Tag: board

Maintaining ASF Project Independence

A key differentiator of the Apache Way versus other Foundations is our project independence from vendor control. Users can trust that projects adopted by the ASF will be governed long-term for the benefit of the whole contributor community. ASF projects are also immune from licensing changes away from open source licenses, since the ASF only ever uses the Apache-2.0 license. Even in the case of projects that get deprecated or lose sufficient community to maintain the code, the ASF ensures that all project resources will remain read-only in the Apache Attic forever.

A key question then is, how does the ASF ensure project independence? While independent governance isn’t an issue for many projects, the ASF has certainly had it’s share of projects built in fast-moving commercially successful technology areas. As companies change direction, build up marketing campaigns, and buyout competitors, their messaging has sometimes been seen as being a controlling force around core techologies – including, sometimes, ASF projects.

The ASF has several of methods to ensure independent governance in our projects, even in the face of extreme vendor pressures. While governance changes often take time in broad-based communities, these three pillars are the building blocks of the ASF’s independent ethos – and serve as a backstop to all Apache projects. I wrote about these three pillars for a recent ASF board meeting, lightly edited here.

Three Pillars Of Independence At Apache

1. The ASF Membership

Our hundreds of ASF Members are individuals (never corporations) from around the world and from all walks of life. Members are nominated privately within the existing Membership and elected annually by other individual members. Nominations and elections are based on their positive contributions to ASF projects, and their willingness to promote the public good when making decisions for their projects. A nominee’s employment or contributions outside the ASF are not a factor in electing new Members.

These hundreds of Members provide a technical and community mentoring
backbone to all of our projects, as well as a focus on our mission for
the public good. Many Members continue to volunteer across multiple ASF projects, and across various employers during their careers. Since Membership is permanent, a key cadre of Members from the first 10 years of the ASF’s history are still involved with governance and mentoring, providing a rich and fiercely independent culture.

2. Apache Project Trademarks

The ASF owns all trademarks on behalf of our project communities. The Apache brand benefits our projects and the ASF as a whole, given our strong brand recognition for independent and welcoming communities building software openly. Potential contributors know what to expect from any Apache project, and that with their contributions to the project, they’ll have a fair chance at being elected to a project’s PMC to help govern that project in the future.

Protecting the Apache brand – and the brands of all Apache projects – is a key focus of the ASF as a whole. Since the ASF as a nonprofit owns all trademarks of our projects, we have the ability to ensure that users always know where to get official Apache software products. While users are welcome to fork our code – it’s under Apache-2.0 as always – they may not fork our trademarks.

3. The Apache Board

The nine member ASF Board is elected annually from within the ASF Membership. Board elections are competitive and are based on individual Directors’ contributions to the ASF as a whole, not for outside activities and never for commercial affiliations. Since Board elections are private within the Membership, there is no chance for commercial interests outside the ASF to influence our annual Board elections, or the independent culture that our Board holds dear.

Every ASF project reports directly to the ASF board on a quarterly basis. Directors read all reports, and may have comments or suggestions for project governance when they are needed. This regular contact between projects and the board ensures that project governance is always at top of mind.

From time to time some commercial vendors have abused the ASF’s trademarks and goodwill for a vendor’s sole benefit, at a cost to the community as a whole. At other times, vendors have worked to bend project governance for their own benefit, either by hiring project contributors or by having their employees who are contributors unduly influence project direction.

In each of these cases, the independent ASF Board serves as a backstop to ensure projects are governed for the public good. While the board doesn’t make technical changes in projects (that would be silly, anyway), the board maintains Project Management Committee membership lists, and in rare cases can make corrections when needed. Similarly, the board and VP, Brand Management work to ensure that Apache trademarks are respected and reserved for the actual project communities that have done the work, not associated vendors.

The Board and our many volunteer officers’ efforts to preserve project
independence are not always visible publicly, but rest assured: Apache
projects are governed for the public good. While governance mentoring and corrections sometimes take time, the ASF board will always be here to ensure all our projects are truly working for the public good.

Shane’s Director Position Statement 2024

I’ve written many times on how the ASF board works in my past 10+ years of service. My objective now is: simplifying and improving our governance culture, so that when the next generation takes over, they will be able to scale the ASF in a way we will all still recognize for the next 50 years.

There are two aspects I will focus on in the coming year to improve this:

  1. Making our documentation easier to read, and our processes simpler to follow for all of our communities, especially newcomers (contributors, podlings, potential Incubator donors, anyone).
  2. Ensuring rules and best practices are clear enough – with explanations of “why” behind every rule or practice! – so that it’s simpler for our PMCs and the board to keep helping our projects grow in the Apache Way.

Our membership is an amazing resource: passionate, focused on building community-driven projects, and active in advocating our community norms in the broader ecosystem. This outreach and mentoring by members is it’s own public good, above and beyond the software our Apache projects produce. But culturally, it feels like we are doing this individually, not as a truly coherent and organized community. It’s no wonder why some projects come through the Incubator with slightly different ideas of how to work, either from different mentoring perspectives, or hard-to-understand processes.

If we objectively view our how-to documentation and compare it to other foundations out there, we generally come off the poorer, both in graphic design and in readabilty to the newcomer. While some of us have spent immense effort in building up our published docs over the years, the end result has often been inconsistent in the whole. Historically, we tend to work on docs (or information architecture!) as individuals or small ad hoc groups, not true communities that are focused on continuing to maintain systems. That’s why I love Rich’s Working Groups concept over in ComDev: working to foster a specific communities working as a group on documentation and other improvements.

The above will be my main focus – along with everything else the board does, of course:

  • Reviewing and mentoring PMCs, with a particular focus on keeping feedback much more focused, actionable, and friendly.
  • Approving our budget, keeping the organizational lights on, appointing officers, and working on finding the next generation of officers and directors for our future.
  • Understanding the larger landscape we live in, like finding a VP, Public Affairs to track potential legislation in the US now that CRA/PLD are in progress.
  • Pushing us to invest – with budget/staff or focused calls for volunteers – in our public presence, to ensure that when we attract projects and contributors, they have an easy time building healthy self-governing communities.
  • Signposting our long-term strategy for the ASF as a whole. While we’re here to give a long-term home to our project communities (who build our software), the board also needs to help focus some of our individual volunteer energy into specific areas and collaborative working groups.
  • Working with VP, Brand Management to see if what further improvements we can make either detecting trademark issues, and in dealing with potential infringements politely, quickly, and in ways that protect our reputation, and make it simple for third parties to understand what’s appropriate.
  • Working with the Incubator to improve the experience. This includes both making it easier for newcomers to understand how the Incubator works, and to improve outcomes, so we have a better shared understanding of how ASF projects work with all of our newly graduated TLPs.

On some personal notes, I will have more time for ASF work in the coming year; last year brought unusual $real-life time challenges for me. I am retired, and have never let employment or personal income sources influence my decisions about what’s best for the ASF. I volunteer at the ASF because this is the most efficient and enjoyable way that I can donate my time for the public good. I truly believe that part of the public good we do is by our example of community-led collaborative projects, along with our software.

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.
Continue reading Shane’s Director Position Statement 2020

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.

Continue reading Shane’s Director Position Statement 2019

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!

Continue reading The board member experience at Apache

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!).

Continue reading How Apache Directors Run ASF Board Meetings

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!).

Continue reading Where Is The ASF Going? Director Q&A

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.

Continue reading Shane’s Director Position Statement 2018

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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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.  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