Let me explain…

No, there is too much. Let me sum up what’s been happening in the past 1081 days of March since the pandemic started back in 2020. Meme image from Princess Bride, featuring Indigo Montoya saying: "Let me explain... no there is too much."

The pandemic brought it’s own special challenges here, since we have complicating health factors that meant we essentially stopped going out for several months until we better understood the issues our situation presented. Luckily, we all could do work and school remotely for a while, so it was a far easier time here than for many folks.

Besides all the obvious things – seeing friends, going shopping, eating out, and just plain socializing – the other rotten thing about the pandemic was missing all my friends in the open source world. My two must-attend conferences were both cancelled in person: ApacheCon and Monktoberfest. Since I have a 20+ year career in open source technology, many of my friends are scattered around the world, and I only get to see them at conferences, which I’ve really missed, travel hassles and all.

Twitter and other social media sites have been a kind of lifeline, both for keeping up with the FOSS world and just with friends. That makes it all the more devastating to see the current $44B trajectory of turning that flawed-but-great tweetstream into the world’s most expensive billboard for a cheezy techbro. It’s currently a testament to the skills of Twitter’s past engineering staff (mostly fired or laid off now) at their skill to build a robust enough system to survive this long after a… ‘hostile’ management takeover.

My Pandemic Projects

At various times during the past two years I’ve turned to doing volunteer work or building websites to get by. I’ve also gone through a handful of wicked awesome games (and a couple of new game consoles) along the way.

  • Mutual Aid When times get tough, does your neighborhood have neighbors who help each other out? So many places in our modern (US East Coast suburban, which I admit is very first world problems) neighborhood didn’t really have that. So I worked on local social media and built Mutual Aid Arlington to try to connect people.
  • I ran for political office! Yes, it’s true, I ran for local town government during the pandemic – really bad timing for campaigning, I can tell you! In New England we have something called “Town Meeting” which is truly local democracy. To help people understand how hyper-local politics worked, I created Menotomy Matters.
  • I did NOT run for ASF Board. After getting elected again right in March 2020, I decided in 2021 (and 2022) to not run for the board again. Time with family and friends suddenly became so much more important – plus we had plenty of great new candidates for the board. It was a welcome time off, even as I continued to serve as the Vice Chair (since technically, the Vice Chair doesn’t need to be a director!)
  • I bought more domain names. It’s an occupational hazard, especially for anyone in tech who also has ADHD. Start with https://tldrfoss.com/
  • I got diagnosed with ADHD. Much to no-one’s surprise, I got an official diagnosis of ADHD, which explains a lot of my past history. If only this had happened… oh, 30 years ago, what might have I ended up becoming?
  • My remaining ancestor died. Mom deserves a separate post, but she was my last living ancestor. There was yet more paperwork.
  • We played video games. I mean, who didn’t? Along with a new Playstation, I played The Last Of Us (remaster, and 2), Horizon Zero Dawn, and Horizon Forbidden West. Each of them was an awesome experience, highly recommended.
  • I missed two years of conferences. Many of us did, as most conferences were cancelled. For those of us with open source friends, this was doubly hard, since that’s the only time we all gather together.

How Is This About Open Source?

It’s about community, which is the most important part of any open source project. Code is easy. People are hard. Especially groups of people from scattered backgrounds. Optimize your work for the people you interact with.

For those interested in more Shane, I use my real name on various social networks, find me out there!

Shane’s Director Position Statement 2020

As I do each year (and did again in 2024), here are my goals if I am re-elected to the Board at the ASF next year. Posting these statements each year (see 2019 and many past years) is an important way to communicate outside the membership how I think the ASF is doing (great!).

My objectives next year as a director are simple:

  • Continue to improve the services we offer our projects, especially around making services easier to find/use/consume, and provide better build, CI, and other infrastructure needs where practical for our organization.
  • Build a culture of positive encouragement so that newer Members feel comfortable speaking up; and make it easy for them to step up and volunteer for Foundation governance and operations.
  • Ensure the board takes a strategic view, and takes the time to think about the big picture and 5-year plan so we can keep the ASF vibrant and improving for the next 5, 10, and 50 years.

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Monktoberfest 2019 theme

Monktoberfest – the small but influential and highly curated single-track conference run by RedMonk and Steve O’Grady – always has a theme to the talks. I’ve been trying to quantify what I think the theme is all day, although there’s so much good content here it’s hard to quantify it clearly.

My default description of Monktoberfest talks is that it’s about how technology shapes society – and bring data. In the past, many of the speakers had done real research into their subjects and could provide rich and detailed source references behind the compelling and innovative narrative they spun. I have to say this year has been very light on the data side (so far; there are more talks tomorrow), but are the equal of any in the storytelling and concepts.

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Diversity & Inclusion programs in FOSS

A few volunteers at the ASF have been working on some new educational materials around diversity and inclusion (D&I) , so I was inspired to keep working on my FOSS foundations and major projects listing, to see what FOSS organizations have formal (or informal, but visible) programs in this area.

While there are plenty of research and resources for D&I programs in traditional corporate settings, most of us working in major FOSS foundations and projects live in a very different world. While the concepts and ideas for programs are a great inspiration, putting them in language and re-useable pieces that are practical to implement in a distributed, all-volunteer group is much harder.

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How Apache Runs Annual Member Meetings

As a Delaware non-stock membership corporation, the ASF’s bylaws specify that we hold an annual meeting of the membership. Since the ASF is also a distributed organization of volunteers, we hold our meetings a little differently than most companies – meeting on IRC over three days, and voting securely online.

Since we’re in the middle of our meeting this week, here are some answers to common questions. If these are valuable, we can add them to the ASF’s official member’s meeting process. I’ve also written a timeline of pre-meeting setup, as well as about the work after the meeting.

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Shane’s Director Position Statement 2019

The ASF is holding its annual Member’s Meeting next week to elect a new board and new Members to the ASF. I’m honored to have been nominated to stand for the board election, and I’m continuing my tradition of publicly posting my vision for Apache each year.

I’ll keep this short(er); if you want to know more, please read my past thoughts on how Apache works and where we’re going (see end of this post).


After 20 years of growth, the ASF is a successful open-source community providing software to the world and a community framework to dedicated volunteers. At this time in our community development, we need to focus on efficiently scaling our organization to keep up with growth in project communities who need services and mentoring. We also need to make it easier for Members (whose numbers are rapidly increasing!) to participate in ways that provide consistent and positive guidance to our projects and podlings.

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The board member experience at Apache

With the Apache Annual Member’s Meeting coming up soon, thoughts turn to our board and new member elections, and where the ASF is heading as a Foundation. The weeks around our meeting are often filled with great new ideas, as well as the traditional statements from our many excellent director candidates about how we can work together to make Apache better for all of our projects.

This year a fellow director came up with a great new set of questions for current directors about how the board actually works. This is a great counterpoint to some of the questions members have asked in the past about where directors see the ASF going in the 5-10 year timescale. The perspective on day-to-day work of being a director is timely since we have several great new candidates for our election!

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The Monktoberfest conference today and in history

This week is the Monktoberfest, the most interesting conference I’ve ever attended, and one of my must-attend events each year in October.  Not only are the talks thought-provoking and the attendees are awesome, but the location in Portland, ME and the food and events are top-notch. The ideas I get each year are a big inspiration, and it’s a long wait until next year each time.

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Apache How-To: Communicating Effectively

How can you be effective at asking questions or proposing changes at Apache or in an Apache project?  Besides making sure you use the right mailing list, and asking smart questions or following the several email etiquette guidelines and tips at Apache, what should you do to be effective at communicating your ideas?

There are plenty of times you’ve been polite and formulated a good question, but you either don’t get useful responses – or you get too many responses and tangents and complaints and and and…  What are some of the other factors to consider in being effective at communicating with Apache’s many communities?

Is this a question about one Apache project?

If your question or idea is just about a single Apache project, that’s pretty easy: write your thoughtful email to the dev@projectname mailing list; that’s where the primary community for most projects does their work.  Sometimes you may want to email the user@ mailing list if it’s a question about functionality, events, or user-based questions instead.

Make sure to understand that project’s expectations for discussions: do they use [SUBJECT-TAGS], or perhaps use JIRAs for organizing technical work?  Do they expect all proposals to be spelled out in your email, or do they often write up a proposal in their wiki, and then point to it from the email?  Following the project’s normal way of working is important to have maximum chance that other project volunteers will see and respond to your message.  Be sure to reply to any questions as well!

I can’t get a final decision on my question! What next?

The first thing is to be a little patient, and see if you can work out a good enough consensus.  That often takes time, because various other project participants may not see this as their urgent priority; you need to allow sufficient time for feedback.  You may need to adjust plans and make it clear that you’ve taken feedback and changed your proposal.

Sometimes, you need to call for a [VOTE].  The ASF has some very broad requirements around voting,  but really most of the details of votes are up to each individual PMC.  In most cases, a majority of +1 votes carries the day, unless -1 voters have a technically valid veto that can be shown to make the project worse (for a code modification).

Sometimes, if there is a larger issue at stake – where the dev@ list isn’t helping you at least get closure (even if it’s not necessarily agreement), you may want to escalate the issue to the PMC.  Every Apache project has a private@projectname mailing list – that’s privately archived – where the PMC discusses only issues that require privacy – typically security issues, voting in new committers, and rarely personnel issues or code of conduct type issues.

What if I have a question about the ASF itself?

The Apache Community Development project – with its own PMC and everything – is here to help guide newcomers and guide unusual questions to the right place.  If you have a public question about where to find someting, or that crosses multiple projects, start on the dev@community.apache.org mailing list.

Apache has a handful of other cross-project mailing lists as well for conferences, infrastructure, and legal questions.  Note that those lists are also publicly archived unless they specifically state otherwise.  Any potential security vulnerabilities should go directly to the Security Team, which obviously uses private archives.

What if an Apache project is not responding to me? How do I escalate concerns?

The ASF is designed to give project PMCs maximum freedom in governing their own projects.  While the board does expect to see a certain set of behaviors – especially working by consensus and welcoming any newcomers with good work, regardless of employer – the board of the ASF rarely gets involved directly in project operations.

However, if there is a serious governance or community issue that a PMC is not addressing, you can work to contact the ASF Board of DirectorsPMCs report quarterly directly to the board, separately from other corporate operations (infra, legal, trademarks, accounting, etc.)

Vulnerability escalations go to the Security team; and legal issues or communications from counsel go to the Legal Affairs committee.

How do I ask about Foundation governance and corporate affairs?

Most corporate organization happens on privately archived mailing lists.  While project work is done in the open as much as possible, internal corporate work like paying the bills, signing legal documents, and the like are done either by volunteers or in a few cases by paid staff or contractors.  The Membership of the ASF has oversight and visibility to these processes, and it’s usually Members who are volunteering to help with the work.

For Members, the first thing to remember is to use the right list!  Each area of corporate operations has their own mailing lists: legal, trademarks@, infrastructure, treasurer, fundraising, or secretary.  There’s also an overall operations mailing list that’s a great place to ask where you should take your question since the operations volunteers there usually have helpful answers.

PMC Members and committers don’t have access to those list archives, but we certainly accept emails from them. Be sure to send in a clear question, so we know you’re waiting for an answer, and we’ll get back to you.  If your question is about a specific Apache project, it’s a best practice to always cc: private@projectname as well, so the whole PMC there is aware.

If your question doesn’t require privacy, then the best bet is to ask Community Development to point you in the right direction.

What else can I do to be effective at communicating at Apache?

Remember: Apache mailing lists often have hundreds of subscribers – so you’re sending email to a lot of people, all of whom are (for Apache purposes) part-time volunteers.  Knowing your audience is one of the key points when writing – and that’s doubly true when communicating with so many people from different backgrounds.

  • Write helpful and descriptive subject lines; make sure list readers understand if they need to read your email – or not.
  • Keep email threads on topic – preferably, a single topic per email thread.  If you need to add a new topic or feel the urge to hijack someone’s thread, please don’t – start a new thread, or at least change the Subject line.
  • Pause. Take your time. Most project decisions should not be made in a rush, and overwhelming the list with your posts in a short period often backfires when other community members get overwhelmed and stop participating.
  • Keep focused on the issues, and the value to the project or to the ASF as a whole. Even about code we can sometimes feel emotional; keep it based on facts and focused on the big picture.
  • For significant decisions, re-post a recap of the final consensus.  This is best done with a new email or at least a changed Subject.
  • For complex issues, lay out the big picture very clearly.  Sometimes it’s best to post “Hey, I/we are thinking of $big_change_like_X.  If anyone already knows they’ll want to veto it, let us know before we investigate!”  Then write up a detailed proposal, and send that to the list for discussion.  Similarly: start a [DISCUSS] thread with the expectation to gauge interest and possible consensus, before doing lots of coding or planning work and assuming the project will accept it.

Still wondering where to ask something?  See my FAQ of FAQs about everything Apache too!

How Apache Directors Run ASF Board Meetings

I was recently fortunate enough to be re-elected to the ASF’s Board of Directorsalong with 8 other excellent candidates. Since there were two new directors elected – Isabel and Roman – we plan to have returning directors work together to improve our documentation of how we run our board meetings so smoothly.

This is my personal timeline of how I volunteer as a director, in terms of our monthly board meetings (there are a lot of other things directors do too!).

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