FOUNDATION OPERATIONS SUMMARY

First Quarter, Fiscal Year 2019 (May - July 2018)

"The most popular open source software is Apache..."
— DZone “What Open Source Software Do You Use?” [February 2018]

> Conferences and Events: The Apache Europe Roadshow was held in Berlin, Germany, June 11-14th of this year. It was held in cooperation with the FOSS BackStage and Berlin Buzzwords events, at the Kulturbrauerei. The event also served as a preliminary investigation of the venue, and of the production company running the event, as a possible good fit for ApacheCon Europe 2019. This event was a great success, by all measures. Much of the content from that event is available on YouTube, at https://s.apache.org/b5UX

At the end of the quarter in question, we were well into planning ApacheCon North America, which will be held in Montreal, September 24-27th. Details of that event are available at https://apachecon.com/acna18

> Travel Assistance: The Travel assistance Committee exists to help those get to ApacheCon and other ASF related events (such as Apache Roadshows or project specific get togethers) that would not otherwise afford to go. During this quarter, the committee is gearing up to send successful applicants to ApacheCon NA in Montreal, Canada. More than 30 people applied via https://tac-apply.apache.org. In the end, 13 were accepted for financial support and all are being assisted for flights, accommodation and Conference fees. During the Conference itself they will assist with introducing other speakers - some are speakers themselves - and a few other minor duties, but importantly they get to meet other ASF folks, members of their project community etc.

TAC expects to spend around USD $25K of its budget at this event. No other events are scheduled at the moment in regards TAC involvement.

> Community Development: During this quarter our key focus was on continuing to support participation in events. Throughout May our main focus was helping with the planning, communications and preparations for the Apache EU Roadshow in Berlin. As well as promoting the event, we were also actively involved with helping manage and co-ordinate the event content. Over 70 talks were submitted for the CFP and a total of 28 were eventually selected for the two day Roadshow programme. 

In June the Apache EU Roadshow took place, co-located with Berlin Buzzwords and FOSS Backstage. The Roadshow was made up of an Apache Lounge and two full day tracks focussing on Apache Tomcat, IoT, Cloud technologies, Micro-services and Apache Httpd Server. Our Apache Lounge was very popular with attendees as an informal place to find out more information about Apache, meet-up or collaborate. Feedback from attendees indicate that the event and co-location was very successful. All videos, photos and presentations from the event have been published and we have already received feedback from attendees to help us improve any future events. We also took the opportunity to record some interviews for our FeatherCast podcast channel.  As well as interviews with attendees and speakers, we have started a short series called 'Board Conversations' where members of the Apache Board of Directors talk about their role. The co-location with FOSS Backstage worked well and feedback from the event was very positive. As a result  we are now looking at running Apache Roadshows in other locations.

Also in June we were invited to participate again at the Open Expo Europe in Madrid. This is the second year that we have had a presence at this conference. As well as a booth we also had several presentations about Apache projects, community development and the Apache Way. Once again, feedback from attendees was very positive and we are happy to be able to have the opportunity to promoting Apache and its projects to the Spanish speaking community.

Our main focus during July was around our participation at OSCON. This was was a great opportunity to reach out to a potentially new audience. We had an Apache booth and also several presentations at the event on topics such as Innersourcing and Financial inclusion. We received a constant stream of visitors that ranged from those thanking us for our contribution to open source to those wanting to find out what the foundation does. Our stock of stickers and giveaways ran out faster than anticipated so we will make sure that in future we have more stock.

We are now receiving more invitations to participate at more events and so are looking at how we can adjust our volunteer effort to integrate with this. We are now starting to see new people beginning to volunteer at  a regional level and to help support this we are now locating banners and other booth related supplies at several locations globally.

Our mailing list subscriptions have increased this quarter although traffic is lower and we are continuing to publish our monthly blog update.

> Committers and Contributions: Over the past quarter, 1,701 contributors committed 47,375 changes that amount to 15,276,185 lines of code across Apache projects. The top 5 contributors during this timeframe were: Duo Zhang (746 commits), Gary Gregory (712 commits), Andrea Cosentino (615 commits), Jean-Baptiste Onofré (551 commits), and Mark Thomas (455 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 Q1 FY2019, the ASF Secretary processed 166 ICLAs, 9 CCLAs, and 6 Software Grants. Apache committer activity can be seen at http://status.apache.org/#commits

> Brand Management: Operations --the work of the Brand Management team falls broadly into one of three categories: 1) trademark registrations; 2) granting permission to use our marks; 3) addressing potential infringements of our marks. The volume of work continues to grow steadily as the foundation grows. Both registrations and addressing potential infringements are tasks that typically span many months. The GMail based tracking system continues to provide significant benefits in terms of reducing the overhead of tracking these long running tasks and ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks.

This quarter has seen the usual collection of requests to use Apache marks for events, merchandise and publications with nearly all requests being granted, subject to our Trademark Usage Policy. We have also had a couple of requests to use our marks for websites to promote one or more of our projects. In each case we have directed the enquirer to discuss and develop their ideas with the relevant project communities before seeking formal approval.

An enquiry that was, as far as we are aware, a first for the Brand Management team was an enquiry from the Apache Spark project whether or not they were allowed to use a variant of their logo for Pride. The Brand Management was happily to confirm that there were no concerns and that the project was free to go ahead with their plans.

Registrations --we have submitted a number of registrations and responded to requests for additional input on a number of ongoing registartions this quarter. We have not had any registrations complete this quarter although we are working on a numberof transfer agreements for podlings that have existing registrations and are nearing graduation.

Renewals fell due for two registrations this quarter. In consultation with the project communities it was decided, in both cases, to allow the registartion to lapse as the renewals were not viewed as cost-effective.

We have been made aware this quarter of a number of external registration applications made this quarter that overlap with registrations of our own. We are working with counsel to request adjustments to these registrations to avoid the overlap.

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 and we were pleased to see two such issues be successfully resolved this 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.


> Infrastructure: This past quarter, the Infrastructure team and its volunteers have spent considerable effort updating our shared services. We have performed a number of version upgrades, and have acquired and moved to new servers better-tuned to their workload.

Two of the most useful tools for our projects are the Jira issue tracker and the Confluence wiki system. We took a couple weekends to upgrade these to their latest versions, along with the numerous plugins these systems use to provide additional capabilities. Additionally, we performed an emergency upgrade for security purposes.

On the continuous integration front, we maintain several buildbot nodes, and a large deployment of Jenkins build nodes. Each of these were upgraded during the quarter to pick up new features, better reliability, and tighter security. The "Jenkins Master" was running on a shared server within a virtual machine. This created a strain on the underlying disks, so we migrated to a new, dedicated with much higher-performance disks. The Jenkins build system is one of our most-used services, and we continue to monitor its performance closely.

The Apache mirror system is a large network of volunteers that offer additional download points for the large catalog of Apache releases. It has been in operation for almost twenty years, and continues to grow in scope and in reliability. Similar to our Jenkins master, our distribution point was running into contention issues with other services on its machine. As a result, we have moved our distribution to a dedicated box, providing a much more reliable system for the mirror system and to release disk contention from the shared services.

That shared service is what we call our "Top Level Project" (TLP) web server, providing the web sites for the vast majority of our projects' web sites. By moving the mirror system off our primary web servers, it greatly improved its performance. We also migrated a secondary TLP server from our old ASF-owned hardware to a new cloud provider, and are testing and monitoring that new deployment.

Building upon our monitoring changes from last quarter, we have moved our status.apache.org server over to Statuspage.io for better reliability, maintability, and features. Much of our monitoring framework already had integrations, making this transition easy for all involved.

> Financial Statement:


> Fundraising: As we head towards the 20th anniversary of the foundation, we welcome Daniel Ruggeri as a co-VP of Fundraising. We are also proud to be working on three Apache events for 2018: ApacheCon 2018 North America in Montreal in September, the Apache 2018 EU Roadshow in Berlin in June and the Apache 2018 US Roadshow in Washington, DC in December. ApacheCon NA 2018 is effectively sold out for sponsors and we have a number of sponsors highly interested in AC2019 NA as well as AC2019 EU.

Interested in sponsoring the foundation and/or our events? Please email kmcgrail@apache.org for more details.

Fundraising continues to go well. We are able to fund operations and working on an endowment project to ensure the longevity of the organization. Fundraising Committee meetings continue to occur monthly and we are always looking for help. Continue improving our fundraising procedures and working on our playbook website. And we continue groundwork on fundraising for an OSS event in Africa.

The ASF foundation relies on our sponsors to exist. We are not a trade organization but a 100% volunteer led charity. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. To our generous Sponsors, thank you, thank you, thank you.

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Report prepared by Sally Khudairi, Vice President Marketing & Publicity, with contributions by Rich Bowen, Vice President Conferences; Gavin McDonald, Vice President Travel Assistance Committee; Sharan Foga, Vice President Community Development; Mark Thomas, Vice President Brand Management; David Nalley, Vice President Infrastructure; Greg Stein, ASF Infrastructure Administrator; Tom Pappas, Vice President Finance; and Daniel Ruggeri and Kevin McGrail, Vice Presidents 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 2018.