Welcome to our monthly blog update about what is happening in Apache Community Development (ComDev)!

This month we have news about attending the FOSS Backstage Micro Summit, we share some interviews from the Prague Open Source Summit, we revitalise our Jira issue tracker, we welcome a new PMC Chair, we translate our ASF brochure into more languages, we prepare for FOSDEM and a for a half day track at the Open Source Summit in Paris, and we look at introducing Apache Community Business Cards.

FOSS Backstage Micro Summit

The schedule for FOSS Backstage Micro Summit, which takes place in Berlin on November 20th, has been announced and focuses on community, governance and the legal aspects around open source. Several speakers from Apache have been selected to present. Full details of the program can be found at the following link:

FOSS Backstage Program

Attendance at the conference is free but organisers have requested that you register so that they know how many people to expect. You can register for the event at

FOSS Backstage Registration

Open Source Summit Europe

It was great to meet people and talk about Apache and other related topics at the Open Source Summit in Prague in October. Although we did not have a booth at this event, there were several Apache related presentations including a keynote from Neha Narkhede about Apache Kafka,

Other talks included Rich Bowen's presentation about why mentoring is so important, Piergiorgio Lucidi's talk on the incubation process for Apache ManifoldCF and Sharan Foga's presentation of the ASF Committer Diversity Survey at the Diversity Empowerment Summit.

We also managed to record some interviews for our podcast channel FeatherCast and you can find details of the interviews below

This was a great event to attend and meet others in the open source world.

MesosCon Europe

The Apache Mesos community were happy to have an Apache presence with a booth and also a keynote presentation from Rich Bowen. Feedback on the keynote was very positive and many people were interested to learn about the Foundation itself and Apache as the work it does to support its projects.

Quite a few people stopped by our booth to collect stickers and talk to us not only about Mesos but other Apache projects that they used or were familiar with. We also received several enquiries about future ApacheCons. Rich took a short video of us all on duty at the Apache booth:

Apache Booth Duty

Thank you to everyone that helped out on booth duty or supported us at the event especially to the Apache Mesos community for inviting us.

Comdev Jira

Community Development has a Jira instance that we use to track tasks and issues. Over the last few months it hasn't been fully utlised so we have decided to revitalise it and start using it again to help us manage things we are working on. Some initial cleanup of old and existing tasks is needed and this is currently in progress.

Those of you subscribed to our dev mailing list may have noticed the that the Jira notifications are now appearing there when an issue or task is updated. This has been done to enable better communication so that everyone can see the progress on any specific task. So far this has been been successful and people who see a task that they can help with are volunteering to make a contribution.

If you would like to see if you can help us with any of our open issues and tasks then please take a look at our Jira list

Comdev Jira Issues / Task List

ASF Brochures

An ASF brochure was put together for the OpenExpo in Spain earlier this year and was available in English and Spanish. A German language version was later created for our participation at the Solutions Hamburg conference. With the help of our contributors the brochure has now been translated into several other languages including Italian, Catalan, French, Russian, Japanese and we have a Chinese translation on the way.

These brochures are available for anyone running or attending an event that need to information about the ASF for attendees. People can download and print the details they need.

You can find the brochure in the various translations can be found on the Wiki at the link below:

ASF Information Brochures

We are still looking for volunteers to if you would like to help translate the brochure into yet another language then please contact us.

Open Source Summit Paris

The Open Source Summit in Paris is planned for 6th and 7th December and we have been given a booth. . The event schedule has a mix of French and English speaking presentations and we have recruited some French speaking volunteers to help out on our booth.

We have also been given a half day track and the details are as follows:

  • Asynchronous Decision Making - why and how - Bertrand Delacretaz
  • IoT using Apache Spark and Apache Bahir - Luciano Resende
  • Apache Spatial Information System (SIS) + Geospatial Standards - Martin Desruisseaux
  • Apache Beam: Portable and efficient data-intensive processing - Ismaël Mejía
  • DevOps for Apache OFBiz using Jenkins and Selenium - Olivier Heinz

and we also a keynote slot that will be presented by Bertrand Delacretaz.

This is a new event for us and it is great that we have some talks on the schedule. We are looking forward to being there and talking to attendees about Apache. The conference is completely free to attend but you do need to register on the conference website. More information can be found at: www.opensourcesummit.paris

FOSDEM

We have requested an Apache booth for next year's FOSDEM conference in Brussels. The decisions will be announced in late November so we are hoping that we will be allocated a place.

Based on feedback from the community, we put together a FOSDEM devroom proposal but unfortunately it was unsuccessful. However FOSDEM will have a Community Devroom again next year so we are encouraging people to make submissions to this devroom on any community related topic. You can find details of the CFP and how to submit a talk proposal at the following link:

CFP for FOSDEM Community Devroom

Deadlines for submissions is 27th November 2017 so if you are interested in presenting, then please get your proposals in now.

New PMC Chair

We have decided to rotate our PMC Chair. Uli Stark has held the role for a while and it is general practice for projects to rotate the role within the PMC. Sharan Foga has now been appointed the new PMC Chair for Community Development.Many thanks to Uli for all his hard work and effort as VP ComDev over the last few years and also congratulations to Sharan on her new role.

Apache Community Business Cards

This month we started a discussion about the introduction of Apache Community business cards. The idea is that people could have Apache style business cards that could be given out to people. For example, if you are at an event representing your Apache role or project or if you are volunteering at the ASF booth and want to give your contact Apache details to someone you have been speaking to.

Individuals (not the ASF) would be responsible for the cost of printing their own cards. The two suggested card formats are now on the Comdev wiki and we will be promoting their use to committers and projects.

Contacting Community Development

Remember that we are always happy to get your feedback and comments so please feel free to contact us, follow our events and participate in our discussions on our mailing list. If you would like to be kept up to date with all the latest news about what is happening in Community Development then please subscribe to our mailing list by sending an email to dev-subscribe AT community DOT apache DOT org.