Tag: asfboard

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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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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How Apache Directors Run ASF Board Meetings

I was recently fortunate enough to be re-elected to the ASF’s Board of Directors – along 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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Where Is The ASF Going? Director Q&A

With Apache board elections coming up soon, an ASF Member came up with a great set of questions for all director candidates. With permission, I’m sharing those questions here, and providing my answers as well.

I’ve also posted my own Director Position Statement for this year (and past years!).

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Shane’s Director Position Statement 2018

The ASF is holding its annual Member’s Meeting next week to elect a new board and a number of 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 – including my 2017 board statement.

Please read on for my take on what’s important for the ASF’s future – or see my Q&A about where Apache is heading.

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Improving the Apache Member’s Meeting Experience, Part 2

Our annual Member’s Meeting for the ASF went well, resulting in some new members getting elected as well as two new directors being elected to the board. While we wait for a bit of paperwork to get filed, let’s document what needs to happen after a Member’s Meeting at Apache.

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Improving the Apache Member’s Meeting Experience, Part 1

The ASF is a membership corporation and holds an Annual Member’s Meeting every year to elect the board and nominate/elect new members.  As a volunteer-run software organization, we run this process by – wait for it – by emailing around a set of cryptically formatted text files from our private Subversion repository.  Of course, as (mostly) software people, we could make it easier on ourselves… with better software.  Shoemaker’s children, indeed.

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Vote Counting At The Apache Member’s Meeting!

The ASF is holding it’s annual Member’s meeting now, where Members get to elect a new board as well as elect new individual Members to the Foundation.  We do this by holding a live IRC meeting on a Tuesday, then we vote with secure email ballots asynchronously during the recess, then reconvene on Thursday to announce results.  But how does the meeting really work?

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What Apache Also Needs In A Board

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.

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