On Tue Ross Gardler <rgard...@apache.org> wrote: > I'll action the necessary "paperwork" ASAP. In the meantime, welcome > and thanks for your support.
Thanks for the warm welcome. Over at Lucene we have the tradition of new committers introducing themselves briefly. As comdev is still very young and I joined only recently, I'd like to start with myself, hoping for others to maybe join in: After studying computer science at the small university of applied sciences Mittweida, I was working for HU Berlin in 2003. One year later I started using nutch, back then still a project hosted on sourceforge. At about that time I got adicted to doing open source work: I joined Google for an internship in 2005, continued working with nutch, Lucene and friends after that. In summer 2007 the idea of Apache Mahout, a project focused on natural language processing, machine learning, data mining at large scale was born. After getting people from industry, open source and academia interested very quickly the project was founded as a sub project of Lucene in 2008. Since my involvement in Apache somehow happened to steadily grow bigger and bigger - no idea, how on earth this could happen ;) Today, I am organizing the Apache Hadoop Get Together in Berlin on a regular basis, I got a NoSQL meetup started together with Jan Lehnardt over at CouchDB, I try to get people interested in Mahout both by a) contributing to discussions on its mailing lists. b) contributing code c) talking to people about the project at various conferences, university groups, meetups, user groups to the extend that people close to me have started asking me whether there is anything else apart from Hadoop and Lucene I am interested in ;) Together with a research group at TU Berlin I have started an experimental course with the goal of working with Mahout, developing extensions and get them back into the project. Really curious what the final results will be. So far, I have seen at least two students on Mahout, Hadoop and HBase mailing lists. If you want to follow us: http://www.github.com/MaineC/Playground is the project used for organizing the course. I am looking forward to helping lower the bar for newcomers to get into Apache projects and learning what other Apache projects do to extend their community and keep it healthy. Isabel