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
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.
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
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
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.
We are lucky to have a large roster of excellent director candidates, so no matter how the election turns out we’ll have a stellar board. Given the wide variety of opinions in our candidates, I urge all Apache members to set aside the time this week to carefully consider all the board candidates, as well as all the great new Member nominees.  Please vote – and if you’re not free this week, be sure to assign your proxy for the meeting attendance: I and several other Members are happy to proxy for you.
Please read on for my take on what’s important for the ASF’s future…
Continue reading Shane’s Apache Director Position Statement 2015
You know what’s even better than using Hadoop? Using Apache Hadoop!
Even better is Apache Ambari to manage your Apache Cassandra data store through Apache Hive with Apache Pig to make it simpler to write Apache Spark compute flows… Or, if you want it assembled for you, just grab the latest Apache BigTop, which already includes a bunch of Apache Hadoop related packages all together.
How can we do a better job of getting at least a single “Apache Hadoop” into some of the many media stories about Hadoop these days? It’s great that all these vendors are making great technology and projects that power big data, but with all their success and fancy marketing campaigns, you’d think we could get just a tiny bit of credit in the popular press with the actual committers on the core Apache Hadoop project itself. Or any of the other Apache project technologies that these vendors, other software companies – and just about every other company too – rely on every day to help make their websites work.
Would it hurt marketers and journalists and bloggers to throw in just one extra “Apache” before talking about the many free Apache software products that help power more than half the internet?
The ASF and Apache projects give away a tremendous amount of technology every day under our permissive Apache license – always for free. All we ask is respect for our trademarks, and a little bit of credit for the many volunteer communities that build Apache software.
P.S. Apache projects love to get more code, documentation, testing, and other contributions too! And the ASF has a Sponsorship program.
But what we we really want is what every human wants: just a little love. Just an extra Apache here and there makes us feel better.
Thanks!
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:
I also keep a graphical history of the ASF board.
As the ASF grows in projects, communities, and Members, we’re looking forward to continuing to support our now 151 top level Apache projects going forward!
The ASF is holding it’s Annual Member’s Meeting next week, where the Membership elects a new board of directors along with other matters, like voting in new Member candidates. Director candidates write position statements about what their objectives for being a director are in preparation for the Apache board election process. One of the biggest issues for the smooth functioning of the ASF as a home for healthy projects is better explaining how Apache works – so here is my Director Position Statement. You can also read my statement last year and the previous year.
I’ve also written an Apache corporate governance overview as well as posted an ASF contributor timeplot and history of past boards.
Over the past couple of years, the ASF has grown to a point where we can no longer efficiently continue to govern, manage, and execute the various operational aspects of the Foundation in support of our nearly 200 project & podling communities with only unpaid volunteers. We need a board that can maintain our fiercely vendor-neutral governance while also expanding and improving the services that we offer to all Apache projects, and this will require finding ways to increase our paid staff [1].
While the volunteer membership has been amazing throughout our history in helping with governance, mentoring, incubation, and all other aspects of operations, we simply don’t have enough members with time reliably available to provide this level of operational support. With 150+ separate Apache top level projects – each with its own technology, individual community history, and sometimes urgent pace of development — the overall cohesion that marked the earlier years of the Apache organization has been jeopardized. It’s clear from recent requests and issues that we are not providing the level of support – infra, brand/press, fundraising, and community mentoring – that many of our projects expect and require.
With the growth in key project technologies that affect the larger world, we also have a corresponding higher level of expectations from stakeholders outside of the ASF volunteer community. Our sponsors – when we do talk to them about their sponsorships – want us to be more visible in the open source space and show more support to our projects. The many vendors whose employees work on our projects similarly want to be more involved with donations, servers, events, or branding efforts around our projects. Ensuring that this external energy is focused on the Apache project in ways that maintain an independent project governance is critical to the success of both our projects and to the ASF itself.
We need to provide a better API between individual project communities and our service providers (infra, press, brand, legal, fundraising) at the Foundation level. We need to ensure that projects are aware of the services we can provide to support their operations, and make it simple for them to utilize those services. Clear expectations should be set for the level of services that the ASF will provide, as well as governance assistance for those projects that will continue to use external service providers (eg, various marketing@ efforts and many projects’ externally run build/CI/test farms).
To meet the current services needs, and to support increased quality in our governance and operations, the ASF will need to increase our number of paid staff [1]. We need motivated, experienced, and trusted individuals who have the paid time to address the ever-expanding needs of the Foundation, and who can dedicate themselves and their time at a level that is not possible for an unpaid volunteer.
It is also essential that we scale our management and oversight ability of these services and of staff without losing our soul: without compromising our historically independent and volunteer board and governance structures. I don’t know exactly what this path will be: that will be for the next board to decide. But I do believe we are underserving many of the projects at Apache today, and we have no end in sight of new podlings hoping to join us.
If you also believe we need to better provide for the many Apache project communities that trust us to be their home, I hope you’ll cast your first vote for me. Thanks!
Committer since November 1999, Member since 2002, VP Brand Management since 2009.
I am employed by IBM in the HR division as an Applications Architect. My employment and income have been unrelated to my work at the ASF for many years, and I will always clearly separate volunteer work from employer-funded work.
My involvement in the ASF is driven by a belief in, and a love of, the ASF, and is not influenced by politics or finances. I live in Massachusetts with my wife, young daughter, and 2 cats. I view directorships and officer positions at the ASF as serious commitments.
I will attend every board meeting if re-elected.
[1] NOTE: How we pay for staff is equally important: at this point in the ASF’s history, I imagine either independent contractors as infra operates currently, or using the services of our new accounting firm Virtual, Inc. for some sort of co-employment arrangement, to reduce risk to the ASF.
When push comes to shove and full consensus on governance matters at the ASF or at Apache projects isn’t easily found, it’s important to consider what our underlying objectives are. The mission of the ASF is to produce software for the public good. That’s a good start, but like many concise mission statements, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
There are several aspects of how we expect Apache projects to work that we believe are critical to our mission’s success and longevity. These include things like The Apache Way of: volunteer and collaborative led community built software projects; using the permissive Apache license; and having a consistent and stable brand, infrastructure services, and home for all Apache projects.
Continue reading Apache Governance – Projects FirstThe ASF recently held it’s Annual Member’s Meeting where all Members of the Foundation cast ballots in the annual election for the Board. I was lucky enough to be elected, so I will be returning to the board, along with new first time Director Chris Mattmann. Everyone also thanked our two outgoing Directors, Rich Bowen and Ross Gardler.
The new board comprises:
I also keep a graphical history of the Apache board.
