FOUNDATION OPERATIONS SUMMARY

First Quarter, Fiscal Year 2018 (May - July 2017)

"We love The Apache Way and what Apache has done for us..."
--ASF Platinum Sponsor


> President's Statement: Financially, we are on track to meet this year's budget, even after accounting for accounts receivables that didn't manage to close out on time in the last fiscal year. We are still projected to have a manageable deficit, and this will require us to have a multi-year focus on fundraising to resolve. We have redirected resources at both Virtual, Inc. and HALO Worldwide to help out with this effort.

Other highlights: 

  • Conferences is once again at a time of transition as we explore new ways to reach more people;
  • Travel assistance was provided to 10 individuals, bringing the total number of people helped to 131;
  • Brand Management had a relatively quiet quarter, focusing on matters such as registration renewals;
  • Infrastructure is focusing on more user friendly "self serve" tools, and expanding support for projects hosted on GitHub;
  • Marketing and Publicity provided media training, and produced an annual report.

While we remain in a very healthy financial position, it never hurts to take the opportunity to ask for your support. As an individual you can donate to the Foundation http://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html , as a corporation you can become a Sponsor http://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html .


> Conferences and Events: ApacheCon North America was held 16-18 May in Miami, Florida, and had about 500 Apache enthusiasts in attendance. Rather than being one monolithic event, it was a convention of smaller events, including:

  • Apache Traffic Server and Traffic Control Summit
  • BarCampApache
  • Apache: Big Data
  • Apache: IoT
  • CloudStack Collaboration Conference
  • FlexJS Summit
  • TomcatCon

Additionally, there were numerous smaller project hackathons and developer summits.

ApacheCon North America 2017 marks the end of our contract with the Linux Foundation, who have been producing our events since ApacheCon Denver, in April of 2014. We will not be holding an ApacheCon in Europe this year, as we investigate various options for how we will resume ApacheCon in 2018.

Meanwhile, we are pursuing closer relationships with the many events that feature Apache Software Foundation content, whether these are events dedicated to a particular Apache project, or events about a particular topic that happens to include Apache content.


> Community Development: During April and May our main focus was helping prepare for and support ApacheCon NA in Miami. Prior to the event, we began recording interviews with various speakers and key note speakers for our news / podcast channel FeatherCast.

Throughout ApacheCon itself recordings of on-site interviews with attendees and sponsors were also broadcast and published. The audio from many of the ApacheCon conference tracks were also recorded and are available online. We are continually increasing the amount of content available and are finding that FeatherCast is a very valuable and useful resource for helping share and promote Apache and technology related content.

One key discussion raised this quarter was about trying to improve the tools and applications that the Community Development team has at its disposal. This topic was very positively received and resulted in a "Tools Hackathon" session being organized and held at ApacheCon focused on how to use the tools and make them more effective.

In June we were present at the OpenExpo conference in Madrid. The conference was mainly focused at Spanish-speaking audiences and with the help of two local volunteers we continued to promote Apache and its projects. Over 3,000 visitors attended the conference and 300 of them (approx 10%) were actively interested in speaking to us to find out more about Apache.

Community Development has also started to increase its social media presence and we are now active on both Twitter and Facebook. Our monthly Community Development Blog is still being well received and we have published 3 further updates. These regular news summaries give people a brief overview of what is happening or planned. Our mailing list traffic has remained constant during the quarter showing that there are still a lot of active discussions going on.


> Committers and Contributions: Over the past quarter, 1,616 contributors committed 49,112 changes that amount to 13,837,582 lines of code across Apache projects. The top 5 contributors during this timeframe are: Jean-Baptiste Onofré (778 commits), Claus Ibsen (749), Colm Ó hÉigeartaigh (703 commits), Mark Thomas (540 commits), and Stephen Mallette (536 commits) during this period.

The ASF Secretary processes new Apache Committers' paperwork so that they can continue contributing to our projects. All individuals who are granted write access to the Apache repositories must submit an Individual Contributor License Agreement (ICLA). Corporations that have assigned employees to work on Apache projects as part of an employment agreement may sign a Corporate CLA (CCLA) for contributing intellectual property via the corporation. Individuals or corporations donating a body of existing software or documentation to one of the Apache projects need to execute a formal Software Grant Agreement (SGA) with the ASF. 

During this timeframe, the Secretary processed 203 ICLAs, 13 CCLAs, and 4 Software Grants. Apache committer activity can be seen at http://status.apache.org/#commits


> Brand Management: The summer quarter continues to be traditionally quiet in terms of trademark questions and requests, although we continue to get new kinds of questions coming in with some regularity. Some Apache project PMCs now have experience implementing our trademark policies and have been doing a great job answering basic questions themselves directly with third parties, which is great to see. However as our number of projects grow, so do the number of questions or issues overall which continues to tax our small pool of Brand Management volunteers with broad experience.

All of the ASF's education and policies around trademark law for Open Source as well as brand management is published online, and we urge project participants and software vendors alike to review and ask us questions about them - please review our complete site map: http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/resources

On the registration front, we have come upon our first large set of trademark registration renewals and maintenance paperwork. Although our legal counsel handles all the actual paperwork with various national trademark registries, this is still an ongoing effort for our volunteer Brand Management team to validate continuing use of these marks - as well as the financial costs for registry fees. In almost all cases we will continue to maintain existing registrations for projects. We continue to have some projects request new registrations as well, and are successfully negotiating some coexistence agreements with potentially similar software brands in the marketplace as well.

As more Apache brands and projects power more business every year, we continue to look to the companies that profit from Apache software products to help respect Apache brands. We very much appreciate the companies that pass on their trademark registrations with incoming donations of podlings joining the Incubator. Having existing registrations makes the trademark management process simpler for the ASF.

While many companies continue to properly give credit to our volunteer communities, sadly some companies continue to --or have started to-- take advantage of our non-profit work by unfairly co-opting Apache project brands or by interfering with Apache project governance.

Reviewing and correcting these mis-uses is an ongoing effort for the ASF Board, the Brand Management Committee, and all Apache projects.

Please contact the Apache Brand Management team https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/contact with your questions or suggestions!


> Legal Affairs: The ASF Legal Affairs team works diligently with our pro-bono legal counsel and answers legal questions, and addresses policy issues regarding license compatibility for The Apache Software Foundation.

We had a busy quarter answering questions related to the use of data to train models in Apache projects.  In addition, regular ASF legal inquiries such as those related to system dependencies are routinely being answered promptly. The ASF registered a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) agent for the Foundation so that the ASF can implement a safe harbor policy. VP, Legal Affairs, Chris Mattmann, was registered in this role. Finally, the committee provided clarity on an oft-asked question related to release of binary artifacts, and ASF policy in this area.


> Infrastructure: The Infrastructure team and its volunteers provide the machines and services needed by the hundreds of Foundation projects, and the thousands of volunteers working on them. One of our high priority, long-term activities has been to migrate services off our hardware onto third-party infrastructure ("the cloud"; IaaS). Our work in this area has improved stability, repeatability, and lowered our costs.

For the first time, our team was able to meet as an entire group at the ApacheCon held in Miami during May. This was a great time for us to talk at length, and to bond as a team. We will continue the yearly meetups to get work done, and to strengthen that team spirit.

Our uptime over the quarter has met our stated Service Level Agreement, even with our hours of downtime to upgrade our Jira installation and our Jenkins build system. The short answer is that outside of planned maintenance, the Infrastructure team gets by with very little downtime. We have further planned upgrades for primary services (such as Confluence and Jira) to stay current with the continued improvements in these products. 

Two service areas saw significant expansion during the quarter: our use of LDAP as a canonical organizational reference, and our provisioning of GitHub-based tooling to the Foundation's communities.

The LDAP changes have been performed, and made possible, by some great work from the Apache Whimsy community. Older generation, command-line tools have been replaced by friendlier web interfaces. The amount of "self serve" tools has, in turn, reduced the manual workload requested from the Infrastructure team.

Our GitHub tooling is still in a "beta" stage, but has been made available to many more Top Level Projects and to many podlings arriving at the Foundation. These podlings tend to already use GitHub for their development workflow, and our new tooling allows them to continue the workflows their communities have defined. As we continue to sand off the rougher edges of the integration between and the Foundation and the GitHub service, we'll continue to add projects to the program.


> Financial Statement:


> Fundraising: The ASF Fundraising team welcomes Kevin A. McGrail to the role of VP Fundraising.  In addition, we'd also like to welcome HostPapa Web Hosting and Inspur to the Apache Family.

Thank you to all our Sponsors http://apache.org/foundation/thanks . As a 501(c)(3), our operations depend on our Sponsors' support!

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Report prepared by Sally Khudairi, Vice President Marketing & Publicity, with contributions by Sam Ruby, ASF President; Rich Bowen, Vice President Conferences; Sharan Foga, ASF Member; Chris Mattmann, Vice President Legal Affairs; Shane Curcuru, Vice President Brand Management; Greg Stein, ASF Infrastructure Administrator; Tom Pappas, ASF Member and Vice President, Finance & Accounting at Virtual, Inc.; and Kevin McGrail, Vice President Fundraising.

For more information, subscribe to the announce@apache.org mailing list and visit http://www.apache.org/, the ASF Blog at http://blogs.apache.org/, the @TheASF on Twitter, and https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation.

(c) The Apache Software Foundation 2017.