DRAFT board report included below. Please provide comments/edits. We aim to file the report on August 12th or before. Thanks.
# Apache Community Development — Board Report, August 2026 ## Description: The mission of Community Development is the creation and maintenance of resources, tools, and advice to help ASF Projects grow and retain their project communities. ## Project Status: Current project status: Ongoing with high activity Issues for the board: None ## Membership Data: Apache Community Development was founded 2009-10-31 (17 years ago) There are currently 54 committers and 44 PMC members in this project. Community changes, past quarter: - No new PMC members. Last addition was Jarek Potiuk on 2026-05-01. - No new committers. Last addition was Jarek Potiuk on 2026-05-03. ## Project Activity: ### "Thinking Bigger" Initiative A series of strategic discussions on dev@ titled "Community development — thinking bigger" proposed that ComDev operate more like a department that actively invests in project health and sustainability, rather than relying solely on zero-cost volunteer efforts. This generated multiple follow-on threads covering three proposed work streams: 1. **Project Metrics & Health Dashboard** — A prototype project health dashboard (comdev-metrics) was published, covering git/SVN activity, mailing list traffic, community growth, and release cadence across all ASF projects. Discussion on dev@ explored making this an official ComDev service, potentially hosted at projects.apache.org/metrics. 2. **Project Ambassadors** — A proposal to identify de-facto community managers/organizers within each ASF project and bring them together as Project Ambassadors for cross-project collaboration, shared resources, and regular office hours. 3. **Project Health & Outreach** — Early warning systems for at-risk projects, proactive outreach, and new contributor workshops in partnership with universities. ### Google Summer of Code GSoC 2026 continues. The GSOC JIRA project received its first GSoC 2027 proposal (Maven 4 build-aware dependency tracking from Romain Manni-Bucau), indicating early preparation for the next cycle. The dev@ list fielded GSoC participation inquiries from prospective students. ### PonyMail MCP Server Active development continued on the PonyMail MCP (Model Context Protocol) server hosted in the comdev repository. Jarek Potiuk contributed API token authentication with scopes (#312), dark-mode UI fixes, and various improvements. Updates were merged for hono and body-parser. ### Events Site (events.apache.org) The events site saw contributions including a hackathon poster and PR activity around calendar preview features. ### Website Monthly community activity blog posts continued to be published on community.apache.org. The website continues to serve as the primary resource for new contributor guidance and project best practices. ## Community Health: The dev@ mailing list saw 91 messages across 37 threads in June–July 2026, with contributions from 15+ unique individuals. This represents sustained high activity compared to prior quarters. The commits@ list recorded 194 messages, reflecting active automated infrastructure (reporter.apache.org release tracking, projects.apache.org metadata updates) as well as human commits to the website and comdev repositories. The project continues to attract contributors interested in tooling and developer infrastructure. ## Releases: Community Development is a non-releasing project. Its output is services, tools, and documentation rather than versioned software releases. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
