FOUNDATION OPERATIONS SUMMARY

Third Quarter, Fiscal Year 2019 (November 2018 - January 2019)

"Happy to be a sponsor of one of the most important foundations in the world!"
—Randy Abernethy, Managing Partner, RX-M LLC (ASF Bronze Sponsor)

> Conferences and Events: During this period, the Events team was mostly focused on preparations for upcoming events, as reported in our previous quarterly report, so there's not much to add. Our current status, as of 31 January, is as below:

  • Apache Roadshow, DC
    After several setbacks, the DC roadshow has been rescheduled for March 25th at George Mason University. Event details, and the full schedule of talks, may be found at http://apachecon.com/usroadshowdc19

    The DC roadshow will also feature a job fair.

  • Apache Roadshow, Chicago
    The planning for the Chicago roadshow is moving along nicely. It will be held May 13-14 in Logan Square, and details may be found at http://apachecon.com/chiroadshow19/index.html
  • ApacheCon North America 2019
    During the period of this report, we signed agreements to hold ApacheCon North America 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada, September 9-12, 2019. This event celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation. The call for presentations will open soon, and sponsor opportunities will also be available soon.
  • ApacheCon Europe 2019
    Planning for ApacheCon Europe 2019 is well underway, and you can expect announcements and further details very soon.


> Community Development: One of the main themes raised this quarter was around ways to encourage new contributors by lowering the barriers to entry and other techniques that could help onboard them.

Some new contributor onboarding material tailored specifically tailored around Apache and participation in Apache projects is currently being developed and the community feedback has been very positive.

Discussion has also started about how to recognize non technical contributions. This is an area where Community Development could really help in the development of materials and processes, as well as providing guidance to projects on how it could be implemented.

In December, we participated at the Paris Open Source Summit, one of the main Open Source events in France. We had an ASF booth and over the two day summit saw lots of attendees who were keen to know more about the ASF. 

We were also invited to participate in a workshop to talk about how the administrative sector could help increase collaboration with Open Source foundations and communities.

The ASF has once again has applied to be a mentoring organisation for GSoC. In preparation, we have asked all ASF projects interested in participating to start recording their ideas.

We are continually receiving requests to participate at events and would like to be more organised in selecting and planning our event participation. As a first step we have asked our community for their feedback on which events they think are the most important ones for us to be involved. Based on this we hope to create a high level event participation plan for 2019.

Our mailing list subscriptions have increased this quarter and even though we have had a lot of active discussions, the traffic has decreased, probably due to the December holiday period.

> Committers and Contributions: Over the past quarter, 1,615 contributors committed 45,054 changes that amount to 18,612,331 lines of code across Apache projects. The top 5 contributors during this timeframe were: Andrea Cosentino (1,142 commits), Jean-Baptiste Onofré (747 commits), Tilman Hausherr (599 commits), Mark Thomas (594 commits), and Tellier Benoit (512 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 Q3 FY2019, the ASF Secretary processed 232 ICLAs, 3 CCLAs, and 10 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 fell slightly this quarter which was probably due to the end of year holiday period. The budget request for next financial year was finalized and submitted.

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 US registration of OPENOFFICE completed this quarter and we started the process to register IGNITE in the EU and China. We also worked with counsel to respond to office actions for a number of in-progress registrations.

With the assistance of counsel, we addressed a number of external registrations that overlap with our own with those external registrations being amended 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. 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.

We saw an increase in projects reaching out to speakers and conference organizers this quarter to ensure that Apache projects were referred to correctly in conference session titles and abstracts.

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: It has been a very busy quarter for the Infrastructure team. We have been migrating many services to new approaches and systems, including gitbox, backups, and configuration management.

We have been reporting on the move to "Gitbox" for a while now, and this quarter the testing, development, and evolution is nearly at a close. This quarter, many hundreds of repositories have migrated from our old git provisioning to our new gitbox system. A mere hundred repositories are left, and will be completed in February, allowing us to shut down old hardware, old systems, and reduce our maintenance efforts. Meanwhile, the many tools that GitHub brings to development will be available to our projects.

This quarter has also seen a revamp of our backup systems to a simpler, straightforward mechanism across our multitude of virtual machines. We had a mix of commercial backup and in-house systems built on standard F/OSS tools. By concentrating on the in-house tooling, we have dramatically reduced costs and simplified our ongoing maintenance.

Our final, large system migration involves our use of Puppet for configuration management. For the past several years, we've been migrating our very old, organically-constructed systems onto Puppet version 3. While that process of bringing modern configuration management into our operations, Puppet has released many versions, now up to version 6. This quarter, we have begun to deploy new systems using this v6 setup. Looking forward, we'll begin shifting our operations to this new platform, to improve our operations.

In addition to these larger system moves, the team has kept busy with larger scale planning. Hiring more staff, longer term migration of our core email handling, five year budget planning, monitoring improvements, and decommissioning of our old hardware.

> Financial Statement:


> Fundraising: Fundraising has continued to go well this past quarter. We are pleased to have had several renewals from our awesome sponsors and we've even grown the ASF family of Sponsors and Targeted Sponsors! Welcome Amazon Web Services at the Platinum level, and RX-M LLC and Online Holland Casino at the Bronze level. We've recently begun our quarterly cycles of outreach via our Sponsor Ambassadors and look forward to hearing from our sponsors.

Work on reviewing the concept of a potential endowment or endowment-like project for the ASF has been transferred to VP Finance. The Fundraising committee remains engaged and eager to support however possible.

Fundraising support for ASF events (ApacheCon and Apache Roadshow) has picked up with the development of event prospectuses and assignments of Event Sponsor Ambassadors. We have also established and documented a new model for handling event fundraising.

It was wonderful to spend some time with our ASF family and friends at FOSDEM and look forward to doing the same at Apache Roadshow DC in March.

Internally the Fundraising committee continues to focus on improvements. Processes, documentation, record keeping and tracking is being reviewed and bolstered across the board. The team also thanks Kevin A McGrail for his hard work and dedication (VP and Co-VP Fundraising) over the past two years as he steps away from Fundraising.

= = = 

Thank you to all our Sponsors!

  • PLATINUM: Amazon Web Services, 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, Holland Online Casino, HostChecka.com, HostingAdvice.com, HostPapa Web Hosting, The Linux Foundation, Mobile Slots, RX-M LLC, 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/

# # #

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, 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 2019.