMCs, or more specifically how to make the PMC Chair’s job more manageable by reducing the number of email messages that Chairs need to read. One item that was suggested for suppression is Board comments on project reports. Thinking about that, and discussing with Sam, I have decided to start including a summary of recent Board feedback in this report. Feedback on my feedback summary is of course welcome. If this turns out to be effective, I will propose that we suppress copying board@apache.org on report comments. There were quite a few positive comments over the last month thanking PMCs for producing informative and thoughtful reports. In general, the positive comments were in response to reports that gave a clear picture of the state of a project, interpreting data rather than just presenting it. An excellent example is this month’s HTTP Server report. Critical comments centered on a few recurring themes: 1. Reminders to always include the dates when the last committer and PMC member were added to the project. 2. Reminders that mailing list and / or JIRA statistics presented by themselves (i.e. not in support of a statement related to project health or issues faced by the project) can be omitted. 3. Requests to affirm that there is sufficient PMC oversight for the project. 4. Reminders that no response has been received to a comment that requires a response (comments that require response are flagged in Whimsy. I am happy to personally respond to questions regarding whether or not a specific comment requires a response of if a proposed response is adequate). Constructive feedback also followed some common themes: 1. Projects considering formal criteria for committership are encouraged to be careful setting the bar too high or making the criteria too complex. 2. Projects organizing meetings, meet-ups or other in-person events need to make sure that either the events do not have any specific bearing on the project or a) they are open to all interested parties and b) discussions and any proposed decisions are brought back to the project dev list. 3. Private mailing lists should be used sparingly, only for issues that can’t be discussed on the public dev list. 4. Votes for PMC Chair rotations and / or committer / PMC nominations should always be closed and actioned.
This month, we continued discussion of ASF document retention and review policies. Over the course of the discussion, it became clear that what we needed to start with was a set of principles on retention and review. I have started work on a policy draft. I hope to complete that draft in the coming month. I also had discussions with Sam and Tom on developing the five-year operating plan for the ASF. I subsequently proposed that we break the planning process into an analysis phase where we focus on how we expect the needs (and goals) of the ASF to change over the next 5 years and then a development phase where we build an operational and financial plan based on this. Sam and I hope to complete the plan by year-end. I posted a proposed analysis framework to the ASF members list. Thanks to all who have provided feedback and thanks in advance for help and input in the plan development process. Sam requests that the Chair (and other interested parties) have a phone conversation with Greg (and others) early in the document retention process draft.
First, I would like to thank Brett for his 4+ years of service as ASF Chairman. I am both inspired and challenged by the example that he set. I am also very grateful to him and Sam for automating a lot of administrative tasks, making that aspect of the role a lot easier. Despite careful instruction from Brett, I nonetheless made a few administrative errors this month, which were resolved thanks to help from Sam, Craig and Brett. Thanks to all for your help and patience as I learn the ropes. On September 11, I spoke at the Linux Foundation’s OSS Summit in Los Angeles, CA. The title of my talk was “Scaling OSS, Lessons Learned at the Apache Software Foundation." I talked about historical social, financial and operational challenges and how we had met them. I ended with some personal thoughts about the future - basically a statement of confidence in the resiliency of the ASF. Many thanks to Sally for her help and counsel preparing the talk. More thanks go to Sally, Chris, Rene Gielen and other members of the Struts PMC for marshaling a clear and effective response to press inquiries associated with the Equifax breach.
I spent some time this month writing up some details about scripts and running meetings that the Chairman needs, and spoke with Phil about transitioning over to him. I'll be working with him over the next couple of weeks to ensure everything is handed over, as I'll be travelling for two weeks at the beginning of September. I still need to send some follow up material from our face to face in that time as well. I'll be speaking at DataWorks Summit in Sydney on the Apache Way in September. Thanks for having me as chair for the last 4 years, it's been great!
I've had an unusually busy month personally, which means I'm well behind on follow through from the minutes and actions from the face to face. This will be a priority for me next week. I have completed a basic run book for board meetings, annual meetings and other Chairman's duties, and intend to commit these and walk Phil through them over the next month.
We had a productive face to face meeting in McLean last week, covering topics about the next 5 years of the Foundation, how we might best support the growth of healthy project communities and our own membership in line with the mission of the Foundation, and some key operational considerations. I will work with Craig over the next week to publish the formal minutes and a summary of the work done, as well as starting to track the action items that resulted from the meeting. I'd like to thank the board, officers and members who took the time out of their schedules to attend, including the support many received from their employers. In particular, our thanks to Capital One for hosting us at their McLean facilities and for sponsoring our pre-meeting dinner. Thank you to Craig also for driving the changes in the board list discussed at the previous meeting. I hope these will serve to allow more focused discussion on board-level items among the board, officers and interested members. I have indicated to the board that I intend to step down from the role as Chairman, and at the face to face we discussed a succession plan. I will transition the role over the following months. It has been fun, and I'm privileged to have had the opportunity over the last 4 years.
As announced on the ASF Blog, welcome to the 64 new members elected at the Annual Members Meeting! Taher Alkhateeb Jorge Luis Betancourt Gonzalez Ryan Blue Davor Bonaci Michael Brohl Cedric Champeau Byung-Gon Chun Radu Cotescu Jaroslaw Cwiklik William Colen Dániel Dékány Mike Drob Eric Evans Lars Francke Roberto Galoppini Robbie Gemmell Thamme Gowda N Scott Gray Stefan Hett Jonathan Hsieh Bilgin Ibryam Claus Ibsen Jeff Jirsa Evgeny Kotkov Andy Kurth Chris Lambertus Nicolas Malin Karl Heinz Marbaise Lee Moon Soo T. Jake Luciani Stephen Mallette Nate McCall Larry McCay Sidney Markowitz Gary Martin Robert Munteanu Kay Ousterhout Anil Patel Christine Poerschke Matt Post Stian Soiland Reyes Chris Riccomini Carlos Rovira Daniel Ruggeri Guergana K. Savova Felix Schumacher Anthony Shaw Karanjeet Singh Michael Starch Daniel Takamori Josh Tynjala Ashish Vijaywargiya Andrew Wang Claude Warren Jr Michael Semb Wever Piotr Zarzycki Jordan Zimmerman Matt Sicker Jan Materne Dominik Psenner Evans Ye Jay Vyas Olaf Flebbe Jianfeng Zhang I look forward to seeing the board in McLean next month. The agenda for the face to face meeting has been posted, and comments or additional items are welcome. There was discussion about creating a separate board list for traffic on discussions compared to the day-to-day notices, meeting preparation and follow up. I intend to follow through on this over the next month.
Welcome to Ted Dunning and Phil Steitz, our new Directors elected at last month's annual meeting. Thanks go again to Isabel and Marvin for their efforts on the board over the last year, after they opted to stand down at this election. The new board met informally over a video chat recently to (re-)introduce each other, raise their main thoughts for the year ahead. Thanks to Rich for organising the video conference. We are currently planning a face to face meeting, which will be held in McLean, VA on June 15, 2017. The agenda and attendee list should be finalised shortly. At Sam's recommendation, I'm going to try and set up some time to informally catch up with a few officers over video chat before that meeting. The annual meeting proceeded as usual. There was again some brief difficulty ensuring we had quorum for the meeting, which has led to further discussion on the members list about our quorum requirements and the activity of the membership in the meeting and voting process. There was also a good amount of feedback on how to better communicate the procedures for the meeting. I have created some scripts and runbooks to help with setting up future meetings, and will update them with some of the feedback received. We currently await the final membership applications before confirming those that were elected at the meeting. The following is the report I provided to the annual meeting: ----- This week, we’ve celebrated 18 years of the incorporation of the Apache Software Foundation! Apache projects and their communities are the heroes of our continued success and the longevity of the foundation. Since the last Annual Members Meeting, we have added 13 new top-level projects: Sentry, TinkerPop, Apex, Johnzon, AsterixDB, Bahir, Zeppelin, Twill, Kudu, Geode, Eagle, Beam, and Ranger; which is close to the same pace as prior years. The Foundation has been slightly more proactive in retiring projects where the community is no longer active, with Wookie, MRUnit, Tuscany, Continuum, Etch, DeviceMap, Stratos and Abdera all retired to the Attic. We have also elected 58 new members into the Foundation. It has been a somewhat more tumultuous year for the Foundation’s governance and operations, including a number of mid-term changes to the Board and Executive Officer roles. However, these circumstances have highlighted the strength of the Foundation’s structure in that projects were able to continue unimpeded by the needs of our operations. In 2016, we welcomed three new directors - Isabel Drost-Fromm, Marvin Humphrey and Mark Thomas - the most significant number of additions in several years. We also welcomed Ulrich Stärk as Treasurer, and thanked Chris Mattmann for his service to the Foundation in that role over the years prior. Later in 2016, we saw Greg Stein step down after 15 continuous years as a Director, to take up the role of Infrastructure Administrator, and we remain incredibly grateful for the work Greg has done and continues to do for the Foundation. Sam Ruby filled the vacant directors seat, only to step down a month later as he took on the role of President following Ross Gardler’s resignation. Ross then moved into the EVP role, with us gladly welcoming Rich back to the board after a brief hiatus. We are thankful for the willingness each of these members has to serve in whichever capacities are needed. All of these roles have required a significant commitment of volunteer time over the last year. As we approach the upcoming meeting, we thank Isabel and Marvin for their time as Directors, having chosen not to stand this year, and so look forward to more first-time Directors for the 2017-18 term. The changes throughout 2016 have given the Foundation a path forward through a difficult stage of its growth, though certainly many challenges lay ahead as we seek to grow to meet the needs of the projects that call Apache home and to sustain the Foundation for many years to come. And we do continue to grow! Not only have we increased the number of top-level projects, but we have now hit the milestone of 6000 committers to Apache projects, illustrating the reach that Apache software has throughout the worldwide developer community. Throughout, we continue to hold fast to the Apache Way, even in the face of difficult circumstances that face some projects from time to time. This remains key to maintaining the unique value of the Apache Software Foundation. Sadly, we had to bid farewell to Greg Reddin of the Apache Tiles project, who passed away in October last year. We express our condolences to his wife and children, and to his colleagues among the Apache community. I now look forward to the coming year, with great anticipation for what the ASF might achieve, building on the many contributions that have come in the past 18 years and earlier. I am incredibly humbled to have the opportunity to have served as Chairman for some of that time and thank the Board for the opportunity.
A verbal report was given: Significant discussion occurred around fundraising in the lead up to the face to face referenced in the President's report. Discussion also occurred around the implementation of brand policy as covered in earlier months. This was distilled down to 5 points to clarify the board's position. Concerns were raised over whether the board held a singular vision for the foundation, and that this at times posed difficulty in working together. Several directors voiced a need for the board to meet face to face early in the new term to ensure these concerns were addressed. I have observed times when individual directors are interpreted as speaking for the board whenever they give feedback or raise an issue. I've reiterated that board actions occur in the context of a meeting. Aside from these discussions, the focus has been on the upcoming annual meeting. I'd like to take a moment to thank the board for their service to the Foundation over the past year!
Thanks for everyone's patience due to my low availability over the last 3 weeks. I'm catching up. While there have been a number of directors traveling, the focus of the board list was on a fairly short burst of activity around the budget and fundraising, as noted in the President's report and discussion items. We have some work to do to bring this together in the next month. Following the last meeting, I sought to clarify the understanding of board voting in the case of abstentions, given the current wording of the bylaws. It has been the consistent understanding of the board that abstentions are not considered "present" at the meeting and do not contribute to the majority requirement. I'd like to thank the directors that started capturing some central pointers to ASF policy. I propose that we hold the Annual Members Meeting on March 28-30, 2017, however welcome input from any directors or officers - particularly President, Secretary, Treasurer and vote monitors - as to whether later dates in April would be more suitable. I will start preparations immediately this week.
The item from the December meeting regarding the Role of Brand Management as it relates to PMCs has continued to generate vigorous discussion over the last month. The agenda this month draws several conclusions from that discussion. During the meeting, a question was raised regarding the ability of a director, who serves as an officer, to participate in a discussion or vote pertaining to their role. As a result of this discussion, I’ve added an agenda item for the board to confirm that this in itself poses no conflict of interest. This led to a separate perceived conflict of interest being raised, which unfortunately became heated and singled out an individual, appearing to question their integrity. The concern was found to be without merit and withdrawn, and there is no outstanding concern over the individual's actions in any capacity. The incident highlighted the need for Directors, and officers participating in board discussions, to maintain a respectful attitude toward each other during difficult conversations. I have not yet proposed a date for the Annual Meeting, but will do so on the board mailing list in the next couple of weeks. It is to be held no later than 22 April, however I expect to maintain the timing we’ve used in March if practical.
The majority of discussion over the last month has been around the way in which project's enforce their brand, as covered in the President's report. In the next month, I'll start preparing for the Annual Members Meeting again, looking to set a date in March again.
Having been on holidays most of the month, I have nothing to report other than being a long way behind on email.
The board continues to discuss the possible appointments for officer roles, particularly in light of Ross' resignation as President as he conveys in the following report. On behalf of the board, many thanks to Ross for his service in the role over the last 3 years, committing significant time as a volunteer to the smooth operation of the Foundation.
This month saw the continued discussion of officer roles as noted in the August minutes. While further discussion continues around these roles, one clear outcome has emerged, with Ross informing the board of the appointment of Greg Stein as an Infrastructure Administrator. As a result, Greg has notified the board and membership of his intent to resign his post as Director, Vice Chairman and VP Subversion. Greg has served on the board continuously for more than 15 years, including several years as Chairman and later as Vice Chairman. We are incredibly thankful for his service to the Foundation in these roles. While we will miss his presence as a member of the board, we look forward to his new role within the Foundation. Thanks Greg!
The focus of the board over August have been the issues Ross highlights in the President's report, and covered in the discussion items. Other than that, several directors have been assisting a small number of projects working through community issues.
Nothing to report.
The main topic of discussion for the board this month has been the possible need for additional staffing, and what that role should look like. This has considered everything from an infrastructure lead to a "general manager" role, and continues from the topics raised in Ross' report last month, as well as the Infrastructure Lead discussion item in February. At this point, no action has been taken. Thanks to everyone involved in publishing our second annual report earlier in the month. It looks great, and did pick up some positive attention.
I'm glad to report that we received the paperwork from all 58 new
members elected at the Annual Members Meeting in March. Welcome!
Michael Armbrust Paul Benedict David Bosschaert
Mihai Chira Tom Chiverton Richard Downer
Stephan Ewen Sharan Foga Uma Gangumalla
Lars George Mark Giaconia Steven Gill
Adrien Grand Konstantin Gribov Dennis E. Hamilton
Luke Han Gavriel Harbater Sterling Hughes
Julian Hyde Damjan Jovanovic Flavio Junqueira
Georg Kallidis Mark Kessler Paul King
Peter Klügl Guillaume Laforge Julien Le Dem
Jacques Leroux Jesse MacFadyen Val Mallder
Suneel Marthi Colin McCabe Xiangrui Meng
Robert Metzger Jacques Nadeau Pepijn Noltes
Rohini Palaniswamy Tom Pappas Bob Paulin
James Peach Bryan Pendleton Remko Popma
Andriy Redko Josh Rosen Kay Schenk
Christopher Schultz Venkatesh Seetharam Sujen Shah
Konstantin Shvachko Srikanth Sundarrajan Tsz Wo Nicholas Sze
James Taylor Jochen Theodorou Giuseppe Totaro
Shivaram Venkataraman Markus Weimer Chathuri Wimalasena
Joe Witt Allen Wittenauer
We again thank Chris Mattmann for his service as Treasurer for close
to the last 4 years, as he steps down from the role.
Welcome to the new board, elected by the members last month! I’d like to particularly welcome Isabel, Marvin and Mark, each serving as a director for the first time. Our gratitude goes to the outgoing directors Rich, David and Sam for all that they did during their term. Everything went well during the meeting. We elected 58 new members, and will announce them next month after the final paperwork has been received. We also passed a resolution to convert a number of inactive members to emeritus status, but would certainly welcome them back again in the future! Thanks to the STeVe project for their work on a new voting front-end that was used at the meeting. I’ve included my report from the Annual Members Meeting below. ----- It has been another outstanding year for the Apache Software Foundation, marked by continued growth and success of our top-level project communities, and the steady addition of new top-level projects. Since the 2015 Annual Members Meeting, we have added 15 new projects: Parquet, Orc, Whimsy, NiFi, Lens, Ignite, Usergrid, Serf, Yetus, Brooklyn, Calcite, Kylin, Groovy, REEF and Arrow; while 6 existing projects have retired to the Attic: Lenya, DirectMemory, Deltacloud, Shindig, Onami and Rave. Overall we find ourselves with 171 top-level projects, with 45 additional projects under incubation. At the last meeting, we easily met quorum after the challenges the prior year. This is something we will continue to monitor and address through encouraging proxies, and reaching out to inactive members who may be considering emeritus status. Nevertheless, with over 200 members joining it is extremely encouraging to to have such a large number of our members participating in the governance of the Foundation. In 2015, we elected 108 new Members, expanding our representation across the various project communities to a total of 603 members as of February 20. We also elected a new board, with Shane Curcuru returning to the board, and David Nalley joining for the first time. I thank all the directors for their service to the Foundation over the last 12 months! The board has functioned well, bringing diverse opinions but making clear decisions. The board has balanced discussion of Foundation issues with a focus on projects and their reports. We’ve continued to improve tooling in several areas, and formed the Whimsy PMC, in addition to the existing Steve PMC, to build tools that help the Foundation run smoothly. We have seen continued success from our operations, as detailed in the President’s report, and inline with budget. We have made a transition to new staffing arrangements that have increased costs, which will need to be addressed in the budget over the next couple of years. For the first time, the ASF released an Annual Report, a significant effort that helped share specific details of the ASF’s impact with our sponsors and the public. Thank you to the President, EVP, VPs and the committees they work with, many of which expended significant time as volunteers, to keep the Foundation ticking day to day. We also thank Chris Mattmann for his service as Treasurer, as he prepares to transition the role to a new volunteer in the next board year. Through these Foundation-level developments, we support the communities that make up our top-level projects. I can report that the Apache Way continues to show the benefit of community-led development throughout our existing projects, and an attractive reason for other projects to join through the Incubator. I’m pleased that in the last year we have managed to initiate some changes that have a potentially significant cultural impact, while carefully ensuring that we retain the unique Apache DNA. We have had additional projects take advantage of proposing TLPs directly to the board where incubation was not deemed necessary. We have also expanded support for GitHub use by ASF projects, and began experiments through the Whimsy project to assess some of the technical (and later cultural) impact. One of the Foundation’s strengths is that by building communities, we not only build software but also build relationships that extend beyond that development. Therefore, we acutely feel the loss of valued members of the community. It is with great sadness that we saw the passing of Ian Lynch, Nóirín Plunkett, and Adrian Crum in the last year. Their memory, and their contributions, will carry on through our communities, and our thoughts remain with their families and friends. Thank you to the entire ASF community for making it such a wonderful place to contribute, and for the privilege it has been to serve as Chairman.
The focus over the last month has been on preparations for the Annual Members Meeting. I'm pleased to report that we have a healthy number of nominations for new members, as well as candidates for the board. Thanks to those who have helped with the agenda resolutions, and the preparation of the new voting tool! I am currently working with Sally on a write up for the upcoming anniversary of the ASF. As this is the last meeting of this particular board, I'd like to express much gratitude to all of the directors for the time and service they've dedicated to the ASF over the last year.
Preparation is nearly complete for the Annual Meeting, with notices to go out shortly. This year, I've spent some more time writing down the process as I go and created a tool to generate the meeting from templates to make it easier for future boards. I've accepted an offer to join the advisor board for the China OSS Promotion Union (COPU), which came after attending the Apache Roadshow in Beijing last year. This doesn't entail any relationship with the ASF, however I'll certainly share anything relevant that comes from it, particularly if we look to participate in future events in the region.
A Happy New Year to everyone at the ASF. On the board list, we agreed on an Annual Meeting date of 22 March 2016 (concluding 24 March). I plan to formally announce that in the next couple of weeks once we are within the 60 day window. There's some preparation to do to ensure the quorum and voting tools are all set, as well as the usual record preparation.
First up, apologies to those I've missed emails from recently - I've been running quite behind for the last few weeks. Aside from that, nothing specific to report from the last month. In January, I'll propose a date for the next Annual Members Meeting, so that we can aim to hold it in March again. I intend to run this past the board list shortly.
Last month I attended Apache Roadshow - China in Beijing and spoke about the Apache Way. The event was well executed, and it was helpful to meet a number of Apache contributors, and other individuals interested in understanding more about how the ASF operates. I hope the success of the event will provide an opportunity for it to continue in future years, particularly with an increasing number of local Apache committers that can present and collaborate. My thanks to the organisers, and to David, Aaron, Niclas, and other Apache committers that gave keynote presentations or spoke about projects at the event. Earlier this month I had a call with some large organisations seeking to open source a new project and looking for information about the various foundations. I walked them through the principles of the Apache Way, incubation process, and foundation structure; I'll guide them towards the Incubator list and proposal process if anything further arises. A relatively busy month for the board with some discussion around source code control policy, which is listed later in the agenda.
The main discussions during the last month have been related to the Incubator. After a lengthy thread, which is now closed, the conclusion seemed to be that there was no immediate board-level issue to be addressed, and concrete proposals have been appropriately raised on the Incubator lists. As Ross mentions, I'll be in Beijing tomorrow for the Apache Roadshow event, giving an Apache Way presentation (combined with some amount of the State of the Feather).
Encouragingly this month we have received the most reports that we have in recent months, with just a handful not submitted. This helps reduce the effort of shepherds and the knock on effect of extra reports in the next month.
I have nothing additional to report this month, other than what is already covered throughout the agenda.
It has been a relatively quiet month. We still have a few missing project reports. There has been good progress on resolving some outstanding action items. We also have a good number of resolutions to consider in this meeting.
A discussion has started over the last month about potential updates to the bylaws, related to quorum requirements and the requirements for transition to and return from emeritus membership. This may develop into a concrete proposal in future months. As others detail in their reports, we have produced an annual report, which is great to see! Many thanks to all involved.
We welcome to the ASF the 106 new members that have accepted their
invitation after being elected at the March Annual Members Meeting:
Shazron Abdullah Sharad Agarwal Tim Allison
John D. Ament Kiran Ayyagari Andreas Beeker
Andrea Del Bene Ignasi Barrera Konstantin Boudnik
Maziyar Boustani Francis De Brabandere Alexander Broekhuis
Annie Bryant Burgess Sean Busbey Ioannis Canellos
Richard Eckart de Castilho Jarek Jarcec Cecho Jerome Charron
Avery Ching Christofer Dutz Johan Edstrom
Josh Elser Peter Ent Robert Evans
Freeman(Yue) Fang Sergio Fernández Thiago H. de Paula Figueiredo
Peter Firmstone Ray Gauss II Brian Geffon
Violeta Georgieva Georgieva Johannes Geppert P. Taylor Goetz
Issac Goldstand Thomas Graves Andrew Grieve
Hasan Hasan Steve Hay Les Hazlewood
Lars Hofhansl Michael James Joyce Giridharan Kesavan
Shakeh Khudikyan Aaron Kimball Marcel Kinard
Kishore G Robert Kowalski Nick Kwaitkowski
Marcus Lange Dave Lester Jason Lowe
Myrna van Lunteren Renato Marroquin Nathan Marz
Milamber Kevin Minder Omprakash Muppirala
Aaron Twining Myers Prescott Nasser Chris Nauroth
Tyler Palsulich Jitendra Nath Pandey Milinda Pathirage
Travis Pinney Pinaki Poddar Werner Punz
Jun Rao Benedikt Ritter Steven Rowe
Bikas Saha Antonio Sanso Uwe Schindler
Udo Schnurpfeil Robert Scholte Siddharth Seth
Hitesh Shah Patricia Shanahan Daryn Sharp
Zhijie Shen Alexander Shorin Gordon Sim
Sami Siren Krzysztof Sobkowiak Maxim Solodovnik
Phil Sorber Kasper Sørensen Amareshwari Sriramadasu
Dominik Stadler Carl Steinbach Oleg Tikhonov
Joan Touzet Greg Trasuk Keith Turner
Leonardo Uribe Martin Veith Rob Vesse
Melissa Warnkin Volker Weber Patrick Wendell
Rupert Westenthaler Till Westmann Kim Whitehall
Reynold Xin Eric Yang Edward Yoon
Xuefu Zhang
This month we are trialling some new processes in the meeting to better
keep track of reports needing attention, and action items. Thanks
again to Sam and those that have tweaked Whimsy to help make that
seamless, and Greg for taking on responsibility for following up stale
action items.
It looks like we had a hiccup with the report reminders later in the
month, which may have contributed to a higher than usual number of
missing reports. I will follow up to make sure the next reminder goes
out successfully.
I'm planning to submit a report later this week as part of the Annual
Report that is being prepared.
James Carman has indicated that he plans to step down as Assistant
Secretary. On behalf of the board, I'd like to thank him for his
service!
On March 24, we held the Annual Members Meeting. There are still a couple of days for the remaining applications to come in, so we'll hold off the formal announcement of who the new members are, but I'm pleased to say that we added more than 100 new members this year! Our gratitude goes to the Secretary & assistant for processing all of the applications in addition to their regular workload. We had no concerns reaching quorum this year, in part due to the easier method of requesting a proxy. This will still remain a topic of some interest as the Foundation continues to grow. This is the first meeting of the newly elected board, and we welcome back Shane Curcuru, and for the first time David Nalley. I'd like to again thank Doug and Ross for their service to the ASF on the board after they stood down at the meeting. Below is the report that I shared with the members for the Annual Meeting: ------ I'd like to welcome all of our Members to our Annual Members Meeting for 2015. Thanks for taking some time out to participate in the governance of the ASF, including electing new Members, and electing the new Board of Directors. A special welcome again to the 40 new members elected during 2014. This year the meeting is being held slightly earlier than it has been in recent years. This allows the new board to be in place before the end of our fiscal year, and to review and approve the budget for the next year - a pattern I hope will be continued in the future. Even with a shorter period of time since the last meeting, there has been a lot happening within the ASF! We have added 13 new top-level projects: Tez, Celix, VXQuery, Storm, DeviceMap, Drill, MetaModel, BookKeeper, Falcon, Flink, Samza, Aurora and Zest. We retired just one project, with Whirr moving to the Apache Attic. Finally, we wound up our second oldest committee - Conference Planning - with responsibility moving to the President/EVP and our event and community partners. We now have 162 Project Management Committees, with a further 37 podlings in the Incubator. This means that within the next month we should expect to cross the milestone of having 200 projects under management at the ASF. Further to that, we've appointed replacement PMC chairs 29 times, showing that PMCs continue to rotate important positions, share the load and avoid volunteer burnout. We have grown at this steady rate while continuing to ensure that our projects operate under the pattern of open, collaborative and independent development known as "The Apache Way". Over the last year we have streamlined some processes to support this growth - adding to and expanding the tools that help manage PMC membership, monthly project reports, and management of the monthly board agenda. I expect this to continue, and thank the volunteers who have initiated and contributed to those efforts. The operations team are building a stable base for future growth. Our income and reserves have to date kept pace with growth, and we have gradually seen a transition from a day-to-day mode of operation towards a mode of planning and execution as we move forward each year. This helps ensure that these areas are able to provide the support that the Foundation and projects need, with a minimum number of distractions from producing software and building communities. Communication between the operations team and the board has been effective, and the board has adequate oversight and input into the work without needing to get more directly involved. Many thanks go to the President, EVP, and the VPs and committees that work with them for their significant efforts. We thank the sponsors and individual donors that contribute financially to the success of the ASF and its projects. Our thanks also go to the Treasurer, Secretary and their assistants who as volunteers put significant amounts of time into those roles and have kept them running extremely smoothly. As we looked back in 2014 at the 15 years of incorporation of the ASF, we recognised the massive impact that the Foundation has had on both the open source landscape, and computing in general. Every committer, PMC member, and contributor to our projects should be proud of what we've achieved and the part they have played in it. While many aspects of hosting and developing an open source project have become easier to do independently over the years, the benefits of being backed by a Foundation are routinely recognised within the open source development community. The ASF will certainly play a valuable role for many, many years to come. Finally, I'd like to thank the directors who served in 2014-15 for their dedication to the ASF and their regular contributions to its success both inside and outside of the board's activities. Particular thanks go to Ross Gardler (who will continue to serve as President) and Doug Cutting, who have opted not to stand at the coming election. Their presence among the board will be missed. We are therefore assured of welcoming new directors to the board this year, and the members have once again put forward a wonderful group of nominees. I wish the new board all the best for the coming year!
The availability of a new tool to help projects prepare their reports has been very successful, with several projects making use of it and including a note of thanks. Hopefully this will help take care of the regular comments about release/committer/PMC change dates. However, the board will need to continue to monitor reports that seem to become driven by the template and don't offer insight into project or the health of the community based on those data points. Preparations are in full swing for the Annual Members Meeting next week, being held earlier this year as discussed in previous reports. Despite a slightly shorter period of time for nominations, we have received a solid number for both the board and for new members. I'd like to thank the board for all their hard work over the last 10 months, and for enjoying a productive working relationship together. I wish all the same to the incoming board. It has again been a joy to serve you as Chairman and I thank you for the opportunity.
I've started to pull together the resources for the Annual meeting in late March (after the next and final meeting of the current board). I plan to set the record date and send out formal notices in the next week. I hope to encourage people unable to attend the meeting to submit non-voting proxies well in advance of the meeting, and will see what we can do to make that process easier. I also expect to perform the Omnibus resolution using the voter tool again, so that we do not need to pass any resolutions during the meeting itself.
Happy New Year! Following on from the discussion about budget timing, an early Annual Members Meeting has been suggested. This would require starting the process in the next week or two. We will also need to work through the questions about quorum raised at the 2014 meeting. Several other discussions have started among the board this month, but have been pushed out to committees such as Community Development and the Incubator. We have a higher than normal number of reports missing this month, likely due to the missing reminder emails and the holiday period.
Nothing specific to report this month.
Over the last few weeks, there has been quite a bit of activity celebrating the 15 year anniversary of the ASF. With such a long list of achievements, there is much that every contributor to the ASF can be proud of! We look to the future with excitement about what is still to come.
Last month, I asked all PMCs to review their committee records, and highlighted some known issues. Overall, I believe the records are in good shape. Thanks to the PMCs that responded quickly to the request. I was also encouraged that some took the opportunity to think about inviting new members they'd noticed were not listed. I updated the reporting guidelines for PMCs to include more detail about how the reporting process works, and to address some regular comments made [http://svn.apache.org/r1628351]. I intend to send them with a reminder to the PMCs this month. Opportunistically, I was able to meet with Ross and David Nalley while in San Francisco last month, which is described in the President's report. I also attended a meeting of the TODO Group while there, though have nothing to report from it. I was contacted by a project looking to join the ASF, and directed them to the Incubator proposal process. I've not received any further response. As Sally reports, I've been writing an introductory blog post for the series she is planning - a draft is on the press list for anyone that wants to provide input.
There has been some discussion about the maintenance of PMC records, with a couple of people interested in streamlining the process to reduce duplication and chances for human error. Other than that, another quiet month with nothing else to report.
The last month has been on the quiet side, possibly owing to summer vacations. Nothing new to report from my end. While I didn't complete it in time for this meeting, I've picked up on working to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the board list, as discussed in June and July.
We have now received all membership applications resulting from the
May Annual Members Meeting, and I'm pleased to announce the following
new members of the Apache Software Foundation:
Rajith Attapattu Tom Barber Jeremy Boynes
Joe Brockmeier David Brondsema Bryan Call
Hyunsik Choi Adam Estrada Jake Farrell
Sebastien Goasguen Jamie Goodyear Thilina Gunarathne
Lahiru Gunathilake Chathura Herath Benjamin Hindman
Jan Iversen Jan Willem Janssen Markus Jelsma
Jay Kreps Ross Laidlaw Brian LeRoux
Romain Manni-Bucau David Meikle Kevin McGrail
Justin Mclean Jean-Louis Monteiro Sebastian Nagel
Thejas Nair Achim Nierbeck Brock Noland
Andrew Purtell Ben Reser Gilles Sadowski
Christian Schneider Roman Shaposhnik Christoper Tubbs
Rob Weir Andy Wenk Aki Yoshida
Matei Alexandru Zaharia
Over the last month there has been some discussion about the authority
of project VPs to enter into binding agreements with third parties on
behalf of the ASF. While the need for this is extremely rare, we
reiterated that this can occur as long as it is contained to the scope
of their project, the agreement has been reviewed by the Legal Affairs
Committee and any other relevant officers, and that prior approval has
been given for any associated expenses. A suggestion has been made
that this be formalised through policy.
I've started a discussion about streamlining the monthly report
process in a way that may reduce the amount of traffic going through
the board's mailing list. I plan to tie that up and make any changes
to the reporting guidelines by the end of the month, before reports
start appearing for the August meeting.
The last month has been one of high activity, largely centred around the annual members meeting held on May 27. At the meeting we elected 40 new members of the Foundation, and will be able to announce them as soon as the last acceptance comes in. It has been encouraging to see a number of the new Members introducing themselves, and I hope it is a practice that continues! We also elected a new Board of Directors, welcoming back Rich Bowen and Ross Gardler for another term. Thanks go to Shane Curcuru and Roy Fielding for their service in the last year. The meeting resulted in a number of discussions being kicked off, particularly in relation to the difficulty we had in achieving quorum. There was also a lower voter turnout than the last few years (probably being the first time it was under 50%). There have been several suggestions made including simpler proxies, following up inactive members, and changes to the bylaws. These are all still open to pursue over the coming months, and I suggest we think about having a half-yearly meeting again this November to elect new members and try some incremental improvements. Other discussions this month included clarification of the release policy, and policies regarding the canonical source repository requirements for projects. Those are ongoing, with no need for further board intervention at this point. Below is the report I shared with the Members at the annual meeting. ---- The ASF recently marked its 15th year of incorporation, and I'm pleased to report that the Foundation remains strong and continues growing. Not only do ASF projects impact almost every area of computing, but the Apache License, our CLAs, and our pattern of open, collaborative development continue to influence and see adoption within the wider open source community. Over the last year, we've added 16 new top level projects and retired 4, bringing the total to 146 active projects. In addition to that, there are now 34 podlings in the incubator. From those projects, we've seen a number of major releases in the last year, as well as the usual steady stream of improvements, and the addition of new committers and Project Management Committee members to our expanding community. We again have a healthy slate of new member nominations, and nominations for the Board of Directors, which are promising for the future of the Foundation. The board has functioned well and been well represented in the last year, with directors from a number of different backgrounds within the ASF. Despite often holding quite different opinions, they have consistently worked well together and made forward progress on the things that matter to the Foundation. We have continued to focus on delegating operational responsibilities to the President and associated officers and committees. We have seen the expansion of the Executive Assistant role, started a new relationship with The Linux Foundation to produce ApacheCon, and begun working with Virtual for accounting and other needs. We are now well poised to complete a long-awaited Audit, and to ensure the smooth operation of each aspect of the Foundation going forward. We have also seen a number of changes in executive roles this year, with a new President Ross Gardler, Executive Vice President Rich Bowen, Assistant Secretary James Carman, VP Infrastructure David Nalley and myself in my first term as Chairman. Our particular thanks go to Jim Jagielski, Sam Ruby and Doug Cutting for their prior service in these roles which ensured that the transition was seamless, as well as their long standing and ongoing contributions to the ASF. Our thanks also to Roy Fielding, who is standing down as a director at this meeting. I'd like to thank all of our executive officers and directors for their service over the last year, which they do as volunteers. Finally, our thanks go to all of our sponsors, and to all of the committee members and committers that contribute their time to building great open source software, furthering the ASF's mission.
While some discussion about directed sponsorship and expanding project resources continued this month, the recent focus has been on immediate needs and the budget, as covered in the President's report. We have also been busy with preparations for the Annual Members Meeting, which will be held next week. We have a very healthy number of nominations for both new Members, and for the Board of Directors. This being the last meeting of the current board, I'd like to thank you all for your time, effort, and service to the Foundation, and for the privilege of being able to serve you as Chairman. It has been an honour!
I sent a notice to members, advising them that the Annual Members Meeting will be on May 27, and calling for nominations of new members and nominations for the 2014-15 board. This was sent via the members mailing list, with a separate notice sent to those members who are not subscribed to it. At the time of writing, we don't have a 2014-15 budget to approve for this meeting, so I've requested an update from Ross. ApacheCon recently completed, and while I wasn't able to attend, it sounds as if the event went well and was of great benefit. Many thanks to those who volunteered time to make it happen, and all the members of our community that participated! Jim volunteered to set up the voting tool for the Members' meeting.
At the last board meeting, we agreed on May 27 and 29 as the dates for the Annual Members Meeting. I will send out the formal notice to members and call for nominations of new members and the board in the next couple of weeks, once we're inside the required 60 day period. ApacheCon is coming up soon. Unfortunately, I'm not able to attend this year, though I'm interested to hear which other directors will be present. Given the timing, I don't expect there's a need for the board to formally meet face to face.
The main topic of discussion on the board list over the last month has been release practices. As it progressed, it was good to see that ongoing operational concerns were handled separately from discussion about how to do more frequent releases within the bounds of current ASF policy. Releasing open source software to the public is one of the most fundamental things we do, so it is important that it is handled diligently. We're getting closer to the time where we need to prepare for the Annual Members Meeting, so I've started to canvas dates. Currently the first week of June seems the most feasible, but I've included a discussion item in the agenda to decide. The ASF received an invitation to participate in the "2014 Future of Open Source Survey", which Sally has taken forward with the PMCs.
Nothing additional to report this month.
As the Secretary reports, there are some PMCs that have not kept their records up to date after making PMC changes. Many of these have been followed through, but I intend to pick up an action to remind all PMCs to check their records, and to follow up any that may find discrepancies. There didn't appear to be a great demand for a mid-year members meeting when it was put forward in October, so I haven't pursued it any further. I expect we would hold the annual meeting in May again, and will start to canvas dates in the new year.
Over the last month, we've seen a number of threads spill over to the board mailing list, which were at times quite heated. These all appear to have been resolved, with the relevant committees able to take the next action where necessary. One encouragement I took from the threads was seeing a few new faces among our members and officers contributing helpfully. The status of the audit, which we discussed last month, remains a prominent topic. It appears positioned well to move forward. Overall, projects at the ASF are going well and the reports list no major issues. Information on community health in the reports is steadily improving.
The last month has been rather quiet at the board level, with no particular issues needing our attention. In contrast, there is plenty happening on the operations end of the Foundation, and of course within our projects. That is a good thing. We do have some long standing items on the agenda for the meeting, which I hope we can bring some closure to. I've also raised the question of whether we should hold a special members meeting this year as we are at about the time where that process would need to start. I will be on holidays during the first week of November.
Last month's experiment to reach out to PMCs with comments on their reports the day before the meeting had moderately successful results. Many responded or amended their reports before the meeting, or soon after. It seems worthwhile pursuing more tools to ensure PMC chairs are aware of comments as they come in. We seem to have a higher than usual number of PMCs missing reports this month, which hopefully is an anomaly. Marvin Humphrey has edited the PMC documentation related to adding a new member to the PMC, allowing the chair to optionally run the notice and vote period simultaneously. Thanks to Doug and Cloudera for organising continued access to a conference bridge for the board calls.
Overall it has been a quiet month. The board received some requests to assist with PR, which various Directors responded to. The Attic has taken responsibility for the transition of two projects that were terminated in the July meeting. As agreed previously, there will be no face to face meeting of the board like we have had at around this time for the last few years. The next board may revisit that option again in 2014. Thanks go to Sam for adding web-based tools to manage the meeting agenda, which a number of directors and officers have been able to make use of.
At the June meeting, the Board appointed a new slate of Officers for the coming year: Chairman - Brett Porter Vice Chairman - Greg Stein President - Ross Gardler Execute Vice President - Rich Bowen Treasurer - Chris Mattmann Asst Treasurer - Sam Ruby Secretary - Craig Russell Asst Secretary - James Carman Our thanks go to Jim for his tireless efforts as the President, and his service in the many executive officer appointments he has held in the years since the Foundation was established! Thanks also to Doug for serving as the Chairman for the last 3 years, who leaves big shoes to fill. I'm honoured to be able to serve as the current Chairman, and thank the Board for the opportunity. Congratulations to Ross and Rich in their new roles as President and EVP, and James as the new Assistant Secretary. The new process for notifying the Board of PMC changes seems to have transitioned smoothly. Thanks to Greg for communicating and documenting the change. One PMC addition was pushed back in the last month. The handling of inactive PMC members continues to come up from time to time, but the documentation we have seems sufficient. We haven't yet been asked to approve a removal under the revised process. Overall, the Board is operating effectively.
We held our annual members meeting last month. 36 new members were added to the foundation. A new board was elected, adding Chris Mattmann and Shane Curcuru. Thanks again to Rich Bowen and Ross Gardler for their service on the board. My report from the annual meeting follows. --- It's been another great year for Apache. We've graduated about 25 new projects from the Incubator and now up to 139 projects. Folks in these projects successfully collaborated to produce hundreds of software releases. Hundreds of new committers have also been added, demonstrating the vitality and openness of our communities. Things look rosy looking forward too. We are fortunate to have sufficient sponsors to fund operations. Our organizational structures seem to mostly still be scaling well and not in need of major revision. The board has worked well together and has proven capable of making evolutionary changes as needed. Thanks to everyone who helps out here: the infrastructure team, officers, and every committer. As a primarily volunteer organization, we accomplish amazing things. Thanks especially to the membership for being the heart of Apache. We depend on you to ensure that we stay true to our mission.
Our annual members meeting is next week. Nominations have now closed. We have a strong slate of nominees for both membership and next year's board. Today is the final meeting of the current board. Thanks to those who served this past year. You effectively guided Apache on its mission. Thanks also for having me as your chair. It's been an honor.
I announced this year's members meeting, which will be held on IRC this May 21st and 23rd at 10:30am Pacific.
We intend to hold our annual members meeting this May 21 and 23, to elect a new board and add new members. We're now entering the 60-day advance notice window and should hence start publicising the meeting, soliciting nominations, etc.
There was a brief board discussion of the chain of command within the ASF. We agreed that our infrastructure contractors report to the VP of Infrastructure, who in turn reports to the President. While we try to keep things informal, it's still best to know where everyone stands formally. When the authority of our words are different depending on which hat hat we wear, whether officer, contractor, PMC member or ASF member, then we are wise to clarify.
Nothing to report.
At last month's meeting we decided not to hold a mid-year members meeting this year. We didn't hold one last year either. There doesn't seem to be much demand these days to add new members more than once a year. We intend to hold our next annual Members meeting this May. My preference is for the week of the 20th, unless I hear objections.
Thanks to Greg for running the meeting in my place last month when I could not make it.
No report was submitted.
We held our annual face-to-face board meeting last month, this year in the Washington DC area. We rapidly reached consensus in several areas that might have taken considerably longer to discuss over email, demonstrating the effectiveness of this annual tradition. Many thanks to Adobe for hosting the meeting. My summary of that meeting follows. --------------- We appointed the following new officers: Executive Vice President - Ross Gardler Treasurer - Chris Mattmann Assistant Treasurer - Sam Ruby Many thanks to exiting EVP Noirin Plunkett. We currently engage six paid contractors. Over time this number will likely increase, and long-term we may need to hire an Executive Director. In anticipation of this we decided to slightly re-organize the Foundation to better permit such a role. We now place all operational components of the Foundation under the President, rather than having some report directly to the Board. The groups that report through the President now include: Branding ConCom Fundraising Infrastructure Press Travel Assistance In particular, these groups will now submit their monthly reports to the President who will compile them into a single report to the Board. The President is now responsible for answering questions to the these groups from the Board.
The Board will hold its annual face-to-face meeting on the 28th of this month in the Washington DC area. The morning will be a closed, executive session with the afternoon open to visitors. At this meeting we'll discuss changes to our executive officer assignments. Folks who are interested in getting more involved in the Foundation's executive functions are encouraged to contact the Board. Greg has initiated the convention of listing expected travel expenses in a file (foundation/board/travel-data.txt). My expectation is that, going forward, Foundation-funded travel (except that funded by the Travel Assistance Committee) should be first listed there so that others have a chance to review such expenses before they're incurred. The Board has tasked Hadrian Zbarcea to develop a plan for an audit of our finances. With his advice, we hope to hire an accountant to perform either a review or a full audit before the end of the year. ConCom seems to be struggling to arrange a successful ApacheCon EU. The Board is concerned that such events expose the Foundation to excessive financial and legal risks. The Board and ConCom should establish event guidelines to limit these risks in the future.
Nothing to report this month.
The board's annual face-to-face meeting this will be held on August 28th this year in Washington DC, hosted by Adobe. We elected a new board last month at our annual members meeting. Rich Bowen and Ross Gardler were added to the board. Thanks again to Shane Curcuru and Daniel Kulp for their service on the board. My report from the annual meeting follows. --- It has been an outstanding year for the foundation. Our communities continue to release great software. The incubator has hatched a raft of new projects. Lots more are incubating and will soon join the ranks of TLPs. Our position as the leading community-based open source foundation has grown even stronger. We must be doing something right! We should congratulate ourselves for all our success. As we grow we require more resources. We've slowly increased the size of our infrastructure. Various other expenses have increased as well. But income from sponsors has thus far kept pace and our path seems sustainable. My thanks to everyone involved here. A special thanks to the directors, officers and project chairs for going the extra mile to keep our foundation running so well.
The annual members meeting will be held next week. Nominations are complete for both new members and for the new board. This is the last meeting of the current board. Thanks to all of you for your service!
I spoke about the ASF at an Open Source Think Tank meeting. Several groups there are using the Apache license but have created their own foundations, usually some form of pay-to-play. I argued that one of keys to Apache's success is a meritocratic, level playing field, and that a pay-to-play consortium works against this. Folks from Citrix contacted me about bringing their CloudStack project to the ASF. I outlined the incubation process to them. They also had some questions around publicity and sponsorship so I introduced them to the responsible ASF officers. The Incubator has since accepted their proposal for incubation. I announced the May 22 members meeting to the membership and sent out the calls for board and member nominations.
The board recently accepted the resignation of director Larry Rosen. In resigning Larry cited differences in the appropriate strategy and tactics for the foundation with the majority of the board. We thank Larry for his service to the foundation serving on the board and wish him well.
I remind folks that our annual members meeting will be held on IRC Tuesday 22 May from 10-noon Pacific, and resume on Thursday 24 May from 10-noon Pacific. Please start thinking about board and member nominations now.
No report was submitted.
There were a few protracted discussions on ASF internal mailing lists this month involving foundation members. Not all dialog was constructive. In general, I encourage everyone in the foundation to think before posting both whether they are making (1) a positive contribution to the conversation; and (2) good use of everyone on the list's time. I also encourage officers that manage lists to step in promptly when a thread goes out of control. More specifically, a question about how the foundation operates emerged from these discussions. I remind folks that board members do not individually set foundation policy. The board as a whole either directly votes to create policies or delegates the setting of policy in an area to an officer. Once an area (legal, fundraising, branding, etc.) is delegated, then all decisions for that area belong to the officer, not to the board, unless or until the board revisits that delegation.
We had a great face-to-face board meeting in Vancouver. Thanks to Microsoft and Gianugo Rabellino for hosting this. After a full days discussion and dinner we better understand one another's views about the foundation. This understanding improves our ability to work together on a day-to-day basis and is not easy to gain during our monthly conference calls and through our mailing list discussions. We agreed that we should continue to hold such annual face-to-face board meetings, but that it would be better to hold them sooner after board elections each year. We felt that OSCON is a good conference to hold these near, as many board members already attend. This is held in Portland, Oregon during July. Thus we decided that board elections should be held in April to better give newly elected board members time to plan their travel. We also decided not to hold a "special" mid-year meeting to elect members this year, as the board and member elections will take place soon enough in April.
The ASF has operated smoothly without major events this month. CouchDB and infrastructure are experimenting with git, to help determine out how this popular tool can reasonably be used at the ASF. The Board will hold its annual face-to-face meeting early next month at ApacheCon in Vancouver.
I travelled to Japan to speak at IDG's "Next Generation Data Center" conference. While there I gave five interviews to journalists. The primary topic of interest was Apache's Hadoop ecosystem, but I also tried to promote the ASF more generally whenever reasonable. Other than that, a quiet month.
In the past month I've done some ASF outreach. I gave a talk at Visa about open source and the ASF. I also met with folks from Huawei to answer their questions about how they might get more involved in ASF projects. I have scheduled a face-to-face board meeting for 7 November in Vancouver, BC.
We conducted our annual members meeting last week, electing a new board and 21 new members. The omnibus resolution easily passed, approving the board's actions over the past year. For the record, here is my annual report to the members: The ASF is the leading community-based software foundation. We provide legal, social and technical structure to nearly a hundred project communities. Our unifying theme is not any particular kind of software, but rather our way of collaborating. The past year has had its landmark events: in September we counted our millionth commit; in December we left the JCP; in February our software helped play Jeopardy; and in June we accepted OpenOffice.org into the incubator. We've taken positive steps in clarifying the Apache way. Thanks to Shane and others, our trademark policy is now better documented, understood and practiced. This has not been uncontroversial or painless, but as our projects become sucessful we must defend their identity. But let's not permit these highlights to blind us to our substantial everyday accomplishments: the myriad bugs fixed, features developed, releases cut, and committers added. Today we have ten more top-level projects and 21 more incubating than we did a year ago. We are a well-functioning foundation: we nurture communities that create great software. I'd like to welcome Larry and Brett to the board and thank Noirin and Geir for their service last year.
I have been travelling for the past month and have not been involved with much Apache business.
After months without measurable progress towards getting Sonatype to publicly acknowledge our Maven trademark, I gave the Maven PMC a deadline. Late last month I told the PMC that, if Sonatype does not publicly acknowledge the mark by the time of this board meeting then the board will find a way to resolve the issue itself.
A quiet month with few significant board-level events.
Little has happened at the board level since our last meeting outside of the normal business of the foundation.
I met with Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. We had a wide-ranging, friendly discussion of our commonalities and differences. Our trademark policies are very similar while our licenses and governance have some fundamental differences.
A special members meeting to elect new members is currently in recess. We had no trouble reaching quorum and have a good number of nominees, so I expect this to be a fruitful meeting. Beyond that, little of note has happened since the last board meeting. Question: should minutes of members's meetings be publicly published? AI Craig: publish minutes for the January 2011 meeting. Up for grabs: publish minutes for previous meetings.
The most notable action of the foundation since our last meeting was to leave the JCP EC. Jim and Geir discuss this more below. We plan to hold a Members meeting January 18-20. The primary purpose of the meeting will be to elect new members.
Thanks to all who helped put on another successful ApacheCon. I talked to a number of folks there who very much appreciated ApacheCon as a place for them to meet. The board has published several Java-related statements in the past month. We restated our support for the Harmony project in the light of IBM's reduced involvement. We expressed our pleasure at being re-elected to the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee, but also our concern that we might be forced to soon leave the JCP if Oracle does not start honoring its agreements there.
Overall, a quiet month for the board. The board is considering making a public statement on the impact of IBM's departure from the Harmony project. Related, we're contemplating the ASF's ongoing role in the JCP EC. No final decision has yet been made in either regard.
Thanks again to Sally for helping to arrange our annual face-to-face meeting earlier this month! This tradition pays throughout the year. With the opportunity to better know other directors, we reduce our chances of wasteful flamewars and increase the likelihood of teamwork. Also, dedicating a full day meant we could take the time required to discuss some difficult issues in depth. Last weekend, the Board's mailing list saw another airing of a project's desire to switch from Subversion to Git for source code management (SCM). The Board declined to address this beyond remarking that SCM for ASF projects should continue to run on hosts that the ASF controls and that further details should be worked out directly with the infrastructure team. In particular it seems that infrastructure volunteers are needed to resolve various issues before read/write Git can be fully supported.
Congratulations to the following newly elected members, voted in during last month's ASF members meeting: Bill Barker Andrzej Bialecki Max Bowsher Paul Burba Stephen Butler Branko Cibej Ben Collins-Sussman Chris Custine Chris Douglas Karl Fogel Simone Gianni David Glasser Lieven Govaerts Jonathan Gray Christian Grobmeier Leif Hedstrom Mark Hindess Greg Hudson Simon Laws Pierre-Arnaud Marcelot Philip Martin Michael McCandless Simon Nash C. Michael Pilato Peter Samuelson Stefan Seelmann Daniel Shahaf Jeremy Thomerson Hyrum Wright Blair Zajac Ivan Zhakov The foundation is currently coordinating the appointment of the Exec-Officers of the ASF; nominations have been submitted and discussions are proceeding. We expect the appointments to be performed at next month's board meeting. Before then, we will be having a semi-formal f2f meeting in Boston the weekend of Sept 10th, coordinated by Sally. Thanks to Sally, et.al. for setting all this up (and the various polls, surveys, etc...). Finally, we are sorry to see Henri tender his resignation from the board. He would be truly a valuable asset to the board but we do hope he continues to attend board meetings when he can. Approved by general consent.
The big news regarding the foundation over the last month is, of course, the members meeting which was held last week (via IRC). Of 34 new member nominees, 31 were elected in. They are currently being contacted in order to offer them membership to the ASF. Also at the meeting, the 9 slots for directors were filled. We have 5 returning directors from last year (Shane, Doug, Roy, Jim and Greg), 3 returning directors from previous years (Bertrand, Sam and Henri) and one "totally" new director, Noirin. Noirin is also noteworthy for being our first female director. Welcome to the new board and the new members. And a note of great appreciation for our outgoing directors and officers. Attendance at last weeks meeting was quite high, making attendance quorum with quite some room to spare. The percentage of members who voted was also high, averaging around 50%, with the board election garnering 63% participation. No doubt, the creation of the web front end GUI to the voting tool was a significant factor in this. Thanks again to JoeS and infra. I spoke yesterday (Tuesday) at the US Library of Congress in a panel discussion regarding Open Source and Open Source Communities. The community aspect of the ASF, and how we build and maintain highly dispersed but also highly functional communities was a specific item of interest at the event. The foundation is healthy and active. Re: Executive Officer appointments. I am more that willing to remain on-board as Chairman. Last year, there was also some interest in me taking on the task of President instead of Chairman, and I'm more than willing to do that as well... whatever spot the board would like to fill.
After last month's Chairman report, and the resulting discussion at the board meeting, I sent an Email to the membership and the PMCs with the main point of: I encourage all members and all PMCs to really, really review what it means to be an ASF member and what it means to be an ASF project. After that, be honest with yourself and ask whether or not the ASF is the place for you and/or for the project. And for projects, that decision should be discussed in the open, with the entire community. They deserve that much. This resulted in quite a bit of discussion and debate, some good and useful, some less so (imo). After maybe a week or so of intense email postings, the issue has died down. One good result of the discussion was a blog post [1] spearheaded by Bertrand Delacretaz regarding some "basic, invariant" guidelines and rules for/of Apache projects. As far as how many members and PMCs actually performed the requested "naval gazing", no one knows. I'll be speaking at the US Library of Congress July 2010 NDIIPP Partners meeting next month as part of a panel discussion. My focus will be on the history and "lessons learned" behind the creation, growth and continuance of the ASF. I scheduled the next Annual ASF Members meeting for July 13-15; as with most of the previous ones, this will be held via irc. As a reminder, it is at the annual meetings that we elect not only new members but also new directors for the board. My own personal opinion is that this board and officers have done quite a good job and my thanks and appreciation goes out to them. 1. https://blogs.apache.org/comdev/entry/what_makes_apache_projects_different
Over the last month, there have been some questions, issues and
topics discussed on the various mailing lists that have caused me to
reach an unacceptable level of concern and, dare I say it, even
alarm. Some may object to the tone of what I say, but it is due to
the continued and growing "disconnect" between some projects and the
ASF, and the huge amount of turmoil, resources and personal energy
that it sucks out of the foundation to respond to and handle.
The ASF is more than just a project-hosting location. It is, or
should be, a place where like-minded people share a vision on
how Open Source should be done. Certainly we are not so vain
to suggest that our way is the only way, but we do feel that it results
in long term, sustainable projects with code with as few restrictions
as possible and with IP governance that provides a level of assurance
that others can use it with minimal risk.
And yet it is surprising to me how many projects within the ASF
either don't understand, or follow or even appreciate some of these
core ideas. It is also upsetting that when the Chairman or any
director makes a comment about the situation, the content of the
comment is ignored (or seems to be).
We don't have process or procedures for the "fun" of it, but for
clearly defined and logical reasons. And yet that is not understood
and a small minority chaff at it, or blow it all out of proportion.
Logos and marks are important assets to the foundation and our
developer and user community, and yet again, a small minority don't
appreciate that and feel no need for even minimal protection.
For this small (but vocal) minority, I wonder where we went wrong.
Why join an organization to just ignore or disregard the very aspects
of it which made it useful and prosperous? Or why join an organization
but be totally ignorant of who they are and what they do?
And for us, the foundation, what can we do about it... and what
*should* we do about it, if we really want the ASF to continue
to live long and prosper?
In happier news, Welcome to the newest ASF members, elected
during March's member meeting:
Ian Boston Isabel Drost Brian Dube
Jonathan Ellis Gurkan Erdogdu Senaka Fernando
Otis Gospodnetic Niklas Gustavsson Andreas Lehmkuehler
Aristedes Maniatis Kathey Marsden Chris Mattmann
Fred Moyer Marcel Offermans Christopher Rhodes
Bob Schellink Vincent Siveton Michael Stack
Mark Struberg Tim Williams Donald Woods
Selvaratnam Uthaiyashankar Tony Wu
Shane: I share Jim's concerns, and we need to figure out how
to address it. We need to make it clear what is expected, as
it is not as clear as it could be.
Geir: I am concerned about the way this is being described:
"us" vs "them".
Brian: I second what Geir is saying. There clearly is a
disconnect.
Doug: This is a result of growth. I agree with Shane.
Henri: we had people leaving Commons for similar reasons:
requiring consensus of people who aren't contributing the
work. The expectation outside of the ASF is changing, in
particular 72 hours is a being perceived as a signficant
delay.
Sander: when do we require 72 hours? When does -1 block a
release?
Henri: in commons, we previously treated -1 as a release
blocker. We need more education. 72 hours is a meme that
allows everybody to participate.
Justin: I'm concerned that this never surfaced in any board
report.
Jim: we need more F2F get together to share the knowledge.
Documentation does help, but is not sufficient.
Sam: From http://www.apache.org/foundation/voting.html:
"Releases may not be vetoed" <== in bold
Jim: we were blind-sided. We take IP and IP tracking very
seriously. We want to avoid any kind of risks.
Sander: my suggestion is to require PMC chairs to dial in to
board meetings at least once.
Brian, Philip: people who report should dial in
Geir: adding more people would change the call (duration,
focus)
Brian: it also adds more (perceptions) of overhead
Doug: one call every three months is not that much
Jim: it is all perception. It can be perceived as a chore or
an opportunity.
Geir: what is missing is a chair with an affinity to the
foundation
Shane: we need to set the expectation that the chair is
associated with the ASF
Sander: we should ask new chairs to attend the first call
Sam: I think that the terms used in this board report sets the
wrong tone.
Jim: I agree, but I also see the need to be the bad guy to
communicate the need that we are serious
Doug: I think a less confrontational tone would be productive
Justin: It is Jim's sometimes you need to not be oblique,
sometimes you need a stick
Henri: if there is a carrot and a stick, I suggest that the
carrot goes first
Jim: While I share Sam's and Doug's concern, I would prefer to
keep my report largely as it is, but will change the wording.
[these minutes reflect the updated wording]
Of significant note for the last month is, of course, the (special) ASF Members Meeting, that was held via irc between the dates of April 23 thru the 29th. The reason for the long recess was due to some issues with the minotaur server, which hosts people.apache.org, and is the server used for voting via the ssh voter-tool. Infrastructure quickly brought minotaur back up, but I decided to allow some extra days for people to confirm their votes, as well as give infra some breathing room, just in case the server started acting up again. We had about 120 members (out of 277) counted towards the attendance quorum and 156 members voting. Although, historically, this is a "good" showing, the large number of members who didn't attend or vote is somewhat concerning. The requirements of being a member are not the least bit onerous, and yet many members cannot even achieve the bare minimum. The main task of the meeting was to allow for the nomination and election of new members. Due to the fact that a few of the newly elected members have not yet returned their signed member application, I am holding off announcing any specifics regarding the outcome. There was spirited discussion on the lists regarding ApacheCon and membership (what it is, what it means, etc...). Regarding ApacheCon, the board's position on ApacheCon was re-iterated and some misconceptions regarding the board position were (hopefully) cleared up; Concom is now taking all the input under advisement. Some suggestions regarding membership included a "new member Mentor" possibility, as well as trying to get some agreement and alignment among members on "what do you look for in a new member." This discussion has, unfortunately, died down without any clear consensus. The current status of our taxes and our CSC corporate status is still unknown. The number of missing reports this month is quite concerning...
A relatively quiet month, but with a few important items to report. First, of course, is the coming members meeting, to be held via irc next week. We look to have a nice set of nominated members. Secondly, our Delaware Annual Report was due March 1st, but, last I checked, despite numerous reminders and Emails starting from December of last year, had not been prepared or submitted. A status update would be appreciated. I echo Justin's thanks to the committees for their efforts in submitting their budgets. The hope and expectation that this years budgeting process will be much smoother than last years (no doubt it will be; last years was our first successful and completed effort and so some "difficulties" was to be expected). The foundation appears to be on solid ground.
From a board and foundation point of view, things have been relatively quiet. It looks as though most projects are running smoothly, with an even flow of activity, although that activity seems kinda quiet itself (note the number of reports that sum up as "not that much going on"). I don't consider that a concern. Kudos to infra for the LDAP migration. I've updated my script that generates the projects.html and committers.html page to be LDAP aware and have placed it in the foundation:board/scripts repo. Will be sending out notice of the ASF (Special) Members meeting after this meeting. Although this could become a somewhat "charged" topic, I feel the need to bring up a growing concern that I've been having. No doubt, some will see this as just a grumpy-old-man rant about the "good old days", but I hope not. I've observed that even though a number of projects "get" the ASF way of managing and overseeing projects, their affiliation to or "loyalty" to the ASF itself seems quite limited. The closest analogy I can come up with is the difference between people who, after graduation from University, stay in touch with the school, join the Alumni association, etc and those who say "I did my time, I have my degree and it has their name on it, which is all I wanted.". As more and more ASF projects become cornerstones of IT and web infrastructure, and as more and more companies continue to leverage ASF projects, this has the potential, I think, to disrupt the whole community structure of the ASF. It's just something I want the board to maybe consider and keep in the back of their minds. Is this something the Incubator can help with? I continue to be contacted regarding speaking at events, which I have had to refer to other ASFers due to some limited time availability these last few months. (If they are online interviews, I accept.) Come March, I should be able to accept a lot more of these in-person requests. General agreement on Jim's concern; splitting umbrella projects is a good first step; beyond that no action taken. 23-25th March proposed for members meeting; Sam is unavailable for the 23rd (W3C AC meeting), Craig will be the acting Secretary for that meeting.
After the last board meeting there was quite a rigorous discussion thread regarding the board's modification of the submitted Axis TLP resolution before voting on it. It was noted as a reminder that the board has ultimate responsibility and authority over the content of resolutions, but it was also suggested that what the board "should have" done was table the resolution and bounce it back requesting the changes be made and re-submitted. It was noted that the former is actually an indication of a "well-running" board and that a dysfunctional board would have taken the former action. A legal issue was brought to the board's attention and was referred to the legal cmmt for follow-through. I sent a reminder to the board that our Delaware Annual Report, for our corporate status, is due by March 1. A member's meeting still needs to be scheduled. Big uproar on the mailing lists over the board taking initiative, but the general consensus of the board is that the board did what it should have done. Waiting wouldn't have served any purpose.
Not a lot to report. I've been watching the results of the disbanding of the PRC (and the subsequent creation of the separate offices) and have been pleased with the progress so far. I am concerned about the impacts of the sponsorship transition, but that is just the paranoid in me coming out. We are due for our "special" ASF members meeting, and have pinged the membership regarding the feasibility of it being held in mid/late January of 2010. board@ and members@ have been relatively quiet. At the start of the year, I'd like restart discussion regarding an EA, a formal audit of our books and a review of our current budgeting projections.
The last month has been spent pretty much on board-related and ApacheCon (and our 10th anniversary/birthday) events. There's been a lot of very good discussion, both f2f as well as on-lists and we are making headway into some very hairy issues, as seen by the PRC re-org as well as our feedback to Concom. But there is more to be done, witness allowing the new post-PRC cmmts to work and flourish as well as EA issue. At ApacheCon (as well as the weeks heading into it), I spent some time providing interviews and the like, related to the ASF and our 10th birthday. This is winding down now. At ApacheCon, Greg, Sander, Justin and I met with most of our sponsors to get feedback as well as provide some insight into what has been going on. As a result, Greg will be/has requested a sponsors@ mailing list that we can use to streamline communications between ourselves and our sponsors. I am starting to draft our "year in review" letter. We will be appointing new officers this meeting. No matter how it shapes up, I have enjoyed my time as Chairman and feel that I have been quite successful in its duties and under my Chairmanship, the board has achieved some goals which had been on our plates for quite some time. I have appreciated your trust.
Over the last month, quite a few interesting items popped up. First, we had a committer who was "abusing" their committer perks (mostly use of their apache.org Email address and their association with the ASF) for some questionable MLM promotions. After numerous discussions, I considered it prudent to temporarily suspend the committer's privileges (this is the item noted in the Infra report). Discussions are ongoing and I anticipate a smooth closure, and reinstatement of said privileges. There has also been discussion on the members@ list about the "should directors also be allowed to be officers" thread, of a couple of months ago. This discussion was just rebooted but the debate looks healthy. Our board get-together is imminent, to be held at Ovid Vineyards on November 1st. Current consensus is that all non-PMC chairs are also invited and encouraged to attend. We still need a status update regarding transportation to and fro. Quite a number of resolutions are in the agenda regarding changes in PMC chairs. I don't recall any other meeting with so many. Quite interesting. I worked with CSC and the State Of Delaware after it was discovered that our corporate status had been suspended. I am still working on finding out where the communication breakdown occurred, but at least, in the meantime, all has been resolved. The board seems to be working quite well and quite smoothly, as does the foundation itself. That is not to say that we don't have some significant issues that need to be handled. Ongoing Sponsor- ship, calendar-and-contract-tracking, and standard office support, still are open issues that have yet to be worked, much less resolved. Again, we seem to do quite well reactively, yet still leave something to be desired for proactive work. We need to knuckle under and drive some of these things, and that's something I intend to start working on immediately. Discussion: Brian will arrange transportation. Jim clarified that the board meeting is open to all officers except for PMC chairs per board direction.
We are in the process of finalizing plans for our board "get- together", set for November 1st. There are 2 candidate locations for the event: one in Napa Valley and another closer to to the Oakland area. You will see that this is a discussion item for later on. I have renewed our D&O Insurance; we remain with the same broker and same coverage but the price is a little less than last year. Kudos to Infra for handling the security incident with speed, professionalism and openness. The board list has been mostly quiet this month, but there is a lot of foundation work being done at the PMC and committee level, and the level of activity is quite nice. This is especially true in TAC, PRC and even Incubator (as related to foundation-issue). Even so, the main concern at present still seems to be documentation of all existing policies, since there are still some that lack a single definitive "write-up" of such, resulting in the mistaken conclusion that either non-exists or there is no consensus. This has been obvious within PRC but also within Incubator as well. Again, kudos to both entities for closing this loop. Two interviews with myself were published within the last month, one with Linux.com and another with eWeek. Also, Justin, Sally and I had a general talk with Microsoft (Sam Ramji and Robert Duffner) about several topics, including ASF sponsorship renewal, their sponsorship of ApacheCon and their hopes for feedback and insight regarding their CodePlex foundation. My email summary of the board meeting will now go to committers@ instead of members@. At the risk of (re)opening a can-of-worms, I'd like reboot the EA effort. You will also see that PRC is discussing a re-organization, and we should discuss if there are any reorgs which we would find unacceptable. We had delayed officer appointments until this month, but I have not seen any requests to follow up with this; my hope is that it is because the current set of officers are doing well enough and not because of apathy. Whatever the case, I am certainly willing to remain Chairman and, should we decide to schedule appointments, would be willing to accept any nomination to remain so. In any case, we should decide whether we want to schedule appointments and when.
The big news since last month is that we've received all the accepted and signed member application from all candidates elected in at the last members' meeting. Therefore, we officially would like to welcome the following new members to the ASF: Cezar Andrei David Bertoni James Carman Maria Odea Ching Brian Fox Janne Jalkanen Damien Katz Luc Maisonobe Benson Margulies Kevin Menard Simon Pepping Asankha Perera Gareth Reakes Greg Reddin Julian Reschke Peter Rossbach Carlos Sanchez Dain Sundstrom Carl Trieloff Julien Vermillard Hadrian Zbarcea I renewed the foundation's D&O Insurance for another year, with similar terms and pricing as last years. The renewal process was a bit more involved, due to insurance companies being much more circumspect in their renewals. We are hoping to have a director's get-together, with the most likely "venue" being located on the east coast sometime early-to-mid October. We should discuss this and try to finalize a date and location. See Infra's report regarding possibly also having a softball game at the same time. There's been a request to have the get together in the Boston area. We're seeing quite a bit of "leakage" between the prc@ and the members@ mailing lists. Topics related to this leakage are mostly regarding trademark policy and branding. I have attempted to describe the policy that the ASF has been operating under for the last ~15years with some success. Also regarding members@, there was an interesting thread regarding the Incubator as well. I was interview by Linux.com regarding a wide-range of topics, from the ASF 10 Year Anniversary, to the Apache License, to the growth of Linux. This was facilitated through PRC. We now have a new ASF concall account. All PMC chairs have been made aware of the new account info, and they have been asked to contact directors if they need the "host" account info. All in all, a relatively quiet and well running month.
The big news of the month is that we had our annual ASF members
meeting, held via IRC, on July 7th ("thru" July 9th). Although
official numbers aren't posted yet, we had an extremely large
turnout, both in attendance as well as in the poll, casting votes.
We voted in 21 new members; the names are not yet public until all
new members have been contacted and we receive their signed member
applications. By next months meeting, however, we'll be able to
note their names for the record.
We also saw a large turnover in the board as well, with 5 new
directors joining 4 returning directors. I would like to take this
opportunity to thank all the previous directors (Bertrand Delacretaz,
J Aaron Farr, William Rowe Jr, Sam Ruby and Henning Schmiedehausen)
and to welcome in the "new guys" (Shane Curcuru, Doug Cutting,
Roy T. Fielding, Brian McCallister and Brett Porter). Because of
the large turnover, the board has decided to postpone Executive
Officer appointments until September. Still an open topic is the
question regarding directors also being officers. The general
consensus seems to be that having a formal rule in place pre-
venting it seems overkill, but that it should be strongly
discouraged. The overall responsibility for the decision rests
on the board (and the individual as well).
As per our policy, raw board ballots have been committed to SVN.
Good, healthy discussion is continuing on members@ regarding
topics such as additional fundraising techniques (eg: store.apache.org)
and others. Work is also continuing regarding our presence at OSCON.
The old conference-call account is going away the end of this month. We
are getting a new service, also donated by SpringSource. I will forward
account info to directors and officers later on this week. As with the old,
this is an ASF-specific account for foundation use.
Without a doubt, this year will be an interesting one.
Since the last board meeting, there has been continued discussion and debate regarding the budget and the budget process. It would be a mistake to call these smooth. However, the hope and the goal is that we have learned from this process and that the next go-round with be more smooth and more reserved. With the upcoming members meeting (and board election), there has also been ongoing discussions regarding more general aspects of the ASF, mostly related to marketing and PR and its alignment (if any) with our mission. Also under discussion has been the sponsorship program and its influence and impact (if any) on our mission. I created an Email thread specifically about this to try to gauge what the specific issues are and what specific, actionable remedies may exist (if required). It is, btw, somewhat ironic, that 2 major action items that the foundation have been trying to accomplish for years (the budget and the sponsorship program), once they have been realized, have created so much conflict. Regarding the board elections, we will see another large turn-over in directors; at the very least, 3 current directors have chosen not to rerun. A reminder that the ASF members meeting is scheduled for July 7th (and 9th) and that time remains for new member and new director nominations. With the conflict of the last several weeks, it is easy for that to influence the perception of the board and the effectiveness of the board over the last 12 months. That is, imo, a darn shame, because we have successfully made some major changes and major strides in getting the ASF on auto-pilot. Back when we were much smaller, it was easy for volunteers to do all the "foundation infrastructure" work, since there wasn't much. As we have grown significantly larger, that is no longer the case and getting us to a place where we can continue to allow and empower volunteers to do that, while ensuring continuity and closure of issues is a difficult task, which this board has been very crucial in handling. My personal thanks go to each and every director and officer.
On April 28th, we held a board special meeting, via concall and irc.
The topic of this meeting was discussion regarding the draft and
proposed 2009-2010 budget. The concall was held because it appeared
to me that we were not making much progress at all trying to
handle this via Email. Most line items of the budget solicited no
negative feedback, and the only areas which seem to be a point of
discussion are: (1) The EA position's full-time/part-time status;
(2) The requested additional amount for focused sponsorship
handling and (3) the connection between #2 and the external PR
Agency contract handled by PRC.
To further clarify the expected time-requirement for the EA position,
I again queried various committees to obtain their "usage stats" on
such a position, should it exist ("how much could/would you offload
to the EA?"). Responses clearly seem to indicate that, as expected,
a full-time EA (though with a varying cyclic load) would be required.
The options regarding the dedicated (or focused) Sponsorship liasion
task included officially adding this, at the required level, to
the current contract with HALO or "outsourcing" this to another
person/agency. If bundled with HALO, then the scope of the contract
was also discussed, and whether the required "normal" PR/marketing
aspects would be reduced due to budgetary reasons.
Although there appears to be consensus that typical PR/marketing
for the ASF is expected, required and allowed, there does not seem
to be complete consensus on the levels, budget-wise, this should
be held at.
Nevertheless, I feel that we can no longer continue to operate with-
out an approved budget. We have a fiduciary responsibility to this
foundation and, therefore, am calling on a vote for the proposed
budget. It would be nice for it to be unanimous, but I feel that
instead it will be one of our very rare "split" votes.
In addition to the budget (and related) debates, there has been
continued discussion regarding git, as related to our infrastructure
as well as our culture. So far, the discussion has been measured.
The past month has been incredibly busy with board and foundation
related activities, in support of various tasks. Additionally, I
will be presenting a "Tux Talk" for HP, one of our Sponsors, next
month regarding the ASF and Open Source in general.
Finally, we are due for our annual ASF members meeting with an
election of new members and a new board. I have proposed a date of
June 30th for this meeting.
Bertrand indicated that he is unavailable the week of June 30th.
Sam questions whether the feedback indicated a full time EA
was needed.
Geir asked what the ramifications are for not having an
approved budget. Jim simply responded that it reflects very
badly on us. Legally we could proceed as we had been. There
would be no operational ramifications.
Over the last month, we have seen quite a bit of activity, interest and discussion; some good, some not so good. On the good side, the treasurer transition appears to be going well, with the only remaining action item being the actual taxes themselves (admittedly, a major item). Also, other action items, such as the budget and EA search are progressing, although maybe not at the speed that some would like. Regarding the budget, there was an informal meeting at ApacheCon with JAaron, Sander, Sally, Justin, Bill and myself (also in attendance was Leo) to try to scrub some of the numbers in the current draft budget, mostly from a PRC, Infra and Concom point of view. These were committed back to the draft version. Regarding the EA search cmmt, a draft "task list" is, and has been, available in SVN for quite some time. Some updates and changes have been made, mostly by myself, with additional updates by Bill and Sam. The general consensus is that all directors are under close agreement, although there are differing "semantics" on how we are phrasing some tasks. The biggest discussion point was regarding the "accounting/bookkeeping" aspects of the position, especially since we just tagged a new treasurer. Sander is working on drafting a true Job Description based on the task list. As mentioned in the PRC report, there was a lot of activity and interest centered around the ASF's 10th Anniversary, primarily at ApacheCon EU but also elsewhere. This is expected to continue and to culminate at the ApacheCon US show in Oakland. In support of ApacheCon and the ASF, I did quite a number of f2f and online chats and interviews. Speaking of ApacheCon, from my own point of view, the conference was quite successful; it was especially interesting to see the huge success of the various Meetups, and to see so many of the sessions and informal presentations with packed rooms. I was also pleasantly surprised with how well the Chat and Chew sessions went, including my own (regarding the ASF Sponsorship program). I am currently working with HP to organize and schedule a "Tux Talk" session with them, regarding the ASF and Open Source. These sessions are online based. On the 'not-so-good' side (depending on one's point of view, this may not be an accurate adjective... some may consider it "healthy", others as "very bad") there was quite a heated thread on board@ regarding personality conflicts between some members of the board. In my opinion, unless such conflicts hinder the operation of the board, this is not a major board concern. After all, although it would be great if all directors were BFFs, the reality is that such an ideal viewpoint would be almost impossible to achieve in reality, and would not necessarily result in a "better running" or more efficient board. In any case, we are due for our annual members meeting and for the election of a new board. I anticipate scheduling this for June and will float some candidate dates past the membership for feedback. I expect, of course, it to be held via IRC and using the ssh-based voter tool. The SecAssist postion was renewed for another 3 month period. At last month's report, it was just noted that it was "received." It has, in fact, been accepted, signed and filed.
We are less than a week away from ApacheCon EU 2009, which is note- worthy because it kicks off our decade of the ASF media push. Sally is coordinating interviews and other media-related engagements to promote this very cool event. The membership application for us to "join" W3C is still, at last check, still "in process." It feels good for us to be better at handling paperwork than other organizations! Both the board and member mailing lists have been relatively quiet. The foundation and the board are ticking along. I have sent a contract renewal to our current secretarial assistant for a duration of 3 months. It is expected that we will have our EA on board before the contract expires, and we can let the EA provide feedback on whether to continue the contract as well as what changes may be required. At present, I have not yet seen the contract filed, but there were issues with the faxing to the eFax line; If the SA has not rec'd it after I refaxed it on 3/17/09, I will scan and Email. I will be presenting and attending ACEU09, and have a number of interviews and meetings already setup. Sally will be coordinating my schedule for these events.
This month saw a lot of discussion regarding a number of issues. At times the discussions were relatively heated. The main discussion was regarding the EA role, which the board created a President's cmmt last month to review, define and search for. Unfortunately, the majority of the discussion was during the time when Sander was offline, so he was unable to weigh in and provide his comments. Nevertheless, the discussion was helpful and did bootstrap the cmmt's task. I created a draft EA position description which Bill and others have updated. There was also discussion regarding the CouchDB project. There was some concern, based on posts from the dev@ and user@ mailing lists, that some aspects of the project may be deviating from ASF norms. Since part of the concern was based on the interaction between the VP and the community, and since the VP is the "eyes and ears" of the board, I brought this up on the board list. The CouchDB report refers to this and brings the matter to current closure. The non-availability of the Treasurer continues to be a problem and is a major input to the current description of what an EA should be. The board thanks Geir for stepping in and stepping up and helping close some of the major holes and open issues regarding invoicing and payments. It should be noted that it is the board's understanding that the tax filing have still not occured and that we are late in the filing and incuring penalties. Justin has informed us that we are able to file for yet another extension, which is currently in process. I have signed the Member Agreement with the W3C on behalf of the ASF with myself the ASF representative. Due to the legalities of the W3C, this agreement can only be postal mailed. We have, as of this date, not received confirmation. Work on a budget has continued. I created and updated an initial budget and Justin provided substantial edits to it. This budget is being verified with the representative cmmts (eg: PRC, ...). Also I have been working on the position description for the EA as part of the Admin Search cmmt. The one membership application noted in last months report as being "in transit" as been received and recorded by the Secretary.
This year marks an important point for the ASF and for the FOSS
community in general: In 2009 we celebrate the 10th anniversary of
the incorporation of the ASF. Little did we realize at that point
just how viable and valuable the ASF would be and continue to be.
The PRC is working to ensure that this important event receives the
notice it is due.
During 2008 we saw continued agressive growth within the ASF, with
new members and new PMCs and new podlings. We have kept pace with
this growth via outsourcing some basic functions as needed, and
keeping our infrastructure up to date and being pro-active. The
board, and I personally, wish to thank every volunteer, committer,
PMC member and ASF member who helped make 2008 a great year.
Last month we held an ASF Members Meeting and we voted in 17 new
members. All elected members have accepted the nomination and have
provided their signed member applications (one is still in transit).
It is my pleasure to announce the following new members of the ASF:
Assaf Arkin Afkham Azeez Nathan Beyer
Alex Boisvert Eric Covener Nigel Daley
Thomas Fischer Michael Glavassevich Paul Hammant
Andreas Hartmann Oleg Kalnichevski Xiao-Feng Li
Karl Paul Luciano Resende Lawrence Rosen
Thorsten Scherler Bojan Smojver
I have agreed to serve as the ASF's Advisory Committee
Representative to the W3C. This finally creates a bridge between
these two organizations, hopefully to the betterment of the Internet
community at large.
On a somewhat uncomfortable note, I am somewhat concerned about
balls being dropped at the board and officer level. We are starting
to see a drop, imo, in the level of responsibility towards tasks and
roles (for example, see some of the various PMC reports which appear
to be whipped together at the last minute). Accepting a board and/or
officer position requires an honest assessment that one can fullfill
those duties. Of course, we are all volunteers who do these tasks
when we can, and things (personal, work or otherwise) pop up which
can affect our ability to do them in a timely manner. There is (and
should be) no shame in saying this and asking for help if needed.
For the most part, we are all people who have a hard time doing that
however. We need to get past that. I certainly do not claim being
immune from this phenomena.
We agreed to accept membership applications based on the
postmark date
Repeating what was submitted at the Members Meeting on
December 16th. Oh yeah... We're holding a members meeting.
Credit cards for Sander and Paul were received and FedExed out
to them. Both Sander and Paul reported getting them.
An invoice for CSC was received via postal mail and it was
FAXed to the secretary for processing. The invoice was recorded
and approved for payment.
Since we are in December already, this will be an "almost end-of-
year" report for the ASF. Over the last 12 months, including last
December, we've seen an addition of 48 new members: 32 in Dec. 2007
and 16 in June of this year. Unfortunately, we have also tragically
lost a valued and dear member, Dion Gillard, and a noteworthy
Wicket member, Maurice Marrink. We miss them both.
The ASF has also seen a large growth in the number of TLPs.
New over the last 12 months are 12 projects: Synapse, Hadoop,
Continuum, Archiva, CXF, Tuscany, TAC, CouchDB, Buildr, Attic,
Qpid and Abdera, most of which graduated from the Incubator.
At the members meeting in June, the new board was voted in.
All previous directors were re-elected except for Henri Yandell,
who chose not to run. Bertrand Delacretaz was elected to fill the
open position. Thus, the board is:
Bertrand Delacretaz Justin Erenkrantz J Aaron Farr
Jim Jagielski Geir Magnusson Jr William Rowe Jr
Sam Ruby Henning Schmiedehausen Greg Stein
Also new this year was the separation of the Executive Vice
President (EVP) and Secretary roles. The board appointed
Sander Striker as EVP. Paul Querna was also appointed as Chair
of the Infrastructure team.
The ASF Sponsorship Program has been a great success. All previous
Platinum, Gold and Silver sponsors are renewing and we welcomed
many new sponsors (*) as well:
Platinum:
Google
Microsoft*
Yahoo!
Gold:
HP
Silver:
SpringSource (Covalent) / Progress (IONA)
Bronze:
AirPlus International. / BlueNog* / Intuit*
Matt Mullenweg / Tetsuya Kitahata / Two Sigma Investments
We wish to officially thank all of our Sponsors.
Continuing our pattern, we held ApacheCon Europe earlier in the
year (April actually, in Amsterdam) and ApacheCon US later on
(in November in New Orleans). Both shows were very successful.
Additionally, after the US show, many members and attendees stayed
in New Orleans to help with additional community service by rebuilding
a fence that was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina. The Travel
Assistance Committee (TAC) also finally obtained the right mix of
people and were able to help provide financial assistance to some
worthy attendees.
The ASF Infrastructure continues to grow, both as the number of
projects and people increase, but also due to the deligent oversight
of the Infra team itself, being proactive in obtaining additional
resources and hardware to meet our requirements.
Members may have noticed an increase in the public relations
activity related to the foundation over the last 12 months as
well. Some of this is, of course, related to the Sponsorship
Program, as encouragement for organizations to sponsor us.
That is not the whole story however. It is also due to the
fact that we realize that we have a compelling story to tell
and that people and other organization are honestly interested
in us, our history, our philosophy and how we do what we do.
Many thanks to HALO Worldwide for helping us define and
implement this PR strategy.
Finally, 2009 marks the 10th anniversary of The Apache Software
Foundation. Little did we realize, when we created the ASF, just
how important, crucial and respected the ASF would be a decade
later. But maybe all of us should not be surprised at all.
Foundation-wise it was a busy month. Of course, there was the ApacheCon conference in NOLA which was very well received. During the event, we took the opportunity to connect with many of our Sponsors, specifically Progress/IONA, Springsource/Covalent, HP, Yahoo! and Microsoft. The intent was to get some feedback from them regarding their impressions of the Sponsorship program, what has worked and what could be better. HALO helped coordinate these meetings. Full feedback will provided as available, both to the board and to the PRC. In general, there were 3 main points from the Sponsors: (1) A desire for more direct and frequent communication with the ASF; (2) a better understanding of how we are utilizing our funds; and (3) how Sponsors and the ASF can work together to increase the "brand" and overall use of ASF technologies. More information is in the PRC report. There were a number of interviews held at the event as well, most notably with Michael Cote and with Pam Derringer. The former was foundation general whereas the latter was mostly around the httpd server project. We also had a meeting with Ted Guild of the W3C regarding better ways for the 2 organizations to "work" together. As you know, the actual mechanics on how to do this had been a sticking point for years. At the meeting, however, we came to a very easy and simple agreement: that the ASF would be a participant in W3C in a very similar manner to how we are in the JCP; we would not be required to pay any sort of "membership" fee. Alternatively, interested individuals within W3C would be encouraged to get more involved in the various ASF projects which interest them and their groups. I will be the main point of contact/liason in the ASF/W3C relationship for the time being. As with previous ApacheCons, I presented the State of the Feather and ASF Sponsorship talks at ACUS. The SotF talk will form the basis for our end-of-year release as well as content for our Sponsorship communications. On a personal note, due to the time constraints with the SotF talk is always under, the format of this talk should be changed. The Sponsorship talk was held during lunchtime. This is, to be charitable, an extremely bad time for that talk to have been held. In keeping with that topic, the (special) ASF members meeting is scheduled for December 16th and 18th, 2008 at 16:00 UTC. As with previous meetings, it will be held via IRC. The main topics expected for this meeting will be the election of new members. I was invited to present at a "Tux Talk" at HP. This is basically an opportunity for outside experts to speak to teams within HP to increase awareness and usage of Open Source, and Apache technologies specifically, within HP. This is still being scheduled. I am encouraged to see such a large number of TLP resolutions this month. The last 6 months had been somewhat dry in that regards. It is great to see the continued growth within the foundation. Because of our continued growth, as well as due to feedback from our Sponsors (as noted above) and because of possible large expenditures in the near future (and also, quite frankly, because it is our fiduciary duty), I feel that it is very important that we actually work towards crafting a real, honest to goodness budget. We have subcontractors, real expenses and financial committments. We have operated without a budget for too long. I am also happy to see that Concom did such a good job at ACUS. The event venue especially was a great fit for the crowd. Also, the sessions themselves were, from all accounts, for the most part very successful as well. Kudos also to the TAC. Finally, it's also good that we are starting a mechanism to handle "stale" projects, which, no doubt, will be an issue as we continue along. It is great when people just step up, see a need, and work towards it. Discussion: Perhaps the audit committee could help with the budget?
Just recently, there was (and is still somewhat ongoing) an interesting discussion on members@ concerning the use of git at the ASF. Leaving aside this exact issue for the time being, this does bring to mind a topic which has been on my mind for quite awhile. Specifically, what are the major challenges that the ASF will meet in the future. There is a PoV that scaling and growth is likely the biggest thing to affect us in the short term, but I don't agree. History has shown that we've been able to handle this and, even assuming a sudden large increase, I just don't see how it would result in such a cultural or infrastructural shift as to significantly change who or what we are. No, IMO, the biggest hurdle for us with be in encouraging and fostering innovation, and remaining relevant in the community. We see quite a number of projects just "ticking along" which, in and of itself, is not a bad sign, but when we also see a decrease in energy and innovation within that project, then obviously, we should have some concern. So the question is how to encourage innovation? Obviously this is at one level a cultural issue; it must be clear that this sort of innovative, "flash of genius" development (such as Roy described in his "Apache 3.0" keynote) is not only allowed but welcomed. But also, we should have the tools available to make this easier. In other words, if our current (approved) developer toolset is a limiting factor, we should drop them in favor of more "innovative" tools. Of course, this all implies that innovation and relevance is something that, as a foundation, we value and want to foster. I am sure that there are members who really couldn't care at all if we are "relevant", as long as we are able to create the kind of s/w we currently are. And this is a valid point. My main question is whether we are, right now, at the end of our evolutionary development, or if we are still allowing change. After all, this is really under our control. There has been continuing but somewhat reduced discussion on the the PMC-member ACK policy. It appears that there is no clear consensus that this needs to be changed. We are coming up due for a members meeting, most likely in December. I will query the membership regarding potential dates. There will likely be a town hall meeting at ApacheCon New Orleans. We will coordinate this on board@.
Foundation-wise, the last month has been relatively quiet. However, there are some outstanding issues related to board and board-level activities, such as contract renewals (past due and soon-due) and invoicing and payments. Note that an extension for filing our tax return was requested and handled by Aaron and Sam. It also worthwhile to note that many reports from PMC indicate projects which are simply "ticking along" with no real active development, but no real issues either. Is this an issue of stagnation, or simply the result of software which does what it is supposed to do, and that's good enough? The board list has mostly been quiet, with just a surge of activity recently regarding the "ACK policy" with PMC changes. I gave 2 small interviews over the last month, one regarding Open Source in general and the other about the ASF specifically. I am also currently working on the State Of The Feather talk scheduled for ApacheCon US.
Since the last board meeting, the major foundation-wise news was the announcement of Microsoft as a new Platinum Sponsor (as noted in the PRC report). The significance of this should not be minimized: The ASF is seen, by Microsoft as well as others, as the pragmatic yet steadfast voice (and organization) in the FOSS space. Our committment to FOSS, our charter and our (for lack of a better term) "moral compass" is never in question, yet we are also considered as reasonable and realistic people. In addition to creating an organization which allows us to develop code and grow communities, we are also in a unique position to help other entities understand more about open source (and open source collaboration and methods) as they make their transitions towards embracing FOSS. We should be proud. Our D&O Insurance was renewed but with a higher liability coverage this cycle as compared with last year. We are also looking at extending coverage for other items as well. Thanks goes to the EA for handling this effort. As noted in the Action Items section, I worked with the EA to get the Parallels partition (which contains our QB installation) up and running on his Windows machine (via WMWare). It's good to know, for future information, that the Parallels->VMWare partition converter works just fine, since I know that Aaron has expressed some interest in migrating to VMWare. There was some (healthy) discussion regarding the level of detail we "want" included in the board minutes. This is noted as a discussion item for this meeting. There were no other board related issues/discussions during this time, nor any TLP graduations. There were a handful of PMC change requests, which have been acked as normal. Justin was concerned that no officer had approved the renewal; Jim confirmed that he had done so. All agreed that this constituted adequate oversight. Jim expressed that overlap between assigned tasks is normal and expected, the only area where improvement could be made is on communication.
Sam has reported that we have received signed Membership applications
from all newly elected members (from the June '08 meeting). The
new members of the ASF are:
John Casey Ugo Cei Bernd Fondermann
Jarek Gawor Rick Hillegas Rainer Jung
Guenter Knauf Grzegorz Kossakowski J. Daniel Kulp
Martin Marinschek Norman Maurer Gavin McDonald
Tony Stevenson Emmanuel Venisse Roland Weber
Tom White
I have tasked the Exec Assistant to coordinate with our
insurance broker to ensure that all is ready for the D&O
renewal, as well as to look into the viability (and costs)
of insuring our increasing h/w assets.
I have also been busy speaking with representatives of
external organizations (both FOSS and non-FOSS) regarding
the ASF. From all appearances, it looks like both Justin and
I are sharing the community outreach and contact tasks; within
previous boards, either the President (eg: Brian) or the Chairman
(eg: Greg) was the main "representative"; within this board this
is being somewhat evenly "shared". I would appreciate some board
feedback on this.
This is the first board meeting in a *long* time in which we
did not have a scheduled vote on a new TLP or changing a
PMC chair or changing the roster of a board committee. Interesting.
There have been a few discussion threads on members@ and board@
but nothing of serious note. All in all, the ASF is doing well
and ticking along.
The big news is, of course, the annual members meeting from earlier this week. We added in over a dozen new members, and are awaiting word of acceptance from just the last one or two people. Once we've heard back from all new members, we can officially announce their names. One way or another, this will be done at the July board meeting. Also at the meeting the new board was elected. All directors from the 2007-2008 year, except for Henri, were up for re-election and, in fact, all were re-elected (the new director filling the open slot vacated by Henri is Bertrand Delacretaz). I find this quite noteworthy. Despite the obvious (as well as exaggerated) "difficulties" the board had in finding its groove, the membership still considered the board doing a well enough job to be re-elected. This "outside view" is a good thing to keep in mind; when too close, sometimes perceptions are distorted (this does not imply, of course, that there are not problems that need further fixing). It is quite likely that at this meeting we will take another growth step, by separating out the role of EVP to help better distribute workload for directors and officers. IMO, we have always been better served with evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes and enhancements, so this is a Good Thing. It is anticipated that this will result in better utilization of the EA, through no fault or inadequacy of his own. Without a doubt, 2008-2009 will be an interesting, yet fun and exciting, year for the ASF.
On May 5th I speak at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta regarding "What is Open Source" and "How the ASF Does Open Source". I will make the slides available for others to view, use, expand, etc... Final preparations are underway for the annual ASF members meeting, set for June 3rd. Yesteday I sent out a generic reminder but later on this week I will send out a more specific reminder about ensuring that member and board nominations are noted in their respective files and pinging board candidates regarding their acceptance. Attendance records for the 2 meetings in 2007 have been updated. This has been one of our quietest months, with the ASF just ticking along. This will also be our last board meeting with the current roster (no matter who are re-elected) and so I'd like to personally thank all the directors for their hard work and dedication this last year.
The last month has seen vigorous discussion and debate on the members and board mailing lists, regarding a variety of topics. It is nice to see in most of these, voices and opinions from other people than just the usual group. ApacheCon was held last week and from all reports was a success. The ASF itself sponsored the hackathon. We are due for the annual members meeting, with June 3-5 as the leading date. Upon final confirmation, I will start the process of organizing the meeting.
Over the last month, the most obvious activity has been the ongoing
discussion regarding the 3rd party licensing policy, including
comments and debates regarding the current "draft" policy. One thing
that all parties agree to, however, is that this needs to reach
closure.
I am looking at candidate dates for the next ASF members meeting.
The possible dates are:
May 27-29
June 3-5
June 10-12
June 24-26
Preliminary checking indicates that all of these dates are
acceptable to the current board, and so I will be pinging the
membership regarding which are the most viable. As with
previous meetings, this will also be held by irc with all
elections/voting done by the voter tool. I anticipate that
this will result in another round of "discussions" on the
members list *grin*.
The contract for the new secretarial assistant was signed on
Feb. 26, 2008, with a start date of March 1, 2008.
I did a small podcast for ebizQ with Dennis Byron concerning
the ASF. Additionally, I was invited to speak at a seminar
for The National Center for Public Health Informatics at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on May
5th, regarding "Open Source 101".
From a PMC and project point of view, the ASF appears quite healthy. There is a wide range of efforts underway, with PMCs varying from very quiet to very active. I do not consider that a Bad Thing. As long as PMCs are still able to provide oversight, respond to the developer and user community and are able to "kick-start" themselves if a release is required (able to get the required 3 +1s for a release), then non-activity (measured as time between releases) is not troublesome. From a community point of view, things don't look so rosy. We seem to be in yet another phase of navel gazing, prompted by various Emails on the board and member mailing lists (eg: 3rd party licensing and release guidelines). What is particularly "unsettling" about some of these is how quickly they degrade into personal attacks, or extremely bitter and antagonistic tirades. Debate, of course, is good, as long as it results in either re-validation of beliefs and/or guidelines, or in changes to address the shortcomings or problems that caused the debate to commence in the first place. It is, of course, quite possible that we have accepted as rule some aspects which are really more valuable guidelines than anything else, but that does not diminish their usefulness. If they were learned by experience, then there is a rationale behind them. After all, you don't just change a section of code that does something a specific way without looking over the mailing list archives and learning why it's coded the way it is first. In any case, we are in an interesting situation. We are always accepting into the Incubator new projects, and a key aspect of the Incubator process is to indoctrinate those projects into the various ASF processes, procedures, rules and guidelines. Yet we have a very vocal subset of members who feel that many of those very rules that are key to podlings graduating from the Incubator should be removed or redfined. Personally, I feel that the more we grow, and the more varied the membership, we will need to basically refine what our core tenets are. This is not a concern... my only concern is that we do so as adults and as peers.
2007 saw pretty impressive growth within the ASF, both in membership
as well as projects and committers. Resulting from the 2 members
meetings held last year, we increased our membership ranks by 56
new members. 32 were from the November elections alone, and they
are:
Andrei Adamchik Rahul Akolkar Matt Benson
Tobias Bocanegra Nick Burch Alan Cabrera
Arjé Cahn Jacopo Cappellato Hiram Chirino
Martijn Dashorst Tim Ellison Manfred Geiler
Gary Gregory Stefan Guggisberg Grant Ingersoll
Kevin Jackson David E. Jones David Jencks
Dennis Lundberg Felix Meschberger Kevan Miller
Guillaume Nodet Daryl C. W. O'Shea Owen O'Malley
Ajith Ranabahu Marcel Reutegger Matthieu Riou
Martin Sebor Angela Schreiber Bruce Snyder
Thomas Vandahl Matthias Wessendorf
We also graduated 15 TLPs:
Apache ActiveMQ (Incubator) - January 2007
Apache Roller (Incubator) - February 2007
Apache Felix (Incubator) - March 2007
Apache OpenEJB (Incubator) - May 2007
Apache OpenJPA (Incubator) - May 2007
Apache Turbine (Jakarta) - May 2007
Apache POI (Jakarta) - May 2007
Apache Quetzalcoatl (HTTP Server) - June 2007
Apache Wicket (Incubator) - June 2007
Apache Commons (Jakarta) - June 2007
Apache ODE (Incubator) - July 2007
Apache ServiceMix (Incubator) - September 2007
Apache HttpComponents (Jakarta) - November 2007
Apache C++ Standard Library Project (Incubator) - November 2007
Apache Synapse Project (WS) - December 2007
2007 was also significant because we saw the Sponsorship program
really kick in gear. Currently we have 2 Platinum Sponsors (Google and
Yahoo!), 1 Gold (HP), 1 Silver (Covalent) and 3 Bronze (AirPlus
International, Tetsuya Kitahata, and Two Sigma Investments).
Infrastructure also did very noteworthy upgrades and improvements
over the past year.
As mentioned in previous minutes, the board elections (and
subsequent officer nominations) saw the larger turnover in
directors and officers in the history of the ASF. Even with all this,
from an oversight point-of-view, I see no potential problems
with us scaling to handle this growth or ensuring that 2008 is
easily as "successful" as 2007 was.
The month since the last board meeting has been a busy one for the ASF. First, of course, was the success (both critical and financial) of the ApacheCon US 2007 show in Atlanta. Secondly, an ASF special members meeting was held, via irc, on December 11th through the 13th. The main item of business was the election of new members into the ASF ranks. There were 40 candidates nominated, 32 of which were elected in. Invitation letters to those elected in have been sent, and we have received acceptance from a large number already. Turn out on the meeting was acceptable, with over 85 members attending the meeting (as applied to quorum requirements) and with around 99 members casting ballots. Due to scheduling mistakes, 2 executive officers were not present during the 1st half of the meeting but attended and reported during the 2nd half. As expected, the meeting and election process re-kicked off discussion regarding what makes a good member, what are the responsibilities of membership, whether there should be some sort of automatic emeritus status mechanism in place and the pros and cons of the ssh-based voter tool. Whether these discussions will actually lead to any concrete and actionable proposals remains to be seen. A more formal Year In Review report will be presented at the January 2008 meeting, but in general, we have seen healthly activity at the PMC level with good progress within the Incubator and good graduation-to-TLP with the Incubator and Jakarta projects, with initial efforts of the WS project to also promote subprojects to TLP status. Even with all this, from an oversight point-of-view, I see no potential problems with us scaling to handle this growth. Discussion: a request was made that the chair posts meeting attendance information from previous members meetings. Jim agreed to pursue.
Over the last month we've managed to set and announce the dates for the Members Meeting (Dec. 11 - 13); as with previous years it will be held via IRC. In general, PMCs seem to be doing well; I'm pretty impressed that PMCs and the chairs were able to coordinate their reports as quickly as they did, due to the issue with Marvin forgetting to send out the reminders (itself due to a missing library from the people.apache.org server upgrade). This is a good sign.
The ASF has seen continued energy over the last month, both internally, with PMC efforts and releases, as well as external, with another Platinum sponsor. Infrastructure also continues to grow and expand. The board itself is gelling into a more smoothly running group. Regarding transition, it appears that the secretarial transition is finally getting back on an even keel. Mis- communication and unverified assumptions seem to be at the core of the issues seen over the last few months. To expedite this, I met with the sec-assist directly to get to the root causes. Since this is no longer required, I will be removing myself from this issue. The big events for next month are the two ApacheCon events: ApacheCon US 2007 in Atlanta, GA and the OS Summit Asia 2007 in Hong Kong. The membership itself was pinged regarding a possible IRC-held members meeting in December. A discussion item regarding this is scheduled for this meeting.
Not too much to report this month. The biggest item of notice is the board's continuing effort to get into a groove and the officers getting settled into their roles. Thankfully, this has not affected the ASF itself, which is still ticking along nicely. The Incubator is still seeing proposals for new projects and podlings are graduating periodically. The various projects themselves run the range of high-activity/many releases to low-activity/almost-hibernation.
The new board, and officers, are starting to gell and find their own way. This is most clearly indicated by the reduced direct activity regarding the JCP (and the jcp-open list), and allowing others to express their points of views and opinions. There was a slight issue during the renewal of the D&O insurance where, due to the officer changeover, the invoicing and payment was not as streamlined as it could have been, but this was quickly resolved and the policy was renewed on time. There has been, as one would have expected, much discussion within the foundation regarding the events of the last month regarding Java, the JCP and the ASF's involvement. Even so, the membership and the PMCs are not being distracted and activity seems very good and healthy. On a more personal note, the board, as well as the membership and, indeed, countless others outside of the foundation, wish Greg Stein a speedy recovery from the injuries received when he was mugged. This is on top of the broken leg he already had from an accident earlier in the summer. Kevin Burton has setup a fund to help Greg out. This fund is not affiliated with the ASF.
Tabled until next regular meeting
The board is currently making the expected adjustments required to get back "into the grove" and smoothly operate after the changeover of almost half of its directors. Also in transition is the full roster of executive officers themselves, something unique in the history of the ASF. Activities on the board@ and jcp-open@ list indicate that we still have some ways to go, but are making these transitions surprisingly well. A special board meeting was called for July 09, 2007 to focus on the current ASF/JCP issues being discussed on the board@ and jcp-open@ lists. A general consensus was achieved and some action items were created to write-up that consensus and share that with the membership and, eventually, the JCP itself. More information can be obtained from the minutes of that meeting. Status updates of those action items will be discussed today. In general, the ASF is handling the transition well, and continues to grow and prosper.
Tabled until next regular meeting
Greg reported that there was no new information to report since what was reported at the members meeting.
Greg had nothing to report.
Greg had nothing to report this month.
Greg presented at a conference in Beijing with his Apache hat on, and with great interest and questions from Chinese attendees. His presentation covered the role of Apache in the rise of the web, open source, and its eventual impact on the software industry in general. Greg is scheduled to attend and/or speak at several more conferences over the next few months, answering similar questions. He has nothing to report on the Foundation at this time... we appear to continue running on all cylinders with rapid growth and interest, and the various committees appear to be operating properly and covering their areas of responsibility.
Greg noted that he's been speaking at a few conferences lately, talking about the ASF (and other things). He suggested that when people give talks about the ASF, that they contact the PRC so the word can get spread.
Greg had nothing to report at this time.
Greg had nothing too much to report. He remains happy with the progress of the foundation.
Nothing to report for the short time since our last meeting.
Over the past month, the Foundation has seen a couple challenges related to the Incubator and to our position around patent grants in our CLAs. The Incubator has been getting a lot of projects, and some of them seem quite static or even nearly unwilling to leave. In an informal Board meeting at ApacheCon, the Board came up with a slight change in reporting for the Incubator which will hopefully focus the podlings on their goal. Regarding the patents, discussion continues on the legal minutae and interpretation of the language in our CLAs. It is a very difficult problem, especially in terms of getting some of the legal folks to contribute solid opinion in writing. It was further reported that a main concern is the amount of legal discussions being held offlist. Efforts will be made to strongly encourage our legal counsel to use the mailing lists more often.
Greg said that there was very little to report. He asked if anyone had questions about any issues or topics, and no one did.
The organization continues to move forward with its business. There have been no significant discussions at the Board level, and only a bit at the Members level. The attention of a number of Directors has been focused on the Geronimo project and the PRC, but the Vice Presidents have been handling the situations responsibly and appropriately.
Greg reports that he has been offline or otherwise swamped at work during the few weeks since the last board meeting. He has nothing to report.
Greg had very little to report on, other than he had had spoken at a conference about the ASF.
Greg reported that the board expressed its support for Ken's position regarding the changes and actions taken by Ken regarding the Geronimo PMC (change to RTC and suspension of PMC member status for many people). Greg also reported that it appears that there are 27 Google Summer Of Code projects for the ASF.
Greg reported that all has been pretty quiet. He did note his keynote at EclipseCon, in which we talked about the ASF and Open Source in general.
As with the past few months, much of the activity of the Directors has been advising our PMCs (such as Geronimo, Incubator, and others). I believe this is the right place for us to be. A number of PMCs have been asking for legal opinions and policy, which our VP of Legal Affairs has been working through. A discussion about security disclosure policy generated a long thread on the board list, but that list has been relatively quiet the past month. In a broader sense, the ASF appears healthy, and given this month's Treasurer's report, we're in good financial shape.
Greg reported that in general the board has been quiet, as have any ASF issues which may require board attention. It was noted that some issues, such as the mandate of the PRC, as well as the operation and health of the Geronimo and Incubator PMCs have been "pushed down" to the PMC and member level, since they do not, as yet, require direct board action.
Over the past month, the Foundation has performed its annual navel-gazing. This time, triggered by a multitude of donations arriving within the Incubator. Discussion moved from there to the Members list and even some bits on the PRC list. The net result is some further thoughts on growth, relationships with corporations, and new policies/procedures within the Incubator and the PRC. While these can take a lot of time and energy, we usually come out ahead. Step by step, we're continuing to move the Foundation in directions that will enable us to provide great products to our ever-increasing user community.
Greg reported that since the members meeting, there was no other additional information to report.
Greg reported that he had nothing to report.
Apache activities and processes appear to be operating as we would expect and hope. Most items are being handled by the PMCs and other committees as appropriate. The Board has a couple major outstanding items to take care of (working with the Geronimo PMC and the Treasurer transition).
This past month, I attended the FOSSSL conference where I was invited to give a keynote about the Foundation. This is about the third time that I've given such a talk, and I've been finding that there is a lot of interest in how we operate, what we do, where Apache, and Open Source in general, are heading, and what sort of role we play in the larger community. I have found these types of talks are very good for the Foundation in spreading awareness and in helping to fulfill our missions around outreach and education. There are some high-level issues around licensing, intellectual property, and community. Each of these are being handled at the appropriate level, with the right stakeholders.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the "size" of the ASF. Many aspects of size can be (and are) handled just fine. Things like code size, a high traffic site, lots of email, and hardware capacity are all managed fine. However, we are now seeing issues around communication and project growth. As communities grow, consensus can be harder to reach. As a consensus-driven organization, growth can severely hamper what we are trying to accomplish. The number of stakeholders increases and/or the number of people willing to "pitch in" serve to slow down or derail effective consensus gathering. The typical response is to appoint an authority who can attempt to gather consenus, but can decide by fiat when needed. This runs counter to our culture, so another solution may be needed (with a requisite amount of navel-gazing to reach that point). Project growth places a transient burden on our infrastructure team, but it places a continuous, non-terminating burden on the Board to review those projects' quarterly reports. This burden is already quite noticable during Board meetings, and it will simply continue to grow. New structure may be required to handle the growth, and we have talked about possibilities. As an experiment to increase efficiency of review during Board meetings, this month we will assign Directors to shepherd reports during the meeting. All Directors are responsible for all reports, but this extra focus should ensure Directors are truly involved, and it will ensure that all reports get specific, detailed attention.
A report was expected, but not received
The Board held an IRC conference to talk about many issues that are confronting the ASF at this time. No decisions were made in private -- the ideas from the meeting have been incorporated into this agenda. A large part of the discussion, and a concern for the ASF, is better management of legal issues. During the past month, we have also been welcoming our new members into the ASF.
The Membership has been very active over the past few weeks, in preparation for the upcoming Members meeting. A lot of discussion has gone into what the Members would like to see from the people elected to the Board, particularly in terms of their views on hiring an Executive Director (and/or other staff positions at the ASF). This also led into a long discussion of an ED role, its impact on the ASF, and what Members would like to do about it. This involvement and discussion among the Members is refereshing, as the mailing list is usually quite idle. A lot of discussion also occurred around licensing for the new Apache Harmony project, particularly with respect to the GNU Classpath project. The topics varied, but a lot of it came down to a couple questions: what do we want from Harmony [in terms of licensing], and how does Classpath satisfy (or not) those needs? The Harmony team has moved those discussions to the development list to refine the answers before seeking further input on licensing from the Board and our legal team.
Greg reported that the foundation was moving along "fine" with a good separation of concerns.
Greg reported that there was nothing really to report.
It has been a relatively quiet month since our last Board meeting. Much of the "ASF as an entity" work has focused around licensing discussions with the FSF, and PRC interactions with other organizations (e.g. Jinx). The general ASF activity level continues apace, with several projects applying for top-level status this month.
Greg reported that there was really very little to report. Robyn had created the required paperwork to inform the US Patent and Trademark Office of the change of Lawyer of Record for the SPAMASSASSIN trademark application; Greg signed this and the paperwork was submitted.
Greg reported that, in general, things were "quiet" regarding the ASF with no problems or issues. He did note that there has been discussions regarding LGPL, and how it interacts and affects ASF projects, the Apache License and how it is interpreted within Java usage.
Greg stated that there was really nothing to report, over and beyond what was reported at the ASF Members Meeting. In general, the ASF was meeting some challenges, and operating well.
The ASF appears to be moving along, producing code and resolving other issues, as we would hope and expect.
The past month seems to be characterized by continuing legal-related and policy issues. From determining whether we're okay with Playboy being a mirror, to taking positions against patent-encumbered standards, to handling of CLAs, author tags, copyright lines, patents, and the list goes on. I find it very disappointing just how much time is going into legal stuff nowadays. My personal feeling is that we are falling too far into the "cover our ass" territory. I believe that part of this is an effort to protect a limited few of our downstream consumers rather than the public at large; thus, I feel that our time tradeoffs are not being as publicly-minded as we could be. My preference would be to see us back up and reassess the extent and the limits of what we are attempting to accomplish with our legal arrangements; that we should review them with an eye towards maximizing efficiency for ourselves and the public; that we should set a looser regime and get back to coding.
The ASF has been busy over the past month with a number of legal issues. We're getting bigger and broader and running into more of these issues. Thankfully, many of them are cumulative and contribute towards a long-term solution rather than many interruptive point-by-point issues. We have also spent a good amount of time looking at where we want the ASf to go, what kinds of interactions we want to have with corporations, and what kind of information flow (or limitations) we want to have. The discussion has been very good, and is ongoing. An interesting point is that a good number of Members have been getting involved in the discussion about the broader goals of the ASF. The ASF seems to be on a good track although it appears that we're bulging a bit at the seams. If we get some better tools, then we'll probably be able to scale a bit better, but it is certainly interesting to deal with "too big" issues.
Greg reported that most recent activity had been in Avalon, Incubator, Infrastructure and JCP-related, with the biggest being Avalon and JCP. Avalon appears to be correcting itself due to a committer voluntarily resigning from PMC and relinquishing commit rights. Therefore, Avalon seems to be moving forward, working on next steps, and he feels that no board action is required at this time. The JCP activity was noted to be specific to the ASFs J2EE SATCK license, and deferred comment to later as it was a discussion point for the board meeting. Sam noted that there was extensive discussion about the role of the board in proposing new projects. Agreement by Greg with Dirk suggesting and taking as action item making this a discussion point for the next members meeting. Jim noted we need to find a balance between dividing between members and board.
Prefacing his comments with the observation that there was nothing of significant interest to report, Greg reported that the agreement with Robin Wagner for pro-bono legal services has been concluded. She will be providing 10 hours per month pro-bono, and then bill at a rate of $150 per hour for work beyond the 10 hours. Greg will be committing the final agreement to the Foundation CVS. Also, there are three official contacts, currently Greg, Brian and Geir. Brian suggested that we ensure transparency by posting copies of traffic between the ASF and Robin to the legal mailing list. There was general agreement, and Dirk agreed to provide help in decrypting all CC-ed messages to plaintext for list distribution automatically. Greg is going to take further discussion of this offline to work out the mechanics of this process with Dirk, Robin and the three official contacts. There were no further questions for comments for Greg.
Greg reported that, as the directors know, the ASF held a members meeting on May 18th in order to bring the members up to speed on any ASF related news, elect new members and elect a new board. The directors in attendance constitute the new board. Greg noted that, all in all, the meeting went well. There was some discussion over the actual mechanics of the meeting, and such topics as proxies when using the online voting tool (eg: Why even designate a proxy). This would be brought up and discussed on the members mailing list. Greg also reported that he was pleased to see the Avalon project working to address the problems and issues that it had suffered from in the past. He did note that it will be interesting to see how the formation of the ASF Excaliber PMC, if approved, would affect Avalon. Greg's final topic was concerning the generation of a marketing plan for the ASF, in anticipation of the formation of the Public Relations committee. A rough draft will be written and review and feedback will be requested of the board and, eventually, the members.
Greg reported that the ASF is "moving along" and his resources have been directed at our relationship with lawyer Robin Wagner. Robin is still happy to formalise a pro-bono relationship with the ASF and increase the number of hours she is able to spend. There was some discussion about the creation of a new list for the legal discussions.
A lot of progress has been made on the legal front. We have switched over to the new 2.0 license, and we've greatly increased our CLA coverage. There has also been a lot of discussion over the past month regarding copyrights, author tags, and licensing (and incorporating non-ASF code). With all of this, it might be time to sit back and take a breath.
Greg reported that he has been pleased with the current status of the foundation. He noted the number of PMCs being started (either via the Incubator or moving up to TLPs), which indicates a healthy and growing community.
Activity has been relatively low over the past month, mostly due to the holidays. Things have started to pick up again. Looking back to our September meeting, we noted the Incubator had a "low energy level". Today, the Incubator is one of the most active projects at the ASF. From a legal standpoint, things have been relatively quiet. Organizationally, we have a couple PMCs who wish to change their Chairs, but otherwise things seem to be quiet.
Greg reported that the PMCs seem more active than they were 6-12 months ago and appear to be on track and moving in the right direction. The Jakarta PMC has been especially busy in the last month working on increasing their oversight.
Defaulted to presentation given at the Members' meeting earlier that night.
Greg reported that he was quite busy of the last month on non-ASF related items. As such, he experienced some delay in getting in touch with Jason van Zyl and Doug MacEachern regarding the Maven and Perl projects, respectively. Other than that, things had been quiet.
Things keep marching along quite well. The infrastructure team
has lately "come into their own" and is doing a fantastic job.
The new Geronimo podling is struggling with process questions,
mostly based on the "httpd vs Jakarta" question, but also
because their Incubation shepherds are not providing adequate
guidance. This raises two questions to the Board:
1) should we be concerned about unifying some/all aspects of
PMCs' operations, charters, and governance?
2) is there anything the Board can do to increase the
productivity/operation of the Incubation process?
There has also been some unsettling confusion around the WSRP4J
and Pluto projects and their incubation, along with some
questions relating to the existing Jetspeed project.
The DB Project has finally started seeing some real traction
which is great, given their long period of low-level activity.
Commons is suffering some of the same issues, although a
project (serf) has finally moved into the project. It will be
interesting to see if the presence of code can stimulate
Commons into some activity (which could be a learning point for
the future).
Greg reported that the big news was the launch of the J2EE/Geronomi project under the Incubator. There was significant interest in the project and a lot of good work had already been done. Greg reported that there was also some good discussion regarding members' roles in the foundation.
Greg reported that, organizationally, things are quiet within the ASF. Not to say that there is not continued healthy discussion within the ASF, notably on members@ and licensing@, but that there are no items of concern. Greg was reminded that the PHP group was awaiting some sort of "write-up" on what needs to occur for the PHP project to become more inline with other ASF projects. This was mentioned during some offline discussions at LinuxTag.
Greg reported that we now have 110 members, and that he was pleased with the way the IRC members meeting went. He observed that as membership increases, IRC meetings are the way forward. Ken noted that the Avalon PMC appeared to be running more smoothly.
Greg reported that he was pleased with the state of the ASF. The PMCs have been taking a very active role in managing their respective projects, while at the same time fostering a healthy development environment.
Greg reported that he was quite pleased with the amount of activity, especially under Avalon. The code base was being significantly cleaned up to avoid non-ASF code as well as "single person" code. Greg also expressed some concern that the board received no PMC reports. He had hoped that PMC chairs would have remembered the schedule for reports. Greg indicated that he would continue to send out reminders in the future.
Greg reported that, in general, the individual PMCs were continuing to work well, requiring no board intervention. Greg brought the board up-to-date regarding the status of Peter Donald; the Avalon PMC is considering whether to accept Mr. Donald back into the project. Greg also reported that a growing question among some PMCs is an "old" one: what is a member and what exactly constitutes participation specifically *as* a member.
Greg reported that he mostly worked with Jakarta issues, in particular, Maven.
Greg reported on the refactoring of the XML Project and was mostly pleased with the current status of most of the ASF projects.
Greg reported that current ASF status was OK. He was pleased with the start of Ant and the "restart" of Avalon. He expressed some concern over the status of the Incubator project. Jim noted that he had sent out an email to Incubator that the general consensus of the PMC was that they were at a stage where they could start accepting new products, with Tapestry likely being the first one.
Greg noted the discussion over the ASF reorganization, and the possible impacts in organization, infrastructure and community. Greg also noted a concern over the potential of the ASF hosting "rogue" code and that all PMCs should be vigilent.
The Foundation is quite healthy overall, with a continuing
interest and growth in our projects and contributors. There
have been some challenges recently, however, in that our growth
seems to have exceeded our current capacity for managing the
social aspects of the communities. Some committers don't really
understand what the ASF is all about, and even worse, some do
not seem to understand our basic ideals of community and
collaborative development ("the Apache Way" to use an
oft-bandied-about term). Over the past couple months, this has
sparked an interest in two new top-level projects (Commons and
Incubator) as ways to improve our ability to manage projects
and to create healthy communitys. Meanwhile, a large number of
people have come together to look hard at our organization and
several reorganization proposals are being formed and
discussed. This is a great process, and has brought together a
number of people who don't normally work together. However, it
has also hilited some of the misunderstandings and demonstrated
that some amount of reorg is needed for the ASF to continue on
its mission of building and supporting development communities.
Roy noted that the Annual Meeting of the ASF Membership was held on May 21, 2002 via irc. Details of the meeting can be found in the 'foundation' CVS tree under Meetings/20020521. Roy noted that he was not aware of any litigation against the ASF.
Roy has no news to report
Roy reported that he is continuing his investigation into a "virtual office" setup for the ASF. Regarding the Oracle Small Business solution, it is actually NetLedger which provides the service. Further investigation is being performed. Roy also reported that he will follow-up with the Contributor Logo email of last meeting.
Roy reported on the new CVS repository 'board'. His expectation is that it be used as a "scratch space" for board related items, that don't entail significant amounts of email. The STATUS file will be kept up to date, and all board members are urged to use the repository and STATUS file as needed.
Roy reported that he had more time available to focus on the ASF. First on his agenda was to update the ASF site to reflect reality.
There have been no legal challenges to the Foundation's actions or activities. Board meetings have slowed down due to the difficulty of scheduling a synchronous meeting with our busy schedules, and due to our inability to accomplish things asynchronously on the board list without a hard deadline. We need to find a solution that works on a reliable basis, such as a shorter bi-weekly meeting. I have been attempting to build a secure website and voting forum for use by the board, projects, and members of the Foundation, but have been hampered by the lack of a non-firewalled network connection and the need for a dedicated machine only accessible by ASF members. Suggestions are welcome. The next two months will be very busy for me due to my deadline for finishing the dissertation [final defense August 10, final signed copy by September 13]. In discussion, Brian suggested that we use locus.apache.org as the secure website and simply use group assignment to control access. Further discussion of this will take place on the board mail list.
Roy reported that he was preparing for the member's meeting scheduled for the Saturday after ApacheCon. He was formulating the agenda and the new member list and ballot. Roy also reported that hoped that the member's meeting would provide an opportunity to discuss budgeting. Roy also reported his new role as Chief Scientist at eBuilt.