Welcome to our monthly blog update about what is happening in Apache Community Development. This month we have news about defininig a Commnity Development Strategy, ASF involvement in GSoC and the results from our Committer Diversity Survey are published.

Community Development Strategy

This month our mailing list has had some detailed discussions around the goal of the Apache Community Development project. The discussion covered topics such as the original mission statement when the project was established and why people felt that more organisation and direction was needed.


When the project was established our original mission was 'charged with coordinating community development efforts' which was a very broad and flexible definition. Defining a strategy will guide the project and give better visibility of our current and planned activities.

Some of the main ideas mentioned were as follows:

  • Increase community diversity
  • Develop tools that projects can use to promote themselves and attract new participants
  • Educate projects about the Apache Way so that they can more richly experience what Apache really is
  • Strengthen the bonds between projects and the larger Foundation
  • Work with marketing to promote what our projects are doing and promote the idea that the ASF is where innovation happens
  • Internal promotion - many of our projects don't know about what other projects are doing

The next step is to document these ideas into a formal strategy and link it to specific goals and plans.

GSoC

Another big discussion topic this month was around ASF involvement in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and how we might be able to gather data and statistics that show more clearly how GSoC benefits our projects and communities.
Apache Community Development's main goal is about developing Apache communities so it would be good to have actual data about the GSoC program within the ASF and how it supports us in achieving this.

Committer Diversity Survey Results

Thank you to everyone that has helped or participated in getting the Committer Diversity Survey out, and also to all the committers who responded to the survey. It has been really good to be able to collect this information and see what it tells us about our committer base.
The main data and graphs from the survey onto the Community Development Wiki
In total we received 765 responses (out of a 5861 committer base at the time the survey was run) so around a 13% response rate. We also got 111 feedback comments of which 29 did not give their permission to share or from quote their comments.
.
The comments have been categorised into various themes / topics with the main ones as follows:

  1. Suggestions for improvements within the ASF
  2. Suggestions for improvements to the survey (or any future ones)
  3. Thanks / positive feedback about the ASF and/or survey
  4. Feedback and ideas around diversity

Next Steps will be:

  • Continue to analyse the information and identify any potential Community Development related actions
  • Start discussion threads on the various themes and topics raised to see if they will result in additional actions
  • Discuss feedback and diversity ideas and if necessary, integrate into diversity and/or general community development strategy

Contacting Community Development

Remember that we are always happy to get your feedback and comments so please feel free to contact us, follow our events and participate in our discussions on our mailing list. If you would like to be kept up to date with all the latest news about what is happening in Community Development then please subscribe to our mailing list by sending an email to dev-subscribe AT community DOT apache DOT org.