Some great recent discussions around the upcoming member’s meeting in 2017 have got me to thinking about the larger question: how can the ASF as an organization function better, and how does the board effect that? I think there is one more important concept in a board that the ASF needs to have, along with oversight and vision.
Category: Community
Shane’s Apache Director Position Statement, 2017
The ASF is holding it’s annual Member’s Meeting next week to elect a new board and a number of new Members to the ASF. Â 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.
Please read on for my take on what’s important for the ASF’s future…
Continue reading Shane’s Apache Director Position Statement, 2017
What Apache needs in a Board
The ASF is holding it’s annual member’s meeting soon, where we will elect a new 9-member Board of Directors for a one-year term. Â I’ve been honored with a nomination to run for the board again, as have a number of other excellent Member candidates. Â While I’m writing my nomination statement – my 2016 director statement and earlier ones are posted – I’ve been thinking about what Apache really needs in a board to manage the growth of our projects and to improve our operations.
Behind the scenes at Apache: Corporate Org Chart
This post has been improved and turned into the ASF’s official Corporate Governance Organization Chart overview – please see the new version there!
You probably use contribute to several Apache projects. But do you know what goes on behind the scenes at the ASF? Besides all the work of the 200+ project communities, the ASF has an annual budget of about one $million USD to fund the services our projects use. How we manage providing these services – and governing the corporation behind the projects – continues to change and improve.
Continue reading Behind the scenes at Apache: Corporate Org Chart
Dear Conference Organizers: Improving The Speaker Experience
Juggling several speaking engagements coming up, I’m reminded of how hard the job of conference organizers is.  Having helped to run ApacheCon as part of a volunteer team for years, I know how difficult it is to select talks, wrangle speaker acceptances (and rejections), and ensure your final conference schedule is appealing.  Updating the clunky CFP system and keeping the finicky schedule website updated are two problems that software hasn’t solved yet.
Equally important is how the conference acceptance & organization process works from the speaker’s side. Â Remember? Â Those people who make all the content your conference relies on? Â All those people who you love and appreciate – not that you pay them anything – and who you’ll do anything to fix last-minute problems for? Â While we can’t prevent all the last minute problems, there are a few simple steps to improve the speaker communication process to help prevent problems.
Continue reading Dear Conference Organizers: Improving The Speaker Experience
What is Apache Hadoop? Website Brand Review
Website Brand Review of Apache Hadoop
We’ve all heard of Apache® Hadoop® – well, at least heard of Hadoop, and by now you should realize it’s an Apache project! But when was the last time you took a critical eye to the actual Apache Hadoop project’s homepage?.
Here’s my quick review of the Apache Hadoop project, told purely from the point of view of a new user finding the project website.
What Is Apache Hadoop?
“Apache Hadoop (is) a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models”
“Hadoop is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-availability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-available service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.”
Continue reading What is Apache Hadoop? Website Brand Review
Who’s Who at Apache: Roles and Responsibilities
I’ve turned this post into several pages on the ASF’s official website, including a graphical org chart, and a detailed description of all corporate officers at Apache. See the improved versions there!
There’s a huge amount of volunteer energy that flows around Apache’s Annual Member Meeting every year. Old members and new alike come together and brainstorm all sorts of new ideas, both organizational and technical – and we have plenty of online… discussions, let us say. There is an amazing amount of energy from a lot of very smart people, and when we focus this energy, we make real improvements to the Foundation and sometimes in some of our projects.
As we’ve grown, keeping a full shared understanding of all the details of membership and corporate operations has become much harder. We have some documentation, but we also still have a lot of tribal knowledge and decisions hidden in our mailing list archives. To understand the same things, we need to be able to see what rules or policies we’ve actually decided on – or at least written down.
So here is an overview of all the different roles that people can have with the ASF as either a Foundation or with specific Apache projects. In particular, I’m focusing on the specific agreements we make with individuals, or the explicitly posted policies that we expect people to abide by. For more information on how Apache works, see /dev, /governance, and Community.
Continue reading Who’s Who at Apache: Roles and ResponsibilitiesShane’s Apache Director Position Statement, 2016
The ASF is holding it’s annual Member’s Meeting this week to elect a new board and a number of new Members to the ASF. Â 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.
We are lucky to have both a large involved membership, as well as another excellent slate of candidates including a couple of great new faces. No matter how Apache STeVe ends up computing the results, Apache will have a great board for the year to come.
Please read on for my take on what’s important for the ASF’s future…
Continue reading Shane’s Apache Director Position Statement, 2016
ApacheCon Big Data/Core News Wrapup
Our annual Apache:Big Data and ApacheCon:Core events were held recently at the lovely Corinthia Hotel Budapest, and the content and attendees were amazing. Â The weather was great too, and sightseeing and shopping in Budapest were lovely. Â Attendance was still good even in the face of time-competing software conferences and the local refugee crisis happening in the region.
While they were booked as separate events, many people stayed for the whole week. Â Going forward, we will likely have a single event, but be even clearer with the strength of content in specific track days. Â The broad array of very deep and well-received technical content in the big data space was truly impressive; Apache has over a dozen big data related projects and probably 20 more incoming Incubator podlings, so we certainly have the space covered!
Congratulations to the 2015 Apache Board of Directors
The ASF recently held it’s Annual Member’s Meeting where all Members of the Foundation cast ballots in the annual election for the Board. We are lucky to have had a number of excellent candidates for the board as always.
The new board comprises:
- Rich Bowen
- Shane Curcuru
- Bertrand Delacretaz
- Jim Jagielski
- Chris Mattmann
- David Nalley
- Brett Porter (chairman)
- Sam Ruby
- Greg Stein
I also keep a graphical history of the ASF board. Â The graphic there is a great way to see the slow but steady progress of electing new faces to the board over time. Â Thanks to all the active Members who voted in the elections!
As the ASF grows in projects, communities, and Members, we’re looking forward to continuing to support our now 165+ top level Apache projects going forward!
Note that a number of new Apache Member nominees were also elected; however we don’t share their names until they’ve all been contacted and have accepted the invitation. Â Stay tuned in a month for that announcement from @TheASF.