This was extracted (@ 2024-04-17 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).
Good progress on the new logo project, as referenced in the M&P report. We have a couple of promising directions from the designer that maintain ties to our existing brand while moving us away from the feather imagery. Community Over Code NA -- Still very light on sponsors compared to past years, which seems comparable to what other events are experiencing this year. However, I'm still holding on booking anything beyond core necessities until we see more promise of financial support on that. Also starting to explore options for 2025 location.
Sponsorship for Community Over Code is much lower than usual this year. This seems to be true of a lot of events, so I'm not concerned that it's just us. Currently holding off on booking evening events for North America until we have a clearer picture of those numbers. This may mean that this year is not as profitable (or potentially even not profitable) as it has been the last few years. Co-locating Cassandra Summit may help. Current numbers: North America ============== Gold 3 Europe ====== Gold 2 Bronze 1
Nothing substantial to report.
Dates secured and contract signed for CoC NA. More info in VP Conferences report.
Per last month's board vote, we are now OSI Affiliate members: https://opensource.org/affiliates/ We submitted a response to the Open-Source Software Security: Areas of Long-Term Focus and Prioritization RFI (https://www.regulations.gov/document/ONCD-2023-0002-0001). As of this report submission, it hasn't been posted on the responses page, but confirmation was received. Thank you to everyone who helped with it! I recently visited Denver to visit potential sites for Community Over Code 2024 and expect to have dates and location within the next week or two. Have also been collaborating with the EU team on a combined prospectus for the two events.
I'm still sorting out final numbers from Community Over Code, but I expect we roughly broke exactly even. There may have been a small loss. Will report next month. Please see VP Conferences for further details on the event. I will be representing the ASF on a panel about open source and public policy interests at All Things Open this week in Raleigh, NC.
Budget is unusually tight this year for Community Over Code, mostly due to a tough year for sponsorships and tight budgets all around the industry. Hoping to come close to breaking even.
Nothing to add that isn't covered in other reports.
Though planning for Community Over Code proceeds well, we are coming
up short on sponsors this year, and thus I'm planning spending rather
more conservatively until/unless that changes. From talking to folks
at other events, this is a common problem this year.
David and I will be representing the ASF at the Open Source Congress
next week. I will be on a keynote panel ("Impact of Policy for
Decentralized Organizations: Challenges & Opportunities") and then
moderating a breakout session about better inter-organizational
collaboration.
Planning for Community Over Code NA proceeds well. As mentioned last month, preparing to attend Open Source Congress with David on behalf of the ASF next month
Planning for Community Over Code in Halifax continues. As mentioned in the president’s report, I will be joining David at Open Source Congress in July.
Visited the Halifax site for Community Over Code this month and was incredibly impressed with the city, the venues, and everyone there. Overall ASF budget planning is in progress for FY24.
FY24 budget process has begun.
At last month's board meeting, the board approved a president's committee, led by the EVP, to discuss the concerns that have been raised around the Apache name and feather logo and to present the board with recommendations. I reached out to people who had volunteered previously on lists and formed a committee of folks interested in doing a lot of research on the matter. The committee recognizes that this is a topic with a lot of strong feelings as well as the fact that a large proportion of our membership is from outside the United States and may not have an understanding of the population potentially affected by the question. The board was given the committee's findings earlier this week to give them a chance to review it in advance of their discussion in today's meeting. The findings are now posted in the ASF members Confluence space. I and the other members of the committee are happy to offer further detail and answer questions about our research and the recommendations we arrived at.
ApacheCon things covered in Conferences and Fundraising reports. Should the board conclude in the latter part of this agenda to support a committee to consider our naming concerns, I am happy to work on bringing together the folks who have volunteered in various discussions over the last week and others to create a set of recommended next steps (or to simply participate).
Nothing to report this month
No updates this month.
ApacheCon was by most any measure a wild success. Details in VP Conferences report. On to planning 2023!
ApacheCon approaches very quickly. We expect a very successful event--perhaps a little too successful, as we have hit (and exceeded) capacity in registrations.
No significant updates. ApacheCon planning proceeds well.
Much thanks to those who have been helping ApacheCon move along to a return to an in-person event. As noted in VP Conferences report, we sent a survey to the members list about future events. The results showed: - a strong preferences towards returning to two separate ApacheCon events in North America and Europe rather than any combination or alternating between the two - most people would not be interested in an event in South America or Africa; however, we should not discount the possibility of encouraging locally run events in those regions - almost 1/3 of respondents said the city where the event is located strongly affects the likelihood of them attending
No significant updates outside of ApacheCon (see Conferences report). Apologies for missing this month's meeting!
- ApacheCon CFP remains open - Hotel reservations link has arrived! Watch the website for that and registration soon. - Currently $167,500 in expected sponsorship funds
Our current budget draft has a bit of a shortfall. We need to focus on fundraising and sponsor relationships this year. See 8A for budget details.
ApacheCon--We are finishing up planning with the hotel and near signing the contract. Please keep an eye out for the prospectus and CFP!
Highlights generally covered elsewhere. Before proceeding with ACNA plans, I checked in with all of last year's sponsors to see if they're budgeting and planning for in-person events, and all but one replied enthusiastically that they're ready to go. Budgets are coming together for FY23.
Ops team meeting today discussed upcoming FY budget. There's still a lot of uncertainty around events, which also accounts for some significant chunk of the budget. We intend to plan for things to happen and adjust as necessary rather than coming up short. (Rather relevantly!) I would like the board to discuss whether it is comfortable with the risk of a return to in-person events. We had asked you to officially say no to any events until we return to an in-person ApacheCon in New Orleans (due to the terms of that contract). An in-person event in the fall is likely to be US-only, or at least largely US attendees. There is certainly a degree of financial risk in beginning to plan for such an event. After several discussion on various lists and private interactions over the last nearly two years, I have asked the Infra team to start including in their monthly report the status of replacing the term "slave." This is a new request, so I don't expect to see it until the February meeting.
No additional updates.
Nothing interesting to report this month. Waiting until January to decide whether it's time to plan ApacheCon in person next year. Apologies for missing meeting -- will be traveling.
ApacheCon went pretty fantastically. (Many details in VP Conferences report.) Sponsors were generally pleased, and we were pleased to have them (again). There is clear exhaustion with virtual events, though, and many are eagerly hoping we'll be in person in 2022. Other conferences have started holding live events again, and so far it seems to be going pretty well. I'm optimistic, but we'll hold off a bit before trying to make a decision about next year's event. I do think there is value in hybrid, as we have had much higher attendance at virtual events and are able to reach a wider and more inclusive audience. However, hybrid is a lot more work and has a lot of questions to solve, so we'll be keeping an eye on how others are working it out and getting inspiration for how we might do ours.
Very caught up in the end parts of shepherding our sponsors into ApacheCon. See VP Conferences report for more on the event and next month's meeting for how it went. And of course, we'll see you there!
See VP Conferences report for details on ApacheCon Asia and more info about NA/Europe. Keynotes have been announced for the latter. Running test events this week and next for sponsors to get a feel for the platform. We have sold out of both Platinum and Gold level sponsorships. (Silver and Bronze are available in unlimited quantities.)
Seconding the president on our thanks to Sally for her long service, as well as welcoming Joe into his new role and supporting him in the process. We've had a continuing desire for high-level sponsorships for ApacheCon, which is wonderful. The current count is: Asia ===== Strategic 1 Platinum 5 Gold 2 Silver 1 NA + Europe =========== Strategic 1 Platinum 4 Gold 10 Silver 5 Bronze 1 Total $132,550
Latest ApacheCon(s) sponsor report: AC Asia --------- Strategic (1) Platinum (5) Gold (1) AC NA/EU --------- Strategic (1) Platinum (4) Gold (7) Silver (2) Bronze (1)
ApacheCon(s) planning still proceeding well, including sponsorships. Four companies have taken advantage of the option to sponsor both events. ApacheCon Asia --------------- Strategic (1) Platinum (5) Gold (1) ApacheCon NA+Europe ------------------- Strategic (1) Platinum (4) Gold (5) Silver (1) Bronze (1) Other details in Fundraising and Conferences reports.
ApacheCon planning continues... we have over 100k in sponsorships (mostly pending, but I have no expectation of them not going through)..
We're on track to have a semi-dual ApacheCon virtual ApacheCon event, with one in August for Asia time zones and one in September for North America/Europe time zones. Sponsors will have the option to sponsor only one or to create a custom sponsorship package of both at a discount. We already have some significant interest in each. For more ApacheCon details, see VP Conferences report.
ApacheCon planning is underway. We are looking at a more coordinated effort between the North America/Europe event and the Asia event, especially in terms of sponsorship. CFP launching soon.
[no additional updates]
Nothing to add
Nothing interesting to report that isn't noted in other reports.
By all measures, the first virtual ApacheCon was a huge success. Many of our sponsors were arguably more involved than they are at in-person events! We also learned a lot, which is useful, as I anticipate next year's ApacheCon being virtual as well. The platform was a constantly moving target, as it's fairly new, and they're regularly adding new features. While sometimes frustrating, the up side is that we were able to provide sponsors with some event data that we didn't expect to be able to offer initially. Their feedback has been really positive, and I'm excited for all the first-time attendees we had as well. Details are in the VP Conferences report.
Exceptionally pleased in the lead-up to ApacheCon@Home. Details in VP Conferences report. Apologies in advance for either being late to or missing this call--feel free to ping in Slack with any questions.
The highlights of my month are pretty well covered in the fundraising and conferences reports. I'm pleased that ApacheCon@Home sponsors have more than covered our costs for holding the event, which means we should also have extra funding for future virtual events, which Rich refers to. In fact, the unexpected challenge was that we agreed with one platinum sponsor to offer the unlisted benefit of a 15-minute keynote (which we've done at live events in the past), and thus extended it to all of them. Except most of our sponsors are platinum, so we may run out of time slots if any more come on board!
Main highlight: ApacheCon@Home is coming along quite swimmingly, especially financially, which is a huge relief compared to where we were a few months ago. I took over all the sponsor pursuing and relations for the event, and they are still rolling in and happy to participate, mostly at the platinum level. We have ~1,000 registrations.
It's been a long and eventful couple of months squaring away events, but we're about ready to launch ApacheCon@Home, which I'm excited about. We were also one of 10 organizations chosen to benefit from the FOSS Responders work (see https://twitter.com/TheASF/status/1263799630829060097), which was a welcome contribution towards the expenses we did have in canceling our live events.
As I've spent the last month on-boarding (and subscribing to lists and leveling up in email filtering), I took on relationships with VP Conferences and VP Fundraising for roll-up. Still in the role of producing ApacheCon (in whatever form), I admit more of that time this month has been spent on conferences. I've also been working with David on assorted other issues, largely around budget and re-planning given new expectations for both income and expenses due to the pandemic.
Budget ====== See the current draft of the budget here https://s.apache.org/FY21-Draft-Budget If this were a normal year, we'd likely move forward with the current state of the budget. Due to the pandemic, I plan on one more iteration to plan on slightly tighter budget before I present it the Board for consideration. Infrastructure ============== Infra has canceled it's F2F Event - work is almost don on clawing remaining expenditures back from airlines. Backfill the open sysadmin position is currently on hold as we figure out the fallout from the Pandemic CI stats are here: https://infra-reports.apache.org/cistats/ Infra has enabled BuildKite for Apache Arrow. Conferences =========== ACNA is still on track for end of September, beginning of October, Plenty of time remains if that decision needs to be revisited in light of the current situation. Travel Assistance ================= TAC is not currently entertaining travel funding but are working on a more sustainable application for intake and evaluation. Requirements are currently been scoped. Diversity & Inclusion ===================== Movement on the analysis from survey, initial results have been reviewed from the vendor. Expect more on this next month. Five Outreachy-funded interns are expected for the next term. This is a substantial increase from the last term. Marketing and Publicity ======================= Work continues here largely as expected, though seemingly quieter than normal. Fundraising =========== This work continues at the expected pace, which is good news. Brand Management ================ Work continues at a steady pace. Please see the private section of the Brand Management report
This month has been a busy one for the Operations side of the ASF. The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a lot of work for Conferences, Marketing & Publicity, Fundraising, Travel Assistance, and Infrastructure. FY21 Budget =========== A good deal of work has been done by those officers with budgets, both in vetting the items charged against them, as well as preparing plans for the coming year. The current proposed budget shows a loss of roughly 176k. Just to begin preparing folks and start the discussion you can view my budget worksheet here: https://s.apache.org/FY21-Draft-Budget We still have some account rejiggering to do, but I suspect we're close to final form. I am still missing a few smaller numbers and I've highlighted those cells in yellow, and that will change as we move forward. Fundraising =========== Despite all of the extra work from the pandemic, and the normal good work; I do want to call out what I see as an incredible victory from the Fundraising team in a multi-year commitment from one our Platinum sponsors. Marketing and Publicity ======================= Working smoothly despite the increased workload. Travel Assistance ================= TAC was ramping up to support roadshows, but that's no longer needed. TAC has also realized that they keep standing up web apps for collection of information about applicants. With the need to support ever more of these, they are looking for something that demands less volunteer time. They're working on creating a requirements list as well as discussing what others who do similar work in our space are doing. D&I === Survey hasn't materially moved but should have progress to report by next month. I highly recommend that all Directors read the friction logs from the first Outreachy session. There's very valuable insight there. Because of the small number and privacy concerns, members and Directors can read those on the D&I private list. The upcoming Outreachy term has three projects teed up. Privacy ======= A GDPR request has been handled. Work remains to be done on a repeatable process and governance. Conferences =========== Conferences has cancelled or postponed 3 Roadshows thus far. Work continues forward with ApacheCon.
Things are largely working as intended. One new thing to the lineup this past month is that we held an operations call. The call went well. Budget ====== Budget process is underway with most operational functions having submitted a proposed budget. In the process, we've identified some problems and misallocation of some expenses that may change things. We've additionally begun discussions around treating Conferences and Fundraising as their own distinct lines of business from an accounting perspective so that we have a more clear picture of the efficacy of money spent in those areas. Conferences =========== Conferences currently has 5 events in process and things appear to be well managed. Most exciting though is the Event Playbook - which should help mitigate Single Points of Failure as well as making it easier for folks to participate and help. Travel Assistance ================= TAC successfully concluded a small committer-focused travel sponsorship at FOSDEM. Additionally, they are working on a calendar for future event support as part of the FY21 budget planning process. Infrastructure ============== Infrastructure suffered an outage to a critical service (LDAP) but quickly resolved it. Data Privacy ============ Privacy seems to have reached critical mass to make progress. There are several requests pending that are being worked. Diversity ========= Diversity has made good progress on a number of fronts. The most interesting bit is that our first Outreachy participant has been adding info into the friction log. I hope that in the coming months this is something that we can take time to review and learn from. Survey is in analysis mode and is on track for publication in coming months.
I've begun the conversation around FY21 Budget Planning. My current plan is to have the first draft ready by the February Board Meeting, and refine from there. Infrastructure ============== Infrastructure has onboarded a part-time tech writer/editor Andrew Wetmore. Please take note of comments around the mirror system in the Infrastructure report. Travel Assistance ================= Travel Assistance is ramping up for their first Committer-focused event travel sponsorship for FOSDEM. Data Privacy ============ Forward progress is being made, largely focused on scaffolding at the moment.
As Sam noted in his report, I've agreed to start FY21 budget planning. My current plan is to start this just after the new year. Travel Assistance ================= Travel Assistance is working on funding committers to attend FOSDEM as part of their new-for-FY20 line item for committers. Infrastructure ============== Infrastructure appears close to filling the open req for a tech writer/editor.
I attended ACEU and gave the SoTF. ACEU was well produced and attended. Travel Assistance ================= TAC had a few last minute challenges around payment, but executed well. Kudos to Christopher Dutz for leading the TAC efforts in Europe. The TAC folks took advantage of being co-located at ACEU and spent some time planning for the rest of the Fiscal Year. See the Travel Assistance report for more details. Infrastructure ============== Infrastructure is largely operating normally. Of note, infrastructure has re-enabled per-project web statistics and is evaluating a new l10n platform.
I've instructed Greg to perform a review of the services that we offer, in particular paying attention to whether or not our offered services are at least on par with the market offerings, and if not, what the gap is and how we might close that gap. I've asked Tom to prepare a P&L for ACNA, and plan to do so for ACEU. Infrastructure ============== Largely, Infrastructure is working as expected. There's a large one-time expense that was approved related to prior FY accrued but heretofore unpaid charges that will be realized this year. Travel Assistance ================= Last minute flight rebooking had to be performed due to some airline bankruptcies. We're working to make sure that hotel fees are prepaid before the event begins. The TAC hotel is reporting that they haven't received payment, so some last minute scrambling has been performed. Otherwise, things are as expected and in progress for ACEU.
I attended ApacheCon NA and found the conference to be well produced. ApacheCon NA allowed me to have a number of good conversations with members, committers, contributors, and sponsors. As promised in last month's Board report, Tom and I spent time talking about a call list and service level expectations for Virtual at ApacheCon. We think we have a workable path forward with his key deputies identified and a plan for how to cascade down the list. More to come on this front, but I am substantially less worried now about Tom as a SPoF for our connection to Virtual. I've also asked Tom to look into travel insurance to cover employees and officers who are traveling on behalf of the Foundation. The current situation is that we are covering the employees provided to us via Virtual's PEO, but not the contractors or officers. Tom's researching this, expect it to land on operations@ after he has a few answers. TAC === TAC executed well at ACNA. ACEU is already lined up and appears to be progressing well. Infra ===== Infra is overall running well. Infra had a presence at ACNA and had a number of conversations with users and moved a number of projects forward while in-person. Git.a.o suffered an outage which is ongoing. This service translates svn to git, and then mirrors that to Github. The outage was caused by a service provider catastrophically losing storage that we consumed. This was a widespread outage that affected a number of users other than us. This service dates back to our earliest experimentation with git. With our advent of writable git repos and gitbox/github integration a good chunk of the functionality this service provided has been obviated. Projects have been asked to tell us if they are still making use of the service, and restoring just the portions that remained needed and utilized.
During some of the activities of the month we discovered some fragile bits of the Foundation operations that have a single or tenuous links to external service providers. In particular, most of our liaison with Virtual happens via Tom, making him a single point of failure. In the course of our relationship with Virtual it's grown considerably in scope from accounting work to providing significant finance capabilities, handling our PEO duties, event planning, and more. At the same time, Tom's responsibilities at Virtual have also grown considerably, and a lot of our operations now have a component that Virtual is involved in. Accordingly, Tom and I are discussing how we might best increase the connective tissue between Ops at the ASF and Virtual. More to come on this in coming months. Infrastructure ============== Infrastructure completed a datacenter exit in a very short timeframe, which will result in a large cost savings for the Foundation. There was additionally a mail issue with Virtual, where no mail from apache.org was being delivered. This situation happened twice, with no obvious blips in monitoring. While this affected destinations other than Virtual as well, none of them were as painful. There is now in place a temporary workaround, and some robust monitoring that looks for any queue of messages sent to Virtual that sit around for more a short period of time. Travel Assistance ================= This month also saw significant progress in documenting tribal knowledge around the process and tools for running TAC, which also eliminates some single points of failure. Flights for EU are booked. Significant delays and problems securing ACNA tickets from our travel agency has been an issue. Those are mostly resolved, but I expect it will result in some changes in the future.
I've spent some time working on the Annual Report with Sally. Travel Assistance Committee =========================== TAC has finished selections for ACNA and the application process is closing for ACEU. Infrastructure ============== Infrastructure has dealt with a number of security issues as well as spending the bulk of available time on a datacenter relocate.
A good portion of the month has been spent figuring out the additional places inside the Foundation that I need to be plugged into and discussions with Sam. --- Infrastructure: Infrastructure is running well. Most notably, work on CDN evaluation continues moving forward with very promising results. --- TAC: Travel assistance for both ACNA and ACEU are open - and due to the closeness on the calendar, each event has a lead running it. (Christopher Dutz is running ACEU and Gavin is managing ACNA)
For personal reasons I have tendered my resignation.
Infrastrcuture
==============
Team had an offsite which was very productive from a "getting things
done" and a team building excercise (particular important with two new
hires). Team will focus on having separate offsites from ApacheCon as
there are less distractions.
The host running our email service failed. Recovery was rapid
(especially compared to the May 2014 outage). Congrats to the team on
fighting this fire.
Marketing and Publicity
=======================
As usual lots of cross-team collaboration and coordination across
fundraising, conferences, trademarks and infrastrcuture. Perhaps the
most visible of which was the delivery of an updated site for the 20th
anniversary.
A fairly standard level of PR, AR and Marketing activity outside of
the mountains of anniversary work which was the culmination of months
of preparation. A summary of highlights is available in the M&P
report.
Our thanks go to Sally and all those who helped bring the 20th
Anniversary together. Of course there is more to come at our
conferences this year.
Conferences
===========
Three events currently in flight, and a handful of other under
discussion.
ApacheCon North America 2019:
- 14 project communities curating their own tracks.
- David Brin, well-known science fiction author and futurist, is our
first keynote.
- CFP is openuntil May 13th.
- Confernce site https://apachecon.com/acna19/
ApacheCon Europe 2019
- ApacheCon EU site is up including sponsorships, CfP, and
registrations.
- Sponsorships are not selling as well as forApacheCon NA, work is
ongoing.
Chicago Roadshow 2019
- CFP has ended
- Website has posted the schedule of speakers
- We have one Platinum sponsor secured
Travel Assistance Committee
===========================
Preparing for ApacheCon TAC activities.
TAC has agreed to accept and administer additional funds from a
sponsor to target a specific underrepresented group ("Female Latin
American"). As noted in February report a process has been defined
that allows the team to use this money without it negatively impacting
the chances for other participants being the benificiaries of TAC.
Infrastructure ============== Two new Sys Admins started on March 18th. Welcome to Drew Foulks and John Andrunas MoinMoin Wiki will be deprecated in favour of either Confluence or GitHub Wiki Assisting M&PR to stage the 20th Anniversary website design. Eclipse IDE caused a problem with a rapid rise in requests for a plugin that had been removed from dist.apache.org. This resulted in a large scale repeated fetch operations from across the globe. That had a knock on effect that led the team to revamp Blocky, our tool for automated ban/blocking. We are now better equipped to handle such events. Marketing and PR ================ Lots of work for the 20th Anniversary. The Quarterly Report for Q3 FY2019 is live at https://s.apache.org/nUxz Fundraising re-alignment of responsibilities continues to bring results. Conferences =========== 4 events "in flight" so the team are very busy. Of note is that we have a lengthy report with contributions from each of the event leads. This is very encouraging to see. Real teamwork but also with real leadership to keep things moving. Rich appears to finally have reached his goal - congrats to all. ApacheCon North America 2019 - CFP is open. There are a number of community led tracks (details in full report). ApacheCon Europe 2019 progressing well. DC Roadshow - in the black financially. Focus is on attracting attendees at this time. Chicago Roadshow is putting the schedule together. Travel Assistance Committee =========================== No report at time of writing. What I know is... Accepted sponsorship to assist attendance for specific minority groups. This is being administered within the existing process. Ramping up to run TAC for the multiple events on the horizon.
Infrastructure ============= Everything is healthy in Infrastructure. Hiring has reached the offer stage. All projects have been migrated to gitbox. Congrats to the team. Improved On-Call process with "yellow" alerts that don't create unnecessary late night pages. Marketing and Publicity ======================= The role of VP Marketing and Publicity is becoming a central role for many operational activities, including but not limited to, Fundraising and Conferences. Sally has created a "Central Services" sub-group of volunteers to help manage selected cross-foundational projects. This group is intended to help spread the load with respect to ensuring things get done, thereby freeing Sally to concentrate on the more time dependent activities related to the expanded role. Fundraising handover is going well. The current focus is on reviewing, documenting and renewing targeted sponsorships, renewals are, for the most part, proving to be relatively easy to secure. Preparations for the 20th Anniversary are well underway - with lots of work to do, including an apache.org refresh. The central services team are helping drive this forward. The full report includes the usual details of key activities during the month. Conferences =========== DC Roadshow is now only a few weeks out. 12 different projects/communities/topics have claimed a track at ApacheCon North America. A full CFP is expected to open soon. ACEU19 planning is also progressing. See discussion item 8A There was a slight venue hiccup with Chicago roadshow but planning is on track. Travel Assistance Committee =========================== No significant activity. No event currently in planning.
Infrastructure ============= Infrastructure is operating as expected. Hiring remains an ongoing activity. Preparations continue for a long range plan to upgrade Puppet to V6 and OS to Ubuntu LTS 18.04. 65 projects/325 repositories have voluntarily migrated from git-wip-us to gitbox since Nov 2018. gitbox now has 172 projects/1300 repositories. As of Jan 15th 50 projects/175 repositories remain on git-wip-us. Voluntary migrations to minimize disruption are ongoing. Forced migrations will take place on Feb 7th. Marketing and Publicity ======================= Work has begun on restructuring and refining the strategy for ASF Fundraising. Via ComDev a proposal has been submitted for recognizing non-technical contributions to Apache communities. Planning is underway for our 20th anniversary celebrations. A community-wide survey (closing Feb 15th) has been published - “The Apache Way To Me…” https://s.apache.org/oxTr Conferences =========== ApacheConNA discussions with a potential producer continue. Chicago roadshow has been announced, CFP is open. Travel Assistance Committee =========================== TAC are exploring ways that they can better help ASF attendance at other, such as FOSSDEM. Interested folks should look out for proposals from TAC in the coming month or so. No events in process at present.
Infrastructure ============= Infrastructure is operating as expected. Hiring remains a focus - there are many resumes to review. GitBox migration is now active. Migration is currently voluntary, but the expectation that it will become mandatory has been set. There is currently no date upon which migration becomes mandatory. Marketing and Publicity ======================= Sally continues to handle sponsor outreach and renewal activities. $593K secured in annual renewals thus far (excludes multi-year invoicing/payments). Individual Giving campaign launched (https://s.apache.org/9cCy) during the Giving Tuesday global movement. 745 individuals donated nearly $80K since the program's launch last year. Q2 FY2019 quarterly report has also been published https://s.apache.org/d2Fq . Conferences =========== Planning to open ACNA19 CFP in January. Projects are invited to run their own mini-conference/track/summit/other as we continue our march towards ApacheCon being a convention of project conferences. 6 projects or topic communities have responded so far. ACEU19 planning has resumed, Myrle Krantz is leading the effort. The event will be held in Berlin at the Kulturbrauerei. The DC Roadshow (lead Kevin McGrail) has been rescheduled for Monday, March 25th, 2019. We hope to re-launch promotion for this event soon. Chicago Roadshow (lead Trevor Grant) on schedule for May 13-14 2019, in Logan Square. Travel Assistance Committee =========================== No report submitted at the time of writing. However, I am aware of a conversation regarding the provision of funds for a specific minority group. Initially the TAC rejected this on the grounds that the committee and process is not setup to allow such targeting. However, a proposal has been made that would appear to add no significant overhead on the TAC community and preserves the existing evaluation criteria. This is still under consideration.
Infrastructure ============= Infrastructure is operating as expected, and has no current issues to bring to the attention of the President or the Board. Possible financial impact from level of Slack usage. Team are monitoring. Reviewing resumes to fill two open headcount. Cloud credits from one provide have been renewed, with a commitment to three years. This allows for an expansion of GitBox. It's good to see cloud providers willing to provide stability to the foundation through three year commitments. There was a security issue with our Sonarcube analysis server, this has been resolved without any known impact. Marketing and Publicity ======================= Marketing and Publicity is operating as expected, and has no current issues to bring to the attention of the President or the Board. Some Q1 FY2019 reports are now overdue, please submit at your earliest convenience. Conferences =========== Signed contracts for Virtual to produce ApacheCon North America 2019 at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas, September 9th through 12th, 2019. DC road show has been postponed, due to difficulties with sponsors, and \the venue. Chicago Road Show, 2019 proposal submitted by, and championed by, Trevor Grant. Discussion around ApacheCon EU 2019 has stalled. Assistance is both forthcoming and requested (more needed). Travel Assistance Committee =========================== No report submitted. I'm unaware of any issues requiring attention and no event requires attention at present.
No report was submitted.
Infrastructure
=============
Infrastructure team have posted their open position, please help
amplify: https://s.apache.org/hiring2018
There was an extended downtown of around 60 hours due to a hardware
failure in our Jenkins master.
Marketing and Publicity
=======================
A number of F2F sponsor meetings at ApacheCon are being coordinated by
Sally, along with the on-boarding of two new Sponsor Ambassadors
(Craig Russell and Ted Liu).
Media and Analyst training will be available, for the 12th consecutive
year, at ApacheCon. All are encouraged to participate in this
excellent course.
Otherwise, business as usual.
Conferences
===========
The 20th anniversary edition of ApacheCon is almost upon us. This is a
"small one" by design (to keep the cadence going, and fill the gap
between two producers). Current registrations stand at 300 and
finances are healthy.
Special thanks to:
* Rich Bowen for coordinating
* Ruth Suehle, for "everything" (Ruth is bridging the gap between
producers)
* Kevin McGrail, for fundraising
* Sally Khudairi, for marketing assistance
* Sharan Foga, for organizing the ASF booth presence
* Trevor Grant, for being our on-site person for the booth
* Daniel Gruno, for printing, design, and other logistics
* Daniel Ruggeri, for booth assistance and other planning help
* Chris Dutz, who is hosting and maintaining our event schedule
system
DC Road Show, 2018 is confirmed for Dec 4, 2018. See
http://www.apachecon.com/usroadshow18/ CFP is open.
Proposed events (status in full report):
* JBCNConf, Barcelona, Spain
* ApacheCOn EU, 2019, Berlin, Germany
* Apache Roadshow Chicago, 2019
* ApacheCon North America 2019
Travel Assistance Committee
===========================
We have 10 (ten) TAC folks coming to ApacheCon - we ended up with 3
Visa rejections and so had to cancel 3 flights. Coordination with
planners around supporting roles for these people is underway.
I have received three separate keynote invitations for events in China. Two of them fall in the same week (late Oct). I have yet to confirm my availability, but I do plan to accept these two and reject the first. I'll reach out to others should the first conference ask for other ASF representatives. The topic of both keynotes are the Apache Way with a request to explore how Chinese developers should get involved. Infrastructure ============== Running under budget due to open headcount. Hiring process is in starting. Team will be present at ACNA18. Evaluating alternatives to HipChat - primary goal is to satisfy infra needs but the team are also considering wider foundational requirements. Marketing and Publicity ======================= Some vendor payments were missed and this may need to be made out of band. However, these are all budgeted items. Onboarding of two new Fundraising Ambassadors will take place at ACNA18. Created two media partnerships for promotion of ApacheCon. PR and AR proceeds as normal. Conferences =========== ApacheCon NA is in Montreal, Canada, September 24th - 27th. Registration currently stands at approx 200, but most registrations come in the last month. Planning for ACNA19 is progressing well with venue and date selection almost complete. A preliminary conference management proposal is expected very soon. DC Roadshow event is likely to be delayed until Nov. Other events are progressing slowly. TAC === No report from TAC at time of writing. VP TAC has requested an relatively high limit to their credit card to assist in flight and hotel bookings. In the past this was handled by our EA who worked through various avenues to secure necessary funds. President is working with VP TAC to ensure an appropriate limit and safeguards are put in place.
Infrastructure ============== Mostly business as usual - some significant upgrades recently (Jenkins and Buildbot) and the migration of 1.1 million docs pages (Maven) off the deprecated CMS. GitHub integration has started to hit API rate limits. This will require some new mechanisms to reduce our calls. Marketing and Publicity ======================= Annual report published. Thank you all who contributed but special thanks to Sally for "herding the cats". Publication of promotional best practices to align with established ASF publicity, outreach, and branding guidelines is coming soon. Otherwise business as usual. Conferences =========== Currently 8 events in various stages of planning. This is testament to the hard work of VP Conferences and a small team of volunteers. However, such a volume only increases the need for volunteers to sustain it. The team have sought to define the names "Apache Road Show" and "ApacheCon" in an attempt to clarify why we're doing different things around events, and to help planners, attendees, and sponsors to understand what we're doing. See https://s.apache.org/6OAU Details in the full report, but the events currently in the pipeline are: Apache Roadshow Europe 2018, Berlin - wrapping up ApacheCon North America 2018 - early bird pricing closes July 20th Apache Road Show, DC, 2018 - CFP due immenintetly Apache Road Show, Chicago, 2019 - Date and Venue to be confirmed ApacheCon EU 2019, Berlin - New Thinking proposal being finalized ApacheCon NA 2019 - site search is ongoing Seoul Event - discussions have dried up, may be shelved. BCN 2019 Colocation/Road Show - proposal TAC === Ramping up for ApacheCon NA. Currently processing paperwork for the 13 recipients.
Infrastructure ============== The earliest cloud service credits donations are coming up for renewal. No concerns about lack of renewal at this time. Thanks to the long running work to Puppetize workloads Infra is now able to move services to take advantage of cost structures (e.g. low bandwidth charges in EU) Marketing and Publicity ======================= Annual Report is being prepared. Sponsor engagement / support continues to reap benefits. Mostly "business as usual". Conferences =========== Apache EU Roadshow was a success. There are ongoing conversations about further collaborations with NewThinking producers. ACNA18 now becomes the focus with respect to promotional work. Please help amplify. There is a call for volunteers open for help with items not covered by paid staff. On going discussions relating to Chicago and DC Roadshow proposals and early stage conversations about potential for ApacheCon in Seoul in 2019. TAC === Of the 28 that applied, 13 were accepted for ACNA.
Infrastructure ============== Congratulations on bringing the ASFs largest cost centre in on budget (actually a slight 0.3% overage on our $800K+) A key new, long term, focus is to upgrade all infrastructure management from Puppet v3 to Puppet v5. While the existing long term focus of decommissioning aging hardware continues. status.apache.org page has been moved to StatusPage.io - a number of benefits are identified in the Infrastructure report. A key one is a better mechanism for managing and notifying of scheduled maintenance. There have been some difficulties around the Jenkins masters. This is being managed in preparation for installation of a new dedicated piece of hardware. Marketing and Publicity ======================= VP Marketing reports the completion of counselling "a Big Data vendor on correcting their promotional practices to align with established ASF publicity, outreach, and branding guidelines." Thank you to Sally and the impacted PMCs, as well as the company themselves for working in the best interests of the broader community. Otherwise business as usual, including assistance with fundraising relations. Conferences =========== Apache RoadShow Europe - Berlin, June 11-14 2018 - http://apachecon.com/euroadshow18 ApacheCon North America - Montreal, CA, 24-27 Sept - schedule is now online http://apachecon.com/acna18 Venue search is ongoing for 2019 EU event. Proposals received for 2019 events in Japan and South Korea, though there is no direct action to facilitate those events at this time. TAC === 28 completed applications received for ACNA Montreal. Judges in process of evaluating.
Infrastructure ============== Over budget by 0.5%, FY19 budget request reflects this. A few outages and a DDOS to address, but nothing too complex. Marketing and Publicity ======================= Produced 19th Anniversary blog https://s.apache.org/gK4Q and promotional video https://youtu.be/Fqk_rlKiVIs. Q3 FY2018 report published https://s.apache.org/UtBD Otherwise business as usual. Conferences =========== Apache RoadShow Europe - Berlin, June 11-14 2018 - Scheduled posted: http://apachecon.com/euroadshow18/schedule.html ApacheCon North America - Montreal, CA, 24-27 Sept - CFP closed, 249 proposals are being evaluated. Cloudstack Collaboration Conference is to be co-located, GeoSpatial community are running a complete track. Call for volunteers is open - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VWJsUp0HSa2oH6yCbOJJqw5pgdxKt_m0R8yXUcQUA8A/edit#gid=0 Apache DC RoadShow - DC, October - Date and Venue confirmed, more details once website is updated. 2019 will see the 20th anniversary of ApacheCon. Venue search is underway in the SF area. Smaller events are being considered on a case by case basis. Please join planners@apachecon.com to help. TAC === Applications are open until May 1st. Everything is under control.
Infrastructure ============== No issues to report. For the most part it's business as usually, two items of particular interest are: Progress being made on a self service infrastructure (Apache Infrastructure Management, AIM). This will free infra team members to focus on non-standard requests and issues. Some analysis of our usage of Travis is providing valuable data to help with capacity planning in the future. Marketing and Publicity ======================= VP M&P is actively engaging with a company engaged with one of our high profile projects that is having some difficulties working within our trademark policy. The main focus of her work is to educate the company on what is and is not acceptable use of our marks. Otherwise business as usual. Conferences =========== Apache EU Roadshow program is published - https://apachecon.com/euroadshow18/ Apache North America CFP is open and going well. Two keynotes have been announced. Details at http://apachecon.com/acna18/ TAC === Applications for ApacheCon NA applications are open (closing May 1st). Judges have started reviewing. It's great to see TAC being on track again. Well done team.
Infrastructure ============== Request for board feedback: Does the board want to allow additional spend for specific projects, specifically using Infrastructure costs beyond its budget? Full details in the Infrastructure report, in summary the question is raised because "Historically, the Board has generally stated that projects and their communities should be self-sufficient and receive no additional Foundation funds to support them beyond their internal ability" and a situation has been identified in which a single project is consuming resources beyond the normal provision of support. As an observation I will remind the board that there is existing provision for experimentation to allow projects to seek directed sponsorship to cover such expenses. Separately, two new initiatives to lower overheads are underway: 1) identify high usage of shared services within projects so that such usage can be investigated and reduced if appropriate 2) migration of Top Level Project web hosting to public cloud thanks to a long term donation of resources (significantly bandwidth requirements in existing hosting). Marketing and Publicity ======================= Business as usual - noting increased impact from sponsor engagement, e.g. healthy cross promotion of "Success at Apache: A Newbie's Narrative" https://s.apache.org/A72H. Such activities help deliver sponsor value while, at the same time, amplifying the foundations message. Conferences =========== ApacheCon NA 2018 is confirmed and CFP and registration is open http://apachecon.com/acna18/ and planning is progressing well. Apache Roadshow (EU) is also confirmed. Co-located with FOSS Backstage in Berlin. A NA Apache Roadshow is also in planning. Our Thanks to Rich Bowen and Sharan Foga for driving this difficult process. TAC === TAC have rallied quickly to enable applications for TAC support for ApacheCon NA. Applications are open. @Jim: work with Greg on resourcing infra resources for OpenOffice
Infrastructure
==============
Everything progressing well. Upgrades to both Jira and Jenkins being
highlights. Good progress on GitBox tooling to perform "mass
migration" of projects from git-wip over to gitbox, with the goal of
deprecating the Foundation's operation and management of git
repositories.
Marketing and Publicity
=======================
A milestone was reaching - we raised more than $20K and communicated
with 363 individual donors via Hopsie since launching on 28 March
2017. While this number is small when compared to our overall
fundraising activities it is notable that we have been exploring ways
to empower individual donors for many years. This progress is very
encouraging.
At the request of the Presidents office, Halo have worked with VP
Trademarks to draw up a proposal to provide support for our trademarks
activities. This is designed to address the growing workload on our
volunteers. I would note that this proposal is about ensuring prompt
and appropriate attention to trademark issues where the foundation
deems them important. It is independent of any discussion about where
Trademark management should sit in the org structure.
In order to set context I will remind the board of why investing in
supporting our volunteers is important in this area, firstly I'll
quote Phil's proposal [1]:
1. The ASF should provide support for some PMCs to register their
trademarks.
2. The ASF should provide support for some PMCs to help ensure that
their brands are used appropriately.
Assuming that we have consensus on these two statements I'll go on to
explain my own justification for providing support to our volunteers
(shared and refined with others including VP Trademarks, VP Marketing
and President):
* Open source used to be mostly about sharing expertise around
internally used software
* Over time open source has increasingly become a part of products
for sale
* Open source brands have therefore become valuable as a result,
e.g. Apache is about quality and independence, Kubernetes is about
infrastructure standardization
* As direct revenue is increasingly generated from software built on
OSS, so has marketing pressure to use OSS brands to attract sales
* The rise of “consortium led” OSS means that trademark use for this
purpose is often seen as acceptable
* Consequently the ASF is seeing increasing pressure to allow use of
its marks in ways that would undermine our meritocratic model of
independent governance
* Therefore, the ASF needs to step up it’s protection of our marks
so that we maintain independence within our communities
It is my hope that the board will consider Halo's proposal and work
through the Presidents office as we seek to build a model that is both
cost efficient and gentle on our volunteer efforts.
Conferences
===========
Continued investigations with respect to co-location of an event with
Berlin Buzzwords.
TAC
===
No events planned at present.
[1] https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/aa6f29608a6ee1a61490fa54568edf7d7db09097d059850c4c1307d4@%3Cboard.apache.org%3E
Infrastructure ============== No significant items to report this month. The team have re-confirmed that despite forecasting errors for current budget year they expect to come in on budget. Marketing and Publicity ======================= An individual "giving campaign" in November raised $2k. Published the FY2018 Operations Summary for Q2 https://s.apache.org/j1GJ The usual PR, AR and event support activities feature in this months report. Conferences =========== Discussion are underway about co-locating ApacheConEU 2018 with an existing event. There are also discussions about an event in NA later in 2018, though details are still emerging. TAC === Nothing to report (no events planned)
Infrastructure ============== The team have investigated an oddity in our staffing expenditures as identified last month. It seems that Infra incorrectly foretasted FY18 costs from the FY17 actuals. This means there is no budget for the open headcount. However, other areas of the infra budget are in a good state and with ongoing and predicted savings in other areas it is expected that the team will come within its total budget. In other news there was an outage on mail-archives.a.o that took a while to correct. It highlighted our ongoing issues with services on old hardware, old operating systems, and non-puppetized services. This has been mitigated and work to improve aging services continues, Marketing and Publicity ======================= Sponsor Ambassador program work continues, along with general awareness raising around what the foundation does (e.g. published "Success at Apache: Scratch Your Own Itch" https://s.apache.org/7Amk , which was also published as a cover feature in JAX Magazine's special issue on Open Source). The recent turmoil around high profile security breaches has died down and PR and Marketing activity is mostly back to normal. Conferences =========== VP Conferences continues to explore options for ApacheCon events after having confirmed with the broader community that such a thing is still needed. Input welcome on planners@apachecon.com mailing list, which is open to members. TAC === Nothing to report (no events planned)
General ======= Ross undertook a Board Service Training provided by https://boardsource.org and funded by his employer. This was a very useful undertaking, I would encourage all Officers to spend some time reviewing materials on this site. Infrastructure ============== No issues requiring attention this month. The team still an open headcount. Budget anomalies identified last month have been resolved and we can now confirm that Infra a currently in good shape. This will be reviewed again once the open headcount has been filled and the associated expense is known. Marketing and Publicity ======================= As can be expected there has been significant interest in the Equifax data breach and the role Apache software had in this breach. Consequently it has been a busy month, otherwise mostly business as usual. VP M&P led the drafting of the ASF’s response, in coordination with ASF Legal counsel and Board, to the US House Committee’s panel hearing on the Equifax data breach. Also published an "Apache is Open" educational blog highlighting how the foundation works and the responsibilities users of our software have. Conferences =========== Nothing to report TAC === Nothing to report
Infrastructure No major items requiring board attention. No significant downtime during the last month. Some unexpected numbers in this infra related financials this month. Most likely misapplied cost centers. The team are investigating and will fix the errors and / or report next month as necessary. Good progress with respect to moving away from ASF owned hardware, though it has become necessary to replace some disks which were reporting a predictive failure ahead of the scheduled decommission date. Marketing and Publicity An Apache project was associated with a recent data breach at Equifax. Thanks to prompt action from the PMC and our VP Marketing and Publicity the foundation was able to respond constructively and to help identify the cause of the problem (failure to install patches addressing a previously identified exploit). We thank those involved for their prompt and efficient handling of the situation, the guidance provided to the Apache user community as a result should be considered good practice. Other than this item it's business as usual, where "usual" now includes sponsor communications. Conferences Nothing to report. TAC Nothing to report.
Infrastructure In process of renewing our binary signing service with Symantec, requires a new "authentication" of the business. This has highlighted that while our D&B records reflect our new Wakefield postal address, but many other third-party records are out of date. If anyone sees an incorrect listing please notify our EA to have them corrected. Gitbox usage is being expanded to more users. Edge cases still being discovered so mass migration is still a long term, rather than short term, goal. Marketing and Publicity Starting to see immediate results from having VP Marketing tasked with assisting in sponsorship activities. Business as usual with respect to press and analyst engagements. Conferences We have a booth at All Things Open. Conversations are ongoing with respect to involvement in other events / meetups. Conversations also ongoing with respect to alternative conference producer arrangements. TAC Nothing to report
Infrastructure -------------- Confirms that after evaluation of workload it is indeed necessary to employ a sixth team member (this is not additional headcount, rather the filling of an open position). Good progress on reducing dependency on OSU/OSL with the replacement and puppetization of Jenkins. Conferences ----------- Exploring options for future events. TAC --- ACNA’17 was $9,200 under budget. Evaluation surveys and interviews are underway.
No report was submitted.
Marketing and Publicity ======================= Business as usual this month. Media training returns this month at ApacheCon - our thanks go to Sally for offering this excellent course again. Infrastructure ============== No significant issues this month. There is one open position within the team, recruiting is underway. There has been early progress on exploring ways to reduce the cost per project, this starts with a better understanding of the distribution of our costs across projects and services - see https://status.apache.org/costs/ (note this is draft data). Conferences =========== There are over 500 people in attendance at ApacheCon which is currently underway. Interested parties will meet to discuss the future of Apache branded events.
Marketing and Publicity ======================= There have been some discussion between President/EVP and VP PR and Marketing in order to clarify the role as we move forwards. For the most part we are looking at ensuring adequate support is provided to outward facing parts of the foundation while not distracting Sally with core internal functions. At this time Sally continues work with Fundraising, Brand Management, Apache Incubator, Conferences/ApacheCon, and ComDev, and plans to increase Fundraising activities, and ramp down efforts with the rest during FY2018. In addition to the routine "business as usual" items please note the following: Sally launched the new individual giving fundraising platform in conjunction with announcing the ASF’s 18th Anniversary. Sally is exploring possible underwriters for a future event in Europe. Infrastructure ============== Mostly business as usual. One catastrophic failure on the Jenkins master, but this has been addressed and a longer term solution is being explored. The team is currently understaffed by one FTE. Recruiting is underway. Conferences =========== ApacheCon US is showing lower than expected registration numbers, though we are still a month out. Options for an event in the EU are being explored. Travel Assistance ================= Applications opened on January 25th and closed on March 8th. We have approved 10 TACers.
No report was submitted.
Infrastructure ========== Infra team have had to rescind an offer to maintain a VM, CPU and storage for a private copy of Maven Central as a precaution. Storage growth rate indicates that the offer is not sustainable. Maven PMC have been encouraged to seek specific budget support from the Board for their needs. The team are conducting an experiment with a small ($525) unbudgeted expense on unlimited online coursework for three months. If successful the next budget will include staff training as a budget item. There is an effort to accelerate the decommissioning of ASF-owned hardware and the adoption of the Gitbox service (Git as a canonical ASF code repository, http://gitbox.apache.org). Some progress on a new web area for the Directors to create an authoritative set of pages for Board-approved policies and commentary. Conferences ========== 232 sessions submitted for ApacheCon Miami, with 193 for Apache: Big Data. Selection process is now underway. Marketing and Publicity ================== A recent focus on the ASF LinkedIn page results in expanded reach for our news announcements, Exploring plans for professional editing of ApacheCon recordings as volunteer efforts, though very much appreciated, are not producing timely results due to the volume of recordings available.
I took the whole of December off in unexpected (personal) ways. Due to a mail reconfiguration (on my end) prior to the holidays I appear to have lost access to much of the ASF mail. This went unnoticed until the last couple of days when I resurfaced from an unexpected off the grid experience on the account supposed to be receiving ASF mail. Consequently I am doubly out of touch, though priority ASF mail is still routed to my day job account and thus has been processed.My apologies for the absenteeism. Infrastructure The big news is that it is now a priority to move a few test projects to Gitbox. This is (hopefully) the last stage before the full roll out of an improved experience for projects wishing to use Git as their primary source control repository. For the long range the infra team have set a goal of moving "all services off ASF-owned hardware". Though I note some apparent contradictions between this goal and some short term activity, e.g. "Finalizing launching Fisheye services locally at the ASF to replace the third-party service run by Atlassian". After checking with the infra team I confirmed that this item means moving to an ASF owned service but not moving to ASF owned hardware. The infra team also provide some community engagement numbers. This is a new practice and one that should be encouraged given concerns that Infra has become divorced from the broader community wishing to contribute to our infrastructure efforts. The headline here is that there are non-infra patches being applied to areas such as the puppet work. There is no progress as yet for the "cost per project" analysis. TAC Closing out the last event and preparing for the next. Applications will open January 19th and close on March 8th. M&P Business as usual :-)
As previously agreed, my focus is to be on the areas of the foundation that are running well. For the most part, therefore, my reports are expected to be uneventful. That being said, I have not done a good job of as I might in staying abreast of the activities in these areas. Fortunately, we have full reports. For infrastructure all open positions have now been backfilled and new hires are being onboarded. Exploring GitHub as a master continues to be a focus, along with finding ways to reduce the infrastructure costs per project. For conferences the dates for ApacheCon North America 2017 in Miami were released (May 15-19, 2017), at the Intercontinental Miami. Marketing proceeds as expected. Thank you to Sally and all contributors to the FY17 Q2 report which was published on 12/15 (https://s.apache.org/oTOF). A new monthly blog series "Success at Apache" has also been launched to share success stories from the foundation. Sally is seeking content for this blog. TAC has reported final numbers and budget for ApacheCon EU (13 recipients, budget $26,190.04). Two of the TAC recipients have been invited to join the TAC committee. This presents some complication in that only foundation members can participate in some aspects of TAC, specifically where private information is shared by applicants. However, there are many ways in which non-members can assist that do not require access to private information. The TAC report includes some details about how many recent TAC recipients go on to participate more deeply with one or more foundation project.
Truth is I've been enjoying the total freedom from day to day activities. I've assisted a little in the transition to Sam as the new President, but for the most part Sam has simply moved forwards. As agreed with Sam I will pick up the areas that are "just working" and provide oversight there so that Sam can focus on the areas that need attention. Given Sam's indication that he feels the areas needing focus are Brand and Fundraising this means I will be "on call" for Marketing and Publicity, Infrastructure, Conferences and TAC. Each of these areas has paid support and thus the overhead here is expected to be manageable. I will monitor those lists and be available to our officers in those roles should the need arise.
Since the last meeting, we have published the schedule for our ApacheCon Europe events (see http://apachecon.com/) and are in the process of promoting that event, and doing last minute planning. We will once again have a Media and Analyst Training. See Sally for details. Please continue to promote the event to your project communities. I hope to see you in Seville.
The CFP for ApacheCon Seville has now closed, and we are in the review period. We are scheduled to send speaker notifications on the 26th of this month. There have been 173 talks submitted for Apache Big Data, and 175 for ApacheCon Europe. We are using a new system for reviewing talks. Rather than asking reviewers to assign a numerical value to each talk, we are using a tool called "Papers Please", which asks the reviewer to choose between talks based on which talk they believe a target audience would attend. Whereas the old the old method tended to give us ratings of 4 out of 5 on almost everything, this method appears to give a better understanding of what talks people actually want to see. Additionally, reviewers are given the talk abstract and title, but not information about the speaker. This has been shown, in other conferences, to increase diversity of speakers, introduce more new speakers, and reduce the "popularity contest" nature of talk selection. We have one keynote lined up, and are looking for others. If you have one in mind, please speak up. ApacheCon North America is scheduled for May 15-19 at the Intercontinental in Miami. There has been some discussion on the operations@apache.org list regarding crafting policy about when third party events can (and can not) be scheduled, in order to prevent conflicting with ApacheCon and other Apache project's events. While we have a contract that states that we can't hold other events called 'ApacheCon' within a particular geographic and time window around existing events named 'ApacheCon', we do not have a written policy around other events that use Apache trademarks.
We are entering the last month of the CFP for ApacheCon Europe, so this is when we expect to see some talks actually coming in. Once we have a schedule, we will start promoting the event more. However, we have already seem significantly more Twitter/Facebook/G+ activity around the event than we have seen around the last few events, which is a good early sign. Registration ApacheCon Europe 14 Apache: Big Data Europe 15 CFPs ApacheCon Europe 48 Apache: Big Data Europe 51 Please watch the dev@community.apache.org mailing list for ways that you can help get the word out about this event, as we get closer.
ApacheCon Europe will be held in Seville, November 14th through 18th, 2016. We have started to more actively promote the CFP internally. With a great deal of help from Melissa we have contacted the user and dev list for every project and encouraged them to submit talks about their project. I'm sure you've seen at least one of these messages. Registration for ApacheCon Europe is still moving very slowly: Apache: Big Data 6 ApacheCon 7 Meanwhile, the paper proposals are starting to come in: Apache: Big Data 42 ApacheCon 35 Still to do is more promotion outside of the ASF, to related projects, and continued promotion of registration for the event. Soon we'll start promoting ApacheCon North America as well, as soon as the website is up.
Registration and CFPs are up for ApacheCon Seville, and Apache Big Data Seville, at http://apachecon.com/ but this hasn't been widely announced. We'll be starting to promote that in the coming week or two, as soon I have some time. Meanwhile, LF is promoting the events via their websites. Audio from ApacheCon Vancouver is slowly making it up to Feathercast.org. I think at this point all of the audio has been processed and uploaded. I just need to do the actual podcast posts via Wordpress to publish them.
Last week we held ApacheCon North America in Vancouver, BC,
Canada. The attendance numbers are as follows:
ABD - 428 total - (398 for just ABD + 30 add-ons from ApacheCon
attendees)
ApacheCon - 326 total - (277 just for ApacheCon + 49 add-ons from
the ABD attendees)
(That's a total overlap of 79 that attended both events, so the
audience is largely disjoint.)
Combined total attendees - 675(!) versus 447 in Austin
This is a 51% increase from last year!
Among other highlights of this event:
* Sally held her Media/Analyst training again, to a full house.
This was very valuable to all who attended.
* Keynotes included a very astute analysis by Stephen O'Grady, of
RedMonk, of the need for our projects to work with one another,
rather than operating as islands within a loosely-knit
federation. This presentation is well worth watching. It is on
the Linux Foundation YouTube channel. I welcome further
discussion of his ideas on the members@ and dev@community lists.
* There was a 2-day track of GeoSpatial content, which we will try
to do again in Spain and more aggressively market as a
track/subconference/something to the scientific community.
* ODPi had a keynote in which they spoke about the purpose of
their organization. Jim Jagielski had a one-on-one panel
discussion with John Mertic, Director of Program Management for
ODPi, in which they discussed the concerns of the Foundation
about ODPi. This recording will be on FeatherCast.org within the
coming days.
* All keynotes/plenaries are published to the Linux Foundation
YouTube channel at
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCthvmTSlmIcMH93LIJNe-2w
* FeatherCast.org is publishing all of the audio from every
non-plenary session. This will take considerable time, but we
have a number of volunteers working on this effort. Many thanks
to those people. This recording was done entirely by volunteer
effort, using digital recorders owned by the Foundation. The
full list may be found at
http://feathercast.apache.org/tag/apacheconna2016/
The volunteer effort is being coordinated on the comdev mailing
list.
* lists.apache.org was announced in the State of the Feather
address, as well as being mentioned in other talks, and people
are starting to use that service.
At the event, we announced ApacheCon EU 2016, to be held November
14-18 in Seville (Sevilla) Spain. The websites for that event are
at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-europe and
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apache-big-data-europe
Registration and CFP coming very soon. A number
of people have already stepped forward offering local expertise and
on-the-ground support. Please save the date, and mention it if you
happen to be in conversation with potential sponsors. While it is
not our job to promote and market the events, anything we can do
with our contacts is greatly appreciated. There's a recording at
http://feathercast.apache.org/why-did-you-sponsor-apachebigdata/
in which a number of our sponsors talk about why they sponsored
the event, and why everyone else should, too.
We are considering several locations for ApacheCon NA 2017, which
will probably be held somewhere in the Eastern United States. I
expect to have further details on this within the next 2 months.
It is worth remembering that our contract states a period of 5
years, with the option to cancel at 3 years if either party is
dissatisfied. That 3 year period ends with the event in Seville.
Speaking for myself and the President, and expressing the opinions
of the majority of conference attendees and sponsors, I recommend
that we continue with this relationship.
Ross and others complimented Rich on an ApacheCon well done
With ApacheCon 3 weeks out, I have been spending all of my ASF time promoting that event. This has included a series of podcasts on feathercast.org promoting our speakers, their talks, their projects, and ApacheCon itself. Registration numbers follow (as of Monday, April 18): Apache: Big Data 336 ApacheCon 2016: 265 BarCampApache: 40 Last month I promised an update on ApacheCon Europe. The update is that we're going to have one, but that it will be as lean as possible. This means things like not providing an on-site lunch, not having an off-site reception, and not doing recordings of talks. This is a great opportunity for sponsors to step up to cover these things, if desired. However, I have opted to have an event under these conditions rather than to not have an event at all. We should have some idea of venue soon, and will hopefully be able to announce this at ApacheCon in Vancouver.
The schedule has been announced for ApacheCon Core - https://s.apache.org/fgNC - and for Apache Big Data - https://s.apache.org/rKyd - and registration is open for both events. We would like to encourage all projects that have content in the events (as well as those that don't) to promote the event to their various communities. ApacheCon North America will be held in Vancouver, Canada, May 9-14, 2016, at the Hyatt Regency, Vancouver. Projects wishing to have ancillary events (summits, hackathons, etc.) at the conference are encouraged to contact me as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation have promised a decision regarding ApacheCon Europe by some time this month, so expect to hear about that in next month's report.
The CFP for ApacheCon closed on the 12th, and we have begun the process of reviewing these submissions and forming the schedule. Anyone wishing to participate in this process should contact me, or the dev@community.apache.org mailing list. Our current submission totals are: For ApacheCon North America: 152 For Apache Big Data: 206 We are also looking for suggestions (and contacts) for keynotes for the event. We currently have 2 suggestions, and have room for 4 - 5. These, also, should to go to me, or to the dev@community mailing list. Relevant dates: CFP Close: February 12, 2016 CFP Notifications: February 29, 2016 Schedule Announced: March 3, 2016 We do not yet have dates for ApacheCon Europe, but we should know within the next 2 months whether we will be doing that event this year. Huge thanks to Daniel Gruno, as well as to a number of volunteers, for their presence at FOSDEM 2016. They gave away hundreds of stickers, as well as other swag, and showcased the new feather logo. They had many conversations with open source enthusiasts, and it was a good time for reengaing with that community. Apache OpenOffice also shared the table with us, as they have a long history of being present at FOSDEM. As always, a huge thank you to Melissa for her support of this event. One conversation at FOSDEM was our difficulty with connecting new volunteers with concrete tasks that they can do to get involved. Several times a month, people come to the dev@community mailing list and ask "How can I get involved?" and are generally given vague answers that amount to "Go look at the projects and see what they need." From this discussion has arisen a new service, Help Wanted - https://helpwanted.apache.org/ (Thanks to Daniel Gruno, once again) that attempts to bridge this gap. The goal is to promote beginner tasks that are a good place for entry into our communities. Projects are encouraged to put tasks on there that reflect this goal. (ie, please don't just dump your Jira ticket list here.) It's also a place for community-level tasks, such as our desire to create per-project brochures that can be produced on demand for events, meetups, elevator chats, and so on. I expect to be completely focused on ApacheCon for the coming few months.
We are one month out from the close of the CFPs for ApacheCon North America. We expect, as usual, to get a flood of submissions in the last 2 weeks. (Submit now! Avoid the rush!) Thus, it is anticipated that the coming month will be busier, as we try to promote the CFP, and then begin working on the event in earnest.
On November 25th, we sent a CFP announcement to all dev@ and users@ lists, and the submissions are trickling in. We are in the quiet period before the storm. We expect to see talk submissions ramp up in January, leading up to the February deadline, and we will, accordingly, start pushing the CFP particularly hard at the beginning of the year.
We expect a CFP for ApacheCon North America to be published any day now, at which point we will start actively promoting it to our communities.
ApacheCon We just completed ApacheCon Europe in Budapest 2 weeks ago. Attendance was disappointing, but Angela speculates that was a combination of being up against Strata, and the Syrian refugee situation, that contributed to this, and estimates that we would have had up to another 50% attendance were it not for these influences. As it was, we had 432 in attendance for Big Data, and about 200 for Core. We heard a number of people say that the split into two events was confusing and poorly explained. This was primarily at the CFP time - ie, which event to submit talks to, and how the talks were selected. But it was also confusing for attendees, who may have signed up for one event and then been unable to attend the other. In the future, we plan to have a single CFP and a single event, but do marketing for the various content tracks, such as 'ApacheCon Big Data', 'ApacheCon Search', or 'ApacheCon Web'. Sponsors report that this makes it a lot easier to support an event when it is clear what the content is, and thus who the audience will be, which is validation of what we've been saying for years. We will also have content category based CFP selection committees, which will work with Angela and Craig to select the content for the next event. Talks will be tagged as belonging to various major categories, and selection will be divided up in that manner to produce these conferences-with-a-conference. TAC is another area that suffered considerable confusion, as may be reported elsewhere. In future events, we are going to try to have Angela work much more closely with TAC, and with Melissa, to eliminate the confusion caused by having two separate sources of travel assistance. The CFP for ApacheCon North America will be announced soon, once changes have been made to the CFP to reflect the above decisions. ApacheCon Europe 2016 is still in limbo. Given the poor attendance in Budapest, there are financial considerations. We are, however, reaching out to a number of sponsors, and if we can obtain promises of a certain level of sponsorship, we will move forward with planning that event. Several locations are being investigated at this time. FOSDEM FOSDEM has been announced, and Apache has submitted a proposal for a table to promote the ASF. We have requested two tables, one of which will be dedicated to the ASF, and the other which will rotate among projects which wish to show up to promote their specific community. Apache OpenOffice has committed to being present, and we have interest expressed by other projects. Apache Retreats There has been the beginning of a discussion of reviving the Apache Retreat concept. A venue was suggested in conversations at ApacheCon, and that is being further investigated. No firm plans have been made at this point. Discussion is ongoing on the ComDev mailing list. OSCON We have received initial contact from Joshua Simmons, a representative of OSCON regarding what changes would need to happen to secure the ASF's participation in OSCON next year. This conversation is still just beginning, but Ross provided considerable feedback regarding our experience at this year's event.
We are less than a month away from ApacheCon EU. The attendance numbers are very disappointing, and surely not helped by the refugee situation. Angela is requesting that we do all we can to promote attendance on our end, and we're doing what we can. ApacheCon North America is already being promoted at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apache-big-data-north-america and at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-core-north-america but we have not yet done any promotion of the event(s). The CFP, also, has not yet been promoted. We will start doing that in earnest in October, and attempt to get more coverage of this event than we managed to do for EU. Discussion has started about having a presence at FOSDEM to promote the ASF, and encourage a new generation of university students to participate in ASF projects. Details have yet to be determined, as the call for participation in FOSDEM has not yet gone out. Daniel Gruno has volunteered to head up that effort, and will be supported by Melissa and myself in making that happen. OpenOffice has long had a presence there, but we wish to expand that to a larger ASF presence. We (President, EA, VP Marketing, and myself) have also discussed our presence at OSCon, and determined that it's 1) not really the audience we want to be reaching and 2) was in particular not worth the considerable cost and effort this year. We will therefore not be participating in OSCon Europe, and unless someone steps up with a strong case and volunteer effort to make it happen, we'll not be participating in OSCon in Austin next year.
Very uneventful month. I expect to meet with Angela today or tomorrow and get Apachecon Vancouver rolling.
The CFP for ApacheCon Europe has closed and the talk selection process has begun. We hope to announce a schedule soon so that event promotion can begin in earnest. Shortly after that, we will announce the CFP for ApacheCon North America. We continue to be very pleased with our relationship with the Linux Foundation. We will have a presence at OSCon again this year, and the booth will be staffed by a number of volunteers while the expo hall is open. I will be in attendance, and hope to have time to work the booth myself. FOSDEM dates have been announced - 30 & 31 January 2016 - and there has been some talk about Apache having a presence at the event, building on OpenOffice's presence in past years.
The ApacheCon CFP for Europe is open for a little while longer (July 1). ApacheCon dates for Vancouver have been published to the website, so that we can mark our territory in terms of dates. This was done due to the Strata conflict with EU. We've also attempted to establish closer communication with major conference organizations to prevent that happening again.
Not much to report this month. ApacheCon EU is about to start into the CFP and promotion phase, and ApacheCon NA hasn't started at all.
We held ApacheCon North America in Austin last week, April 13-16, and had 449 registrations, up by 50 from Denver. We had the honor of hosting several of the founding members of the httpd project at the event[1], and had a birthday celebration for the 20th birthday of the httpd project. We also received a proclamation from the City of Austin declaring April 13-16 to be Apache Days.[2] There was also a lively BarCamp on Thursday, with a good number of people in attendance. Several projects (Spark, Traffic Server, Cassandra) held project summits. On the whole, we appear to have had a successful event by most measures, although the size of the attendance is still a source of frustration for many. There was an incident at ApacheCon where a keynote speaker was subject to a verbal barrage while in the refreshment line in the exhibit area, and felt intimidated and threatened. A great deal of discussion has happened on the members list, as well as numerous other places, about what action should be taken. The conference producer has been made aware of the incident, but is still traveling and doing events, so I haven't had a chance to discuss this at length with her. Meanwhile, the individual in question has apologized to the speaker (cc'ing myself and the conference producer), and I am also awaiting communication from her regarding whether she wishes to pursue this further with the conference producer, pursuant to enforcing the conference Code of Conduct and blacklisting this individual from future events. I ask for the continued patience of the membership as we work through this. I've also discussed this incident directly with the individual in question, explaining our stance that this kind of thing won't be tolerated in our community. We had very productive meetings with the LF producers regarding how future events will be run. As reported before, LF is stepping up to provide more leadership in upcoming events, and have proposed that ApacheCon EU (September) have a much narrower content focus, with three days primarily focusing on our Big Data projects, and then a fourth day populated by community talks, and project-specific tracks. The goal is to make the conference easier to market, because we will be able to state what the conference is about in terms that the market understands. The secondary goal is to have the main part of the event fund the community portion of the event, which has, in a sense, been a goal of ApacheCon from the beginning. Projects are welcome to propose content in the CFP[3], as per earlier events, but LF will make the final content determination, rather than a committee of ASF people. This is a significant change from earlier events. It is anticipated that it will result in some tensions in the community, but given that we are asking LF to take 100% of the financial risk, it is reasonable that they also have the majority of the decision power also. We remind the board that our mandate was to license our brands to a producer, and get out of their way as much as possible, and this is the goal towards which we have been working for the last year. Jan Iversen will be our primary contact for ApacheCon Europe, while I (Rich) will focus primarily on the North America event. ApacheCon Europe will be held in Budapest [4], September 28 - October 1, 2015. The CFP is open, but has not been announced yet, as there is discussion about running two separate CFPs, one for the Big Data event, and a second of the yet-to-be-named community event. ApacheCon North America will be held in Vancouver, BC, May 9 - 12, 2016. The CFP will open soon, but a date has not yet been determined. I will be visiting the venue [5] while I am at the OpenStack Summit in 3 weeks. [1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/rbowen/sets/72157651553317030/ See also https://www.flickr.com/photos/iamamoose/63963722/ [2] https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/at_apachecon_austin_mayor_steve [3] http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-europe/program/cfp [4] http://apachecon.eu/ [5] http://vancouver.hyatt.com/
Not much to report this month. Doing last minute promotion for ApacheCon and filling slots as speakers cancel for one reason or another. Early bird pricing ends on the 21st. I can now confirm that about 6 of the original Apache Group will be in attendance, and leading a nostalgic panel to celebrate httpd's 20th birthday. The CFP for ApacheCon Europe will be opening very soon, probably before ApacheCon North America.
I will be late to the meeting by about 30 minutes. I will be there to answer questions, if any, by the end of the meeting. I am scrambling to get the schedule for ApacheCon NA put together, and while I've received a LOT of help from various people, the current CFP tools are woefully inadequate for the task. However, we should have a schedule, and keynotes, announced early next week. Meanwhile, I have delegated most of the work for ApacheCon EU to Jan Iversen, so that I'm not trying to do manage two events, and I am looking around for someone that might be interested in stepping up to rotate ApacheCon NA events with me. Rich needs help with ApacheCon planning; Sam volunteered to help.
This month I've been working on finding keynotes for ApacheCon, and trying to get various project communities to promote the CFP and seek speakers. Thus far, we have less than 50 talks proposed, however, we've traditionally seen half to two thirds of proposals come in during the last week. The CFP closes on Feb 1, so the coming month will be spent in the selection process and other logistics around planning the event. I've also been working with the people at OpenSource.com (as has Sally) to identify people within the Apache community to write for the 'Apache Quill' series that they'll be running for as long as we cam provide content.
We are in the ramp-up phase for ApacheCon North America, and I'm trying to gather a group of track chairs to shepherd content based on topic rather than specific project, as this makes it a lot easier to get people to attend. We are also trying to identify possible keynote speakers. Brian Behlendorf has confirmed that he will be keynoting. I'm also trying to contact as many of the early httpd crowd as possible to come celebrate httpd's 20th birthday. Brian is being very helpful with this. There has been discussion (as you will see in other reports) on the Trademarks list about event MOUs and blackout windows, and, for my part, I've been working with LF to encourage earlier planning, so that the blackout window becomes less of a big deal. Specifically, we're going to do our best to announce 2016 locations and dates at ApacheCon Austin. I don't yet know if this is actually feasible.
ApacheCon Europe ended a short time ago. The attendee reception is going on while this meeting is occurring. We had just shy of 300 in attendance. People seem very pleased with the event so far (as of this writing). On Monday evening, we had a birthday cake for the 15th anniversary of the Foundation. On a personal note, I was sorry that more of you were not present for that. It's now time to start working on ApacheCon Austin. Discussions in Budapest have identified some things that we might try to increase PMC participation in that event. We're also trying to reach out to the earliest participants in the httpd project, since ApacheCon Austin will be held on the 20th anniversary of the first release of httpd. Brian Behlendorf has agreed to do a keynote with his thoughts about the past, but more about the future, of the Foundation. We are now looking for additional keynotes.
Most of my time this month has been spent on ApacheCon EU. ApacheCon EU is one month away. We currently have about 170 registrations, which is somewhat below what we wanted at this point, but we do tend to get a surge towards the end. We are working with numerous Meetup groups in Budapest to get the word out about the event, and are providing space to some of these groups to hold meetings during the event. Cassandra and Spark have both stepped up to fill some of the open slots in the schedule, and are working hard to bring an audience for those talks. Many other projects, particularly in the Big Data space, are working hard to get the word out about the event. One of our keynotes has been withdrawn, and we will be replacing it Bror Salmelin, the adviser for Innovation Systems at the European Commission. We also have keynotes from Hugh Howey, bestselling author of Wool, and David Nalley, VP Infrastructure at the ASF. ApacheCon North America is moving along. The LucidWorks people have agreed to colocate their event with ApacheCon this year, and Cloudstack will be running their event at ApacheCon again. we're talking with other projects about doing the same, and I'll be focusing more on this event as soon as we're done with Budapest.
* ApacheCon
* Europe
We continue to move towards ApacheCon Europe. Now that
we are just 2 months out, we will be pushing harder on
projects and speakers to promote their content and bring
the registration numbers up. As of the 15th,
registration numbers are:
Attendees: 44
Committer: 26
Student: 1
Speaker: 72
Sponsor: 4
Total: 147
With much assistance from the Cassandra community, we
have added a Cassandra mini-summit, with a full track of
content. The Cassandra project, as well as our friends
at DataStax, will be promoting this as though it were a
stand-alone event. This is an experiment to see if
having conference promotions under several different
banners is effective in bringing a larger audience.
* Austin
We have "soft announced" ApacheCon Austin as of the
15th. See http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/apachecon-north-america/
for the website and CFP. We will start shouting about it
over the next few days, and if you want to leak the news,
please feel free to do so.
* BitCoin donations
On August 26th, a query to the Fundraising list about whether
we accept Bitcoin donations prompted us to create a Bitcoin
account. This was mentioned on Reddit and several news sites,
including http://s.apache.org/bitcoinnews and within the
first 24 hours we had pulled in over US$2000 in Bitcoin
donations. The rate has slowed down considerably since then,
and our balance now is just under 7 Bitcoins, or US$3,300.
In addition to the monetary benefit, this event got us quite
a bit of very positive press on a wide range of news sites.
We have announced the schedule for ApacheCon Europe (Budapest, November 17-21, 2014) and registration is open. We currently have 118 people registered. We have also announced our keynotes, including Douglas Carswell, Member of Parliament (Great Britain), Hugh Howey, bestselling science fiction author, and David Nalley, VP of Infrastructure of the ASF. We are in the process of planning the less formal aspects of ApacheCon EU, including evening events, the ApacheCon Jam Sessions, Lightning Talks, Fast Feather Track, and so on. We have tentatively agreed to do ApacheCon North America in Austin, Texas, on the week starting April 12th. In the coming weeks we expect to sign contracts for that, and the CFP should be sent out in the next 30 days. This evening (August 20th) David Nalley and I are leading an evening session at LinuxCon North America, in Chicago, where CIOs and CTOs of local businesses will be attending to learn about the Apache Software Foundation, with an emphasis on sponsorship opportunities. This event is being covered out of the President's discretionary budget, in the absence of a fundraising budget at this time.
My time has been consumed by ApacheCon for the last month. ApacheCon EU will be held in Budapest, November 17-21 of this year, and will be produced by The Linux Foundation event team. The CFP for ApacheCon EU closed on June 25, and speaker notifications were scheduled to be sent out on July 15th. We did not meet this deadline, but expect to have the schedule settled, and notifications sent out, this weekend at the latest. The talks have mostly been selected, with enormous help from various people, most notably Jan Iversen, and a few details remain to be confirmed with potential speakers. What remains is to finalize the schedule - talk order, which days things appear on, and so on - and identify an adequate number of fallback talks. At this point, we expect that the schedule will consist of 8 tracks of talks for three days, followed by one day of tutorials (Thursday). ApacheCon will be immediately followed by the CloudStack Collaboration Conference Europe. We are scheduled to announce the schedule on July 28th, but I hope to have this completed earlier than this, as I will be in vacation for the week of July 28th through August 1st. We are in the process of selecting a venue for ApacheCon North America 2015, and several locations are being pursued. We hope to have a final venue selection in August so that we can start the CFP process before ApacheCon EU.
Now that we're one week out from the end of the CFP, talk proposals are starting to come in. We contacted all PMC chairs to encourage them to get the word out to their dev@ and users@ lists to send in their proposals. It is not yet known how many tracks we'll have at this event - it depends on the submissions we receive. I have been working on preparations for OSCon, so that we might make the most of our time there to speak with existing and potential sponsors.
Planning for ApacheCon Europe is moving along, with several keynotes selected and 25 papers in the CFP system. The CFP ends in a little more than a month, so the time to start pushing hard to get papers in is upon us and we should start seeing a lot more planning activity in the next few weeks.
ApacheCon North America 2014 was held April 7-9 in Denver, Colorado, USA. Despite the very late start, we had higher attendance than last year, and almost everyone that I have spoken with has declared it an enormous success. Attendees, speakers and sponsors have all expressed approval of the job that Angela and the Linux Foundation did in the production of the event. Speaking personally, it was the most stress-free ApacheCon I have ever had. Although I hope to have more detailed statistics prior to the board meeting, at the moment the attendee numbers are: Registered: 419 No-shows: 36 Speakers: 100ish Committers: 100ish We're still gathering feedback from speakers and attendees, and should have the results of that survey by the next board meeting. This feedback will inform any changes we make for future events. On the first day of the event, we announced ApacheCon Europe, which will be held November 17-21 2014 in Budapest. The website for that is up at http://apachecon.eu/ and the CFP is open, and will close June 25, 2014. We plan to announce the schedule on July 28, 2014, giving us nearly 4 months lead time before the conference. We have already received talk submissions, and a few conference registrations. I will try to provide statistics each month between now and the conference. As with ApacheCon NA, there will be a CloudStack Collaboration Conference co-located with ApacheCon. We are also discussing the possibility of a co-located Apache OpenOffice user-focused event on the 20th and 21st, or possibly just one day. We eagerly welcome proposals from other projects which wish to have similar co-located events, or other more developer- or PMC-focused events like the Traffic Server Summit, which was held in Denver. I will begin pursuing project-specific and topic-specific tracks in a few weeks once I've gotten caught up on everything else. Discussion has begun regarding a venue for ApacheCon North America 2015, with Austin and Las Vegas early favorites, but several other cities being considered. We hope to have an announcement by early summer, so that this can get into the planning budgets of possible attendees.
With ApacheCon now less than a month away, registrations are progressing well, but rather behind my hopes. We were coming up on 300 registrations when the Early Bird price expired. (I'll hopefully update numbers prior to the meeting.) This is ahead of where we were at this point last year, but still disappointing given the expanded scope of the event. More importantly, however, the producer is happy with the numbers, and I view this event as an investment in the next event, so if they're happy, I'm happy. Everyone has been very helpful, with everyone I've asked for assistance immediately stepping up and helping out. I'm looking forward to doing this again, but with more lead time. Meanwhile, we're still looking at venues in Europe, the difficulty being that the OpenStack Summit in Paris hasn't announced dates yet, and so we have to avoid both options that they have announced, which greatly reduces our available venues. Dates we are currently looking at are December 7 in Prague or November 16 in Rome. Each of these have drawbacks, and we hope to have something decided by the end of this month.
ApacheCon North America 2014 will be held in Denver Colorado, April 7-9, with tutorials and a co-located Cloudstack event to follow on the 10th and 11th. Since the last meeting, the ApacheCon call for papers has come and gone, and we have, as of Monday, February 17th, selected a schedule of talks for the event, and notified the selected speakers. We are still receiving answers back from those speakers and adjusting the schedule for the people who have declined, or want their talks moved to avoid other conflicts. Members of the Apache community were amazingly helpful in the process of selecting the content, and I think we have a really solid schedule for this event. As compared to years past, the conference will have much more content, with 10 tracks on Monday and Tuesday, and 9 on Wednesday, and the Cloudstack Collaboration Conference on Thursday and Friday. Additionally we have a day and a half of tutorials, and numerous evening events. It is now LF's responsibility to market the event and draw in the registrations. I expect to have a report on registrations for the next board meeting. The lead time is very short, and they have their work cut out for them. Any way that we can help promote the event will be important to augment their effort. Meanwhile, we are looking at venues in Europe for November, with Budapest and Rome being considered. And we are also very tentatively looking at the possibility of doing an event in Brazil, although that is unlikely to be in this calendar year.
ApacheCon has been announced and the CFP is open. The event will be April 7-9 in Denver, with tutorials following April 10-11. Hackathon and BarCamp will happen as usual. Sally is helping me field questions regarding sponsorship and marketing, but LF is handling these things. Melissa has been very helpful in all of this, and she is getting the ball rolling for TAC for the event. The CFP closes February 1, and numerous people have stepped up to help review the proposed talks to help select the schedule.
We have a draft contract for ApacheCon 2014, and would very much like to get it signed prior to the Christmas break, so that we can start promotion the first of the year. Jim made some comments which, I believe, have been addressed in the latest draft. We also await the approval of the VP Brand on the trademark portion of the contract. Directors with comments about the draft contract (in $SVN/foundation/ApacheCon/2014) are asked to make those comments as soon as possible so that we can expedite the contract process. A number of people have stepped forward from various PMCs to participate in the content review portion of the RFP process, but we still have a large number of PMCs that are not represented. This will be something that I'll need to address as soon as the contract is signed.
I'd like to give a verbal report on the progress of ApacheCon, as I should be receiving some information on Monday or Tuesday, making it difficult to get a report in on time. Draft agreement for ApacheCon run by the Linux Foundation is not yet available. Could not find a venue in Las Vegas; a venue is on hold for Denver for the 2014 conference.
Over the last several weeks we (primarily Melissa and myself) have been in discussion with the Linux Foundation about producing an ApacheCon in the May/June timeframe, in the United States. There's been some back-and-forth regarding some items that we're concerned about (most importantly, content selection, sponsorship, co-location with related events), and we are content that we're seeing eye to eye on these issues, with some details remaining to be worked out. The summary, however, is that we intend to let them run the show in a way that they feel is most likely to lead to success - that we will pitch in where required, but not volunteer to do any of the tasks that they offer as part of their service. This leaves us with content as our only real task. The notes from our meeting on Thursday the 10th may be found in SVN, in $SVN/foundation/ApacheCon/2014 and questions should be directed to me and Melissa. We hope to have a contract signed in the early November time frame, so that we can get a CFP out at the end of 2013, or very early 2014, and so that we can be on the Linux Foundation event sponsorship prospectus for 2014. A concern that still remains to be worked out is that the Linux Foundation will not be underwriting the event, so, if the event is unsuccessful, we will be on the line for losses. This is a point which we are still discussing with Angela. Details will be send to the dev@community.apache.org mailing list when they are worked out, but at the moment Melissa and I are handling this with the Linux Foundation, and expect to have more to report very soon.
No report was submitted.
Rich had nothing to report
No report was submitted.
Our EA and I have been discussing the state of the accounting for ACNA13. We have some concerns over the reported numbers (see EA report Attachment 1). These concerns are preventing us from starting to plan the next ApacheCon. I have not fully reviewed the accounts at this point, but agree that the issues our EA has identified need to be explored. Finally, I've made a small start on updating the ComDev site to provide useful information for organisers of small events. I will continue work on this as time permits and will shortly be seeking assistance from the broader community.
I made all officers and PMCs of the plans to restructure ConCom to reflect the available resources and capabilities (See special order D). This will see the responsibilities of Conference Planning move to the President, Brand Management, Marketing and Publicity, and Community Development Project. Two points of concern were raised. The first by VP Community Development. This concern was that the small Community Development Project might not be able to cope with the new responsibilities, especially given that other PMCs are considering asking ComDev to assist them. See the ComDev board report for more information. The second concern was raised by VP Marketing and Publicity who felt there was the potential for new roles and responsibilities not to be clear and thus important responsibilities might go unaddressed. This is something that we must remain aware. In my opinion neither of these concerns should prevent us moving forward with the proposed change. I contacted The Open Bastion on behalf of the President in order to evaluate their interest in producing an ApacheCon North America and Europe. They are working on a new contract for our consideration and have asked me to build a list of conferences that should be avoided. Our EA will begin handling the contract negotiations going forward and will work with the President as appropriate. Greg notes that responsibilities falling through the cracks is what we are trying to address with this change. Ross continues to acknowledge the concern. Doug is concerned about handing a volunteer committee responsibilities that they are not enthusiastically accepting. Greg points out that people who are interested in small events are the volunteers and they will simply show up a that new list. Ross agrees and indicates that comdev will be less of a 'gatekeeper' than concom was.
A little work helping VP ComDev evaluate a mentoring programme proposal referred by Sam. Luciano quickly took over discussions and recently indicated they are nearing completion. I was scheduled to participate in a panel at OSCON discussing the various foundation models. However, Noirin Plunkett had also signed up to represent the ASF. I therefore stepped down in order to make way for Noirin.
The SGA for Ripple was finally signed-off, with none of the changes that had been originally requested by lawyers. ApacheCon went reasonably well. Attendance was lower in overall numbers but discussions with the producer led to the assumption that past ApacheCons had reported higher numbers because single day tickets were available. The producer did a good job without burning out our volunteers, my own feedback was to request they inject more of their own ideas into the event if they produce another. It would seem that they had chosen to stay aligned with the old model in order to understand the community before injecting more ideas.
A mostly uneventful month. There was a request from The Open Bastion to assist in generating more community interest in ApacheCon. The main concern was that VP ConCom appeared to be very busy elsewhere and was therefore unresponsive for a period. I did my best to fill the gap until VP ConCom was again available. One of the items that needed to be addressed was the collection of some sponsorship money from two sponsors who were unwilling or unable to pay The Open Bastion directly. This was addressed by VP Fundraising and the Treasurer but The Open Bastion felt this was a breakdown with respect to the single point of contact within the ASF. Furthermore at least one of the two sponsors involved felt the delays this caused were somewhat unprofessional. These sponsorship payment issues have come up with both ApacheCon EU and ApacheCon NA. It is recommended that for future events we make provision for such sponsorships as part of our contract with the producer.
Things seem to be smoother this month. OpenBastion contacted me about contacting our sponsors about ACNA. I bounced this straight to Fundraising where it is being addressed. The issues concerns RIM have with their SGA remain but we are taking steps forwards. Thanks to both trademarks and legal for their help here. Other than that nothing to report.
Very quiet month which meant I was able to get a draft of the travel approval policy to the President for feedback. Will circulate to board once Jim has had time to feedback. VP ConCom approached myself and the President asking us to be Conference Chair, which is predominantly a figurehead role as defined by our contract with ACNA producer. Jim has been able to take on this role as it is currently uncertain whether I will be able to attend. I had a brief exchange with ACNA producer in response to some feedback on the board list about lack of appropriate ConCom support. The concern appears to be that ConCom were not pushing forwards as expected and, possibly even contracted, and as a result the producer is allowing things to get behind schedule. However, the producer indicated that whilst getting session reviews done has been difficult they have no significant issues now that a conference chair has been identified. In my opinion this is a symptom of ConCom trying to find the right balance between an ASF controlled event and a producer led event. Media Relations (Sally) are keeping a careful eye on things.
After ApacheCon EU it's been a quiet month for me. The ConCom report contains most of the feedback I provided to ConCom on ACEU and addresses some of the issues raised. I have nothing more to add, but those interested in more detail from me can read my feedback on the ConCom list. I managed to have a number of conversations with various people about how to get the most out of our volunteer efforts at the externally produced ApacheCon North America. Some of the ideas being discussed seemed to be heading in the right direction and were fed back to VP ConCom. See the ConCom report for more information I've been working with RIM to coordinate their donation of Ripple to the incubator. It's presenting a few legal and trademark issues. The appropriate committees are providing necessary support.
ACEU is still requiring close attention. Mostly I'm operating as a member of ConCom but I did make a request, copied to board@, for more clarity in the budget control processes. I finally have a contract from The Open Bastion, yet to be signed. Since the event is now closing in on being sold out I'm looking into providing additional on-site support for the volunteers as the "bare bones" plan of self-organisation will not work with the numbers that will be present. There should be plenty of budget available to cover this, but first we need clarity on the current budget position. There was one request (from VP Concom) for travel expenses with only a couple of hours notice. In the Presidents absence I approved the request as it was a small amount and would clearly benefit ACEU. I still have not drafted the policy for travel expenses.
Budget to support ApacheConEU has been agreed with ConCom, waiting for any final objections before setting up discount codes. Steve of OpenBastion has still not submitted a contract for consideration. I've chased him a number of times. It looks like he has been putting his energy into making sure speaker acceptances/rejections went out. ConCom volunteers seems to be progressing more now that the pressure to produce a large event has subsided. The event has been rebranded as ApacheConEU (Community Edition).
No report was submitted.
No report was submitted.
No report was submitted.
No report was submitted.
No report was submitted.
No report was submitted.
My apologies for last month--but I'm delighted to see our meetings in the calendar, and thanks to Melissa for her help with that! I look forward to helping Jim with the budget process, but have nothing else to report at present.
No report was submitted.
no report was submitted.
[oral report] Spent time smoothing feathers for infra--people found out but didn't feel they'd been *told* at ApacheCon about the change in hats. Also spent time on the phone with Paschal, trying to get the credit cards reassigned and give Wells Fargo the info they need. That seems to have turned into a big mess, but I gather Sam's on it.
At Jim's request, I've started to take over the tasks and responsibilities of VP Infra. The first challenge is to clearly define what those tasks are, which is in progress. I look forward to the opportunity to discuss this further at the f2f, and hope that we can effect a smooth transfer of whatever is appropriate!
A report was expected, but not received
A report was expected, but not received
Verbal report: nothing to report.
Nothing of note to report.
Nothing to report.
A brief verbal report was given.
Nothing to report.
Quiet month. Spoke at linux.conf.au about the community dev work at Apache, and attended KiwiFoo. Invited to speak about the ASF at Open Source Days in Copenhagen next month.
Happy New Year! A quiet month, nothing to report.
My keynote about our the Apache Way and community development was received with interest at OSDC - it was a refreshing reminder amidst some of the chaos we see internally that externally, we're still seen as a model to be emulated! I also joined several panel-style discussions at the Sydney BarCamp, and the audience seemed to appreciate hearing more about the background to us leaving the JCP EC - again, a reminder that although we all know the whys and wherefores, it's worth repeating them for those who haven't heard yet :-)
A report was expected, but not received
I spoke to several groups at the Open World Forum, about the Apache Way, including a video-cast with Intell'N TV. I will be presenting a keynote about our community development processes at OSDC in Melbourne next month. I will also be speaking about mentoring and incubation at Apache, at linux.conf.au in January.
Nothing to report for the 11 days of holding this role. :-P
No report was submitted.
No report received.
Last month I have been mostly keeping track of the discussions in the membership after last board meeting. That discussion has died down and has been replaced by nominations for members and board. I'll reiterate to the membership that members are free to attend board meetings. I've assisted in booking travel for David Woollard, partly due to the President's replacement credit card not having arrived yet. As with this experience I appreciate the TAC's request for a travel agent when it comes to booking multiple trips. I failed to follow up on my task of posting our RFP for EA, contrary to my previous reports statement of having it up on the 24th of last month. The intent was there, the execution lacked.
I'd like to take the opportunity to echo Jim's concern. I'm not yet at the same stage of alarm, but that may be personal optimism. During Justin's absence no immediate action was required from the office of President. With respect to the executive assistant, I'm pushing the RFP to the site Mon, May 24. The mailing list of the search committee will be listed as the address for applications. I'll coordinate with PR to get some attention to the RFP. Shane: do we have clear consensus that we have budget for this? Sander: yes, we did that last month.
Friday Apr 9th through Sunday Apr 11th I spent at the Apache Retreat. It was situated in a remote location, in Wicklow near Eniskerry. Thirty two people showed up to enjoy the incredible and unexpected weather conditions. Transportation was partly arranged and partly taken care of by participants, which covered the needs. I personally found the remote location combined the limited amount of people to help interactions across all participants. Being able to spend sessions outside sitting on the grass most certainly contributed. Committers, PMC members and ASF members were all represented. There was a, to me, surprising interest in "The Apache Way". Resulting in talking with individuals about history and umbrella projects. The organization fell to a single person due to circumstances, which wasn't noticeable. Everything that needed to be taken care of was. Location and venue left no complaints. Fifty people is probably what to shoot for, considering the no-show rate. In my opinion the Ireland retreat is well worth a repeat; including the weather of course. The Hadoop project caught my attention during the event from an organizational perspective. I have sent a subscription request to the Hadoop PMC list, to gather more awareness for myself about the state of affairs. An updated RFP is available in admin-search/rfp.txt, which I believe is good enough to get the search for candidates started. The recent issues our VP of Infrastructure had making payments makes me think we should post the RFP sooner rather than later.
Another quiet month, thanks to Justin doing a good job keeping up. The discussion with respect to the EA has flared up again, which reminded me of the ball I dropped there. I'll reconnect with Greg Stein and will collect our previous thoughts on the matter, after which I'll construct an RFP for review.
No report was provided this month.
It's yet another short report for the EVP office. It's been a rather uneventful month. Press inquiries have all been handled by others. No speaking opportunities this month. No tasks to be handled requested by the President. Not even hard drives to order for Infra. In other words: "Nothing of significance to report to the Board". That said, I should have mentioned my vacation, especially given the lack of connectivity. Last year I was close to an open network, I naively assumed the same this year. To cut this short, I'll be back on Jan 31. Should you need me in this timeframe, please do call my cell.
No report submitted.
Verbal report: echoed Justin's report, highlight being ApacheCon.
No report submitted by Sander. The following was submitted by Greg: EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT Greg has been culling the mailing lists to get a handle on where and how the discussion got derailed several months ago. The intent is to fold the concerns into a final proposal to bring to the Board Offsite in two weeks. The proposal will be developed in svn for feedback/review, and will contain the job description, and our search/interview/hire process.
As stated last month, I planned on this being a slow month for me. The only thing currently on the roster is speaking in Paris at Open World Forum. Greg and I failed to catch up on the EA effort, will set a time directly after the meeting.
The main event last month was OSCON. We had a booth there, which has been primarily been manned by Paul Querna and Alan Cabrera, assisted by Craig Russell, Justin Erenkrantz and myself. We had a good number of people stop by the booth, though it hasn't been crazy busy. ASF/ApacheCon promo cards that were left over were taken by Alan, for storage/pickup. In the days leading up to OSCON, Henri Yandell, Larry Rosen, Paul, Justin, and myself have participated in the FLOSS Foundations meetings. Justin and I spent a good two days in talking to various people from the press. We also participated in a video shoot for the 10th anniversary of the Foundation. Lastly I briefly met with organisers of the Open World Forum, about a speaking opportunity in October in Paris. They had a booth at OSCON too. Unfortunately, due to personal and work circumstances I didn't get around to updating the admin search documentation. If Greg has the time, I'd like to ask him to pull the cart for a bit. There were two hard drives needed for the Netherlands; I have now finally ordered two. Unfortunately the US credit card failed to work, so the amount will be expensed. Greg agreed to help out with the Admin Search documentation. Sander believes that a month will be more than enough time.
As per Justin, we're going to be at OSCON, manning the booth, getting in touch with Sponsors, and meeting up with folks from other foundations. In the September and October timeframe there are some speaking opportunities in Europe; need to finalize my calendar and travel schedule. Discussion: Roy: what is the current status of the EA search? Sander: want to get an impression of the new board before proceeding Roy: preference is to assume the mandate of the previous board continues Sander: the previous board was divided Roy: my guess is the current board is too Jim: we should restart it, and rehashing everything would not be a good use of our time Sander: I have time on Friday Jim: great!
Verbal report provided. Admin search is on hold until member elections. There will be some speaking opportunities in October, may conflict with ApacheCon.
Apart from having digested a large quantity of email on the budget and related topics, there is not a lot to report. There has been no movement in the Admin Search Committee this past month.
Most of my material was already covered by the Chairman. But in addition I finally started with writing up a more condensed job description based on the input we gathered.
[no report submitted]
I've returned last week from a two week vacation. Catching up on email has taken some time, to use an understatement. During my absense the Admin Search Committee, as created by the President last Board meeting, has received input from Jim, Bill, Sam and others.
The search for administrative support has taken my interest. Finding a suitable person as well as setting the expectations is going to be crucial moving forward in my opinion. I'm foreseeing most of my time going into this. Identifying EU based events to attend has and will receive my attention next month as well.
During the President's absense nothing came up that needed direct attention. An ASF credit card was received. I participated in a PRC strategy call, which was to determine focus for upcoming period. Outcome will be reflected in the PRC report next month.
The highlight of last month was attending ApacheCon New Orleans. I've remained mostly in the background during the event; it's been primarily informal interaction on my part. I've submitted accumulated expenses with our Treasurer, for flowers, the Paris and Milan trip.
Last month, September 24th, I've been on a panel in Paris, during Capitale du Libre, on the topic of current state of Open Source in Europe, though it shifted to impact of the financial markets on Open Source.
No report submitted.
Last month I've spent some time synchronizing with Justin on ASF presence. Events he can't make, and I potentially can. One is the International Workshop on Public Data about Software Development. The second is a speaking oportunity at Paris Capitale du Libre. In closing, one of our fellow committers, Maurice Marrink, passed away. To show our respect we've sent flowers to the family.
Jim also notes that he is available for speaking opportunities, much in the same way that Greg was as the previous chair. General consensus is that this discussion should continue on the PRC list.
Jim agreed to move this report into section 4.
On behalf of Infrastructure I've reached out to some of our Dutch Members to see if they were willing to volunteer to go to our colo in Amsterdam when needed. The feedback has been positive, and I've managed to show two people around at the Colo. Pending update of the access list we should be in better shape there. After talking to Justin, I've started to look at getting up to speed with PRC, to be able to take over his role as backup there. I've reached out to Sally to get her set up so that she can perform site updates without having to depend on others. Over the course of next month I will increase time spent on PRC. As Justin mentions, for European events where we should have a presence, I'm going to try and attend. It was noted that Justin's role as backup is distinct from his role as president, Sander indicated his desire to become more involved with the PRC due as he views it as a key operational area. Jim called for a vote on the PRC list.