FOUNDATION OPERATIONS SUMMARY

First Quarter, Fiscal Year 2020 (May - July 2019)

"We are excited to support The Apache Software Foundation, championing an organization that is delivering software for public good. Apache's software is core to much of the Internet and is used by many of our customers and community."
—Zaheda Bhorat, Head of Open Source Strategy, Amazon Web Services (ASF Platinum Sponsor and Targeted Silver Sponsor)

> Conferences and Events: During Q1, we did not hold any official Apache events.

We were actively planning for the following upcoming events: ApacheCon North America in September, and ApacheCon Europe in October.

Upcoming events are always listed at events.apache.org and sponsorship opportunities are available for all upcoming events. Contact planners@apachecon.com with any questions.

> Community Development: Throughout this quarter a lot of work has been done in helping support the preparations for ApacheCon NA and EU. With a 3 day Community track planned for ApacheCon NA and a 2 day Community track planned for ApacheCon EU, we helped co-ordinate and manage the CFP submissions to select the content for the tracks.  

In early 2018, we setup a Redbubble store as an easy way for any of our ASF projects to order their own branded items such as t-shirts and mugs etc. In preparation for ApacheCon, many of our projects have asked for their logos to be added to the store so they can purchase a range of merchandise and promote their projects visually.

As a regular GSoC mentor organisation, we have been invited to participate at the Mentor Summit in Germany. Two of our existing GSoC mentors have been chosen to attend.

Following on from the discussions last quarter on ways to drive better diversity and inclusion, a separate mailing list has been established that will focus on discussing, defining and co-ordinating strategies to improve diversity and inclusion across the foundation.

We are continuing to investigate opportunities for smaller Apache Roadshows in 2020 including the possibility of one in India. We have also been invited to participate with an Apache track in CCOSS 2019 in Mexico.

Mailing list traffic has decreased this quarter probably due to the holiday season.

> Committers and Contributions: Over the past quarter, 1,646 contributors committed 44,068 changes that amount to 17,190,978 lines of code across Apache projects. The top 5 contributors, in order, were: Andrea Cosentino (921 commits), Duo Zhang (906 commits), Claus Ibsen (748 commits), Jean-Baptiste Onofré (722 commits), and Mark Thomas (664 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 FY2020, the ASF Secretary processed 188 ICLAs, 11 CCLAs, and 14 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 but the tracking system we have put in place remains up to the task.

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. Use of our marks for events is now dependent on the event having an acceptable anti-harassment policy.

Registrations — A number of registrations came up for renewal this quarter. We review each renewal as it comes up and, as a result, opted not to some of those registrations. The remaining renewals are in now progress. Some registrations, particularly those outside the US, tend to be more complex. This quarter some of our registrations in China have required additional work to help them progress.

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.

It was pleasing to see a number of PMCs successfully address potential infringements independently this quarter. As the ASF continues to grow, having PMCs that can operate more independently in this area helps the overall Brand Management capability scale to match the ASF's growth.

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 has had an interesting quarter, combining a regular workload of upgrades, ticket handling, and project support, then needing to change gears for July to perform a full datacenter move to lower our costs.

We spent a significant amount of time upgrading and improving our systems. The backup system was simplified in FY19Q3, and we took another pass at it this quarter to expand storage space and improve the tooling via the open source backuppc system. Numerous upgrades of services, such as Jira and Jenkins, were performed to keep us secure and up to date.

One of the newer services we are testing is the use of a "Content Delivery Network" (CDN) for our projects' websites. A few projects are participating in a trial, and we will roll out wider usage later this year, after successful trials.

Lastly, we have started a concerted effort to expand and diversify our CI/CD capacity. The continued growth of projects at the Foundation, and modern development trends towards CI/CD, have combined to create an ever-increasing demand for resources. We are increasing our system capacity, tracking projects' usage, and looking towards new types of systems and providers.

> Financial Statement:

> Fundraising: Fundraising continues to carry on smoothly. New sponsors are successfully onboarding and renewals are occurring without incident. In this quarter, we renewed and onboarded several sponsors smoothly. We also spent the quarter continuing our work on consolidating existing sponsorship agreements into our formalized foundation offerings. This helps to limit one-off processing and to keep operations as efficient as possible.

We formalized a number of our event sponsorship/support activities into ongoing processes that are safe, repeatable, and comply with industry best-practices as we continue support of ApacheCon and our Roadshows.

Another significant step for Fundraising this quarter was the introduction of form-based onboarding which helps keep data clean and helps enable further automation for the road ahead!

We are delighted to report more than $10,000 in individual giving was donated to The ASF in addition to our foundation sponsors. Thank you, deeply, for your support!

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Thank you to all our Sponsors --

  • PLATINUM: Amazon Web Services, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Pineapple Fund, Verizon Media, Tencent
  • GOLD: Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Union Investment, Workday
  • SILVER: Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Baidu, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Inspur, ODPi, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target
  • BRONZE: Airport Rentals, The Blog Starter, Bookmakers, Cash Store, Bestecasinobonussen.nl, CarGurus, Casino2k, Cloudsoft, 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
  • 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 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.