FOUNDATION OPERATIONS SUMMARY

Second Quarter, Fiscal Year 2019 (August - October 2018)

"There have been no signs Apache will stop growing."
—Nick Ismail, InformationAge

> Conferences and Events: During Q2, we conducted one event, and were in the midst of planning three others.

  • ApacheCon North America 2018, September 24-27 | Montreal, Canada — This event was our 30th ApacheCon, and celebrated the 20th anniversary of the first ApacheCon in San Francisco in 1998. This was an intentionally smaller event, produced mostly in house, with the assistance of volunteer producer Ruth Suehle, as well as a cast of characters from around the Foundation. We had roughly 350 in attendance, and were able to turn a small profit on the entire venture. Video from the event may be viewed at https://s.apache.org/oUA1 (Keynotes) and audio from the event may be found at https://feathercast.apache.org/ (the rest of the presentations). Keynotes included Cliff Schmidt, Myrle Krantz, Bridget Kromhout, and Dave Neuman, and Fred Reiss, all of whom delivered inspiring talks about the role of open source in making the world a better place, with an emphasis on how open source helps the underprivileged of the world. Bertrand Delacretaz delivered the traditional State Of The Feather address on behalf of the Foundation.
  • Apache North America Road Show, December 4 | Fairfax, VA — During this quarter, we were actively working towards the Apache North America Roadshow, which will be held at George Mason University on December 4th of this year. This event is led by Kevin McGrail, in conjunction with GMU. You can read more about this event at http://www.apachecon.com/usroadshow18/
  • ApacheCon North America 2019 — During this quarter we were investigating venues for ApacheCon North America 2019, which will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the ASF. We expect to announce dates and venue in the coming quarter.
  • ApacheCon EU 2019 — During this quarter we were in discussion with a producer in Europe for the production of ApacheCon EU 2019, which is tentatively planned to be in Berlin. Details, dates, and venue should be announced in the coming quarter.

Sponsorship: as always, if you are interested in sponsoring ApacheCon, or other Apache events, we encourage you to get in touch with the sponsorship team, who can provide you with all active prospectuses at that time.

> Community Development: During this quarter our focus was helping prepare for and support ApacheCon NA in Montreal as well as participation in various other events.

During August one of our key activities was coordinating and setting up a central logo page and repository for high resolution logos for every single ASF project http://www.apache.org/logos/ . It was a great way to collaborate with all our projects on achieving a common goal. We now have the most recent versions of all ASF project logos available in various formats. Feedback and participation from projects was extremely positive and we now have a great resource for communities to use for marketing materials as well as reinforcing the Apache brand.

Our main focus in September was to help provide support for ApacheCon NA in Montreal. As usual we coordinated the Apache booth which is always a popular central meeting place throughout the conference. As well as speaking to conference attendees, we also had promotional material and giveaways.

We are continuing to be active in external events. During September we participated at Solutions Hamburg and for the first time had an Apache booth at the event. Once again we received very positive feedback and interest from attendees wanting to learn more about ASF activities. 

It has been nearly two years since we ran the Committer Diversity survey and in October we started discussions around re-running it. The community has been very positive and are very supportive of organizing another survey to understand how and if committer diversity has changed. It is hoped to get this done during the next quarter.

We are still receiving many requests to participate at various events and are looking running smaller Apache Roadshow style events as a way to reach audiences that may not have the capacity to attend ApacheCon.

Our mailing list subscriptions have increased this quarter and traffic is also higher reflecting the continued participation and interest, our discussions have created.

> Committers and Contributions: Over the past quarter, 1,656 contributors committed 50,346 changes that amount to 17,789,994 lines of code across Apache projects. The top 5 contributors during this timeframe were: David Moravek (920 commits), Radu Cotescu (718 commits), Andrea Cosentino (561 commits), Derek Gelinas (484 commits), and Jean-Baptiste Onofré (483 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 182 ICLAs, 12 CCLAs, and 4 Software Grants. History of Apache committer growth can be seen at https://projects.apache.org/timelines.html

> Brand Management: 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 has remained steady this quarter. Registrations and transfers are lengthy processes and the previous work to put in place a task tracking system continues to pay dividends. 

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 — The transfer of the NETBEANS mark in the EU completed this quarter. The transfer of the US registration is still in progress. We also also working on the agreements to transfer the marks associated with a number of other podlings. These typically span multiple jurisdictions so can take a while to complete.

We are working with counsel to address a number of external registrations that overlap with our own. While progress is being made, this too is a lengthy process and we expect that the issues currently being worked on will not be resolved until well into next calendar year.

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. After last quarter's successes in resolving two of these more complex issues, this quarter has seen a small uptick in the number of complex issues we are tracking.

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: Infrastructure had a great quarter, as this was our yearly gathering at ApacheCon. This year, it was held in Montreal, and we arrived from all corners to discuss work, do some team bonding, and knock out a large number of action items helped by sitting across the table from each other.

Our most interesting item this quarter is that we posted a job opening, and will be working to hire additional teammates. Our last round of hiring was two years ago, yet with the growth of the Foundation, the additional help is very much needed.

The rest of the quarter has been spent with typical activity, across Jenkins, email and gitbox. Jenkins saw a lot of work focusing on disk space issues, the new master we deployed last quarter, and continued upgades to support the many projects using Jenkins. We made significant progress on preparing our new email infrastructure, to move us away from decade-old hardware and a tricky software install. Email is such a critical service to our communities, that we are approaching this migration process with the utmost care. Lastly, we improved many features around our "gitbox" service (close integration with GitHub), such that we hope to migrate all projects within the next quarter or two, and decommission our old git servers.

> Financial Statement:


> Fundraising: The Fundraising team has continued building upon the success of previous quarters. We are happy to report that event fundraising is nearly complete for the year and we are ahead of projected budget.

We are delighted to announce Tencent has joined us as a platinum sponsor as well as the return of Alibaba as a silver sponsor this quarter. 

In late September we added three new ambassadors/sponsor relations team members:

  • Ted Liu
  • Craig Russell
  • Bob Paulin

ApacheCon NA 2018 was a wonderful opportunity to meet personally with sponsors and friends of the foundation. We thank those who attended the sponsor lunch as well as everyone who made the event such a success!

We continue to drive out efficiencies in our procedures and systems. The team has begun working on system integrations to automate access to data managed by the Fundraising team. We also continue to watch for and drive out fraudster use of the individual donation platform (Hopsie). Focus on maturing our sponsor relations practice and procedures continues as well.

The recently published targeted sponsorship policy continues to evolve. We have added notes indicating that endorsements are not acceptable per the policy and are working on a draft of a revised policy after feedback and conversation since initial publishing. More to come soon!

The finance team has been considering ideas for securing our financial future via establishing some sort of restricted fund or endowment. Because our sponsors are so important to us, we reached out to several seeking thoughts and opinions. We are happy to report that the feedback was positive and highly valuable. More discussions with sponsors may come as we continue to support the finance team in their evaluations.

= = = 

Thank you to all our Sponsors!

  • PLATINUM: Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Pineapple Fund, Oath, Tencent
  • GOLD: Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Handshake, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, ODPi, Pivotal
  • SILVER: Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Baidu, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Inspur, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Union Investment
  • BRONZE: Airport Rentals, Best VPN, The Blog Starter, Bookmakers, Cash Store, Casino Bonus, Casino2k, Cloudsoft, Emerio, HostChecka.com, HostingAdvice.com, HostPapa Web Hosting, The Linux Foundation, Mobile Slots, SCAMS.info, Site Builder Report, Talend, The Best VPN, Twitter, Web Hosting Secret Revealed
  • TARGETED PLATINUM: DLA Piper, Microsoft, Oath, OSU Open Source Labs, Sonatype
  • 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 Rich Bowen, Vice President Conferences; Sharan Foga, Vice President Community Development; Mark Thomas, Vice President Brand Management; 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.