The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: 1 August - 31 October 2020
FOUNDATION OPERATIONS SUMMARY
Second Quarter, Fiscal Year 2021 (August - October 2020)
"The Apache Way ensures all participants have equal representation and footing, and developers are valued based on their contributions' merits. Bloomberg developers first got involved as Open Source community collaborators and contributors seven years ago, and we've been involved with –and a sponsor of– the ASF almost this entire time, as it’s the home of dozens of projects that are incredibly important to us."
—Kevin Fleming, Head of Open Source Community Engagement and Member of the CTO Office at Bloomberg (ASF Gold Sponsor)
> President's Report
This has been a largely quiet quarter for The Apache Software Foundation. By quiet, I mean that the operations side of the ASF has just been working with little drama, despite the fact that we're in the midst of a global pandemic. Whether it's been Apachecon@Home, the publication of research from Diversity and Inclusion, the day-to-day operations of Fundraising, Marketing, and Infrastructure continue unabated.
In some ways, I guess that is boring. There were no disasters that we had to deal with. While I was getting ready for my Apachecon@Home keynote, I was thinking about the impact of the pandemic on the ASF and the world. If you look at the statistics you'd be hard pressed to find much in terms of impact of the pandemic. In many ways, our distributed, asynchronous, consensus-based method of getting things done has set us up for success.
Maybe 'boring' is the definition of success for the ASF. A 'boring' status where our project communities deliver innovative Open Source software unabated.
> Conferences and Events http://apachecon.com/
During this time we held ApacheCon @Home 2020, September 28th through October 1st. This was our first virtual conference, and the largest conference we have yet held in our 22 years of running ApacheCon.
We have provided some statistics in our post-event report, at https://blogs.apache.org/conferences/entry/apachecon-home-2020-was-a
Some highlights include:
- 5743 registrations
- 66.7% of speakers were first time speakers
- 82.9% of attendees were at their first ApacheCon ever
- 306 sessions (all now on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/theapachefoundation )
- 26 tracks of content
- Sessions in German, Hindi and Mandarin, in addition to English
- Attendees, and speakers, from 6 continents
ApacheCon was made possible by our sponsors. Platinum sponsors were Instaclustr, Red Hat, DataStax, VMWare, Apple, Amazon, IBM, and Imply. Gold sponsors were OpenLogic, Cerner, and RX-M. Bronze sponsors were Codethink, US Postgresql Association, and Muse.dev. A huge thank you to them!
In the coming months we hope to have some smaller, project/topic focused events, but planning for these is still in the early stages, and we have no specific plans yet.
We are also cautiously looking at plans for 2021: We assume, at this point, based on the employee travel policies of major tech companies, that we will be holding ApacheCon 2021 online also. We hope to have details in early 2021.
The Pulsar Summit Asia will be held November 28th and 29th, also online. Details are available at https://pulsar-summit.org/
> Community Development http://community.apache.org/
The main focus of this quarter was preparing for and participating in ApacheCon@Home. Our Community track ran over 3 days and 2 time zones and began with a presentation in Hindi. This was very significant for us as it was the first time that we have presented community content at ApacheCon in a language other than English. Being accessible in other languages is helping reach other potential contributors. Our track attracted a good audience and many of the sessions achieved a good interaction and participation via questions from the audience.
During the event we showed the recently released ASF documentary video "Trillions and Trillions Served" at our online booth. We need to continue to investigate new ways for managing an online booth as it was difficult to understand when and how we could interact with the community at the same time being focussed on our own track.
Our Apache Local Communities (ALC) were strongly represented at ApacheCon@Home and the Indore Chapter held a range of meetings focussed on promoting the Apache Way.
All the videos from all the community sessions are now available on the ASF Youtube channel.
We have started preparing for GSoC 2021 and will once again be applying to become a mentoring organisation. In parallel we have sent out communications to all ASF project to begin gathering ideas for potential GSoC projects.
We are continuing to look for events where we can participate such as our Apache Roadshow China and FOSS Backstage.
Our mailing list has seen a significant decrease in traffic compared with the previous quarter. Even with the decrease we did get a lot of community involvement and activity during ApacheCon@Home which is not reflected in the mailing list statistics.
> Committers and Contributions http://apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html
Over the past quarter, 1,540 contributors committed 61,208 changes that amount to 28,336,795 lines of code across Apache projects. The top 5 contributors, in order, were: Andrea Cosentino (1,813 commits), Mark Miller (926 commits), Claus Ibsen (790 commits), Mark Thomas (771 commits), and Jean-Baptiste Onofré (742 commits).
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 Q2 FY2021, the ASF Secretary processed 151 ICLAs, 9 CCLAs, and 5 Software Grants. History of Apache committer growth can be seen at https://projects.apache.org/timelines.html
> Brand Management http://apache.org/foundation/marks/
Operations —the work of the Brand Management team falls broadly into one of three categories:
- trademark transfers and registrations
- granting permission to use our marks
- addressing potential infringements of our marks
The volume of work this quarter is about half of what it was last quarter. This may be an impact of Covid-19 (fewer events), part of the natural fluctuation in activity or a combination of the two.
This quarter has seen the usual collection of requests to use Apache marks for user groups, events, merchandise and publications with nearly all requests being granted, subject to our Trademark Usage Policy.
Registrations —This quarter was also a relatively quiet one for registrations. We made progress on a number of our pending registrations, particularly in China, but we did not complete any registrations this quarter.
Infringements —Potential infringements are brought to our attention from both internal and external sources. The majority of infringements we see are accidental and our project communities are able to resolve these quickly and informally with occasional input from the Brand Management team. A small number of issues take longer to resolve. We made progress on some of these this quarter and hope that that progress will continue next quarter.
We have continued to address the infringements reported to us relating to products using our marks being sold through various online stores. We hope to resolve a number of these in the coming quarter.
And finally…
The Brand Management team welcomes your comments and suggestions as well as any questions you might have. Please see https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/contact for our contact details.
> Security http://apache.org/security/
We continued to work on handling incoming security issues, keeping projects reminded of their outstanding issues, allocation of CVE names, and other general oversight and advice.
For Q2 we tracked 124 new vulnerability reports across 48 projects. (Q2 last year for comparison was 116 reports). Those reports led to 23 published CVE vulnerabilities.
> Privacy http://apache.org/foundation/policies/privacy.html
This quarter ends without any complaints from users, committers or other parties.
The VP Privacy can be reached in private with the new email alias vp-privacy@apache.org.
A check of our privacy policy showed that we have several issues with our main site which needs to be addressed (not exhaustive):
- We need to add Youtube, Google Fonts etc to the privacy statement
- We need to update the policy to give the correct contact for complaints (no longer dev@)
- We need to check if we actually need AdSense code
Also, we should make sure to apply cookie laws.
The reason for the check is the open issue around status.apache.org since we need to cover that site with our privacy policy as well.
In another finding, Apache Whimsy shows all kinds of email addresses (i.e. personal ones) to all committers. This should be an option, so committers can decide if they want their email address shown and also the possibility to remove email addresses. Same issue is with the postal address shown. This issue has not yet been addressed and needs to be communicated to the Apache Whimsy team.
We have open discussion how ICLA (and similar documents) should be stored.
> Treasury and Financial Statement --map against https://s.apache.org/FY2019AnnualReport
The Foundation is in excellent fiscal shape with all tax and compliance forms filed on time. Latest public filings can be found at http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/ . I have advised that officers minimize expenses until there is more certainty in global economic outlooks. Officers have done so by delaying new investments. This quarter we conducted ApacheCon@Home which operated with a profit via our generous sponsors.
We made a technical adjustment to our accounting to recognize the income of $892,882 from the very generous Pineapple fund donation as a public donation. The donation was originally made at the beginning of 2018. Removing this one-time donation from consideration, our losses this quarter were $141,848.
The majority of our cash remains in a CDARS account at Boston Private which provides FDIC insurance for the full amount. See below for income and expenses:
> Diversity and Inclusion http://diversity.apache.org/
Important milestones were accomplished for two of the major projects driven by the Diversity and Inclusion committee as follows:
Project 1: Research on the current status of Diversity and Inclusion at the ASF
This project was composed of two initiatives: The ASF Community Survey and a User Experience Research for contributors of underrepresented groups. These two initiatives concluded in Q2 and we are now working on a final report, expected to be published and shared with the ASF membership in Q3.
For the ASF Community Survey, we recorded a read out, which you can watch in our official YouTube channel https://s.apache.org/pnkzw , and read the slides shared in the D&I wiki https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/EDI/**+Files+and+Resources .
In the User Experience research, we conducted 19 one-on-one interviews, which provided insightful information on how we can help our community to ease the challenges experienced by contributors in our Apache community, especially those coming from under-represented backgrounds. You can find early results on these interviews in our public mailing list https://s.apache.org/ibs4z .
In Q3, the work will be focused on publishing the official reports, which will include recommendations for our projects and the community in general, to enable the participation of folks from diverse backgrounds.
Project 2: Internships for underrepresented groups (Outreachy)
The second round of internships for the Outreachy program concluded in August. We had four participants, which brought the total number of interns to 5 in our first year of participation.
The third period of internships starts this December, we’ll have six interns for six different Apache projects, you can see the full list of interns and projects in the Outreachy working group notes https://s.apache.org/8ahu8 .
This program has provided opportunities to learn about the experience of new contributors to the participation project, and we look forward to analyzing them in the same context as the scientific data gathered with the survey and user experience interviews.
> Fundraising http://apache.org/foundation/contributing.html
This past quarter has been fairly quiet for the Fundraising team aside from the wonderful success of ApacheCon@Home. We are ecstatic to report that eight Sponsors joined the ApacheCon family this year for the event. Feel free to check out our YouTube channel for recordings of all the talks.
Despite the pandemic and challenges it brings, we continue to see strong support from the community. Individual donations have been particularly strong this quarter (see https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/Fundraising.html for month by month playlist). We have also had a few Sponsors either increase or decrease their support level this quarter and are pleased to welcome two new Bronze sponsors to the Apache family.
As always, we are immensely thankful to our sponsors, who make it possible for our communities to build world-changing software --
PLATINUM: Amazon Web Services, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Pineapple Fund, Verizon Media, Tencent
GOLD: Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Cloudera, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Union Investment, Workday
SILVER: Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Baidu, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Inspur, Red Hat, Target
BRONZE: Airport Rentals, The Blog Starter, Bookmakers, Cash Store, Bestecasinobonussen.nl, CarGurus, Casino2k, The Economic Secretariat, Emerio, Footprints Recruiting, Gundry MD, HostChecka.com, Host Advice, HostingAdvice.com, Journal Review, LeoVegas Indian Online Casino, Mutuo Kredit AG, Online Holland Casino, ProPrivacy, PureVPN, RX-M, SCAMS.info, Site Builder Report, Start a Blog by Ryan Robinson, Talend, The Best VPN, Top10VPN, Twitter, Web Hosting Secret Revealed, Xplenty
TARGETED PLATINUM: CloudBees, DLA Piper, JetBrains, Microsoft, OSU Open Source Labs, Sonatype, Verizon Media
TARGETED GOLD: Atlassian, The CrytpoFund, Datadog, PhoenixNAP, Quenda
TARGETED SILVER: Amazon Web Services, HotWax Systems, Rackspace
TARGETED BRONZE: Bintray, Education Networks of America, Google, Hopsie, No-IP, PagerDuty, Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation, Sonic.net, SURFnet, Virtru
To sponsor The Apache Software Foundation, visit http://apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html . To make a one-time or monthly recurring donation, please visit https://donate.apache.org/ .
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Report prepared by Sally Khudairi, Vice President Marketing & Publicity, with contributions by David Nalley, President; Rich Bowen, Vice President Conferences; Mark Cox, Vice President Security; Sharan Foga, Vice President Community Development; Christian Grobmeier, Vice President Data Privacy; Myrle Krantz, Treasurer; Griselda Cuevas, Vice President Diversity & Inclusion, Vice President Fundraising; and Mark Thomas, Vice President Brand Management.
For more information, subscribe to the announce@apache.org mailing list http://apache.org/foundation/mailinglists.html#foundation-announce and visit http://www.apache.org/ , the ASF Blog at http://blogs.apache.org/ , the @TheASF on Twitter https://twitter.com/TheASF , and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation .
(c) The Apache Software Foundation 2020.
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