Team, Here is the board report I've submitted for the July meeting.
Thanks as always for the great progress! ## Description: The mission of NiFi is the creation and maintenance of software related to providing an easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. Apache NiFi MiNiFi is an edge data collection agent built to seamlessly integrate with and leverage the command and control of NiFi. There are both Java and C++ implementations. Apache NiFi Registry is a centralized registry for key configuration items including flow versions, assets, and extensions for Apache NiFi and Apache MiNiFi. Apache NiFi Nar Maven Plugin is a release artifact used for supporting the NiFi classloader isolation model. Apache NiFi Flow Design System is a theme-able set of high quality UI components and utilities for use across the various Apache NiFi web applications in order to provide a more consistent user experience. ## Issues: There are no issues requiring board attention at this time. With the last board report JM asked if there was anything we can do to ensure we don't have many threads go unanswered on our dev list. In reviewing threads that appear to have zero replies and thinking of what we've seen over time the following patterns are observed: 1. Users asking for help on dev list. We try to be specific for mailing list purpose. We redirect to users usually. 2. Many of these types of dead-end threads end up getting asked on numerous channels at once including stackoverflow, twitter, slack, both mailing lists. 3. Many conversations occur over multiple channels including mailing list, slack, JIRA and there is generally very little traceability across them. For a specific example of this pattern here is someone wanting to contribute. They filed a PR and want engagement on it. https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rc7b1d28ab 43567f21818dd1258650e4d236094dc9166598b950bcc27%40%3Cdev.nifi.apache.org %3E Indeed though the mailing list thread looks unreplied but in reality there has been vibrant discussion on the PR as seen here https://github.com/apache/nifi/pull/3543 A few threads might genuinely slip through the cracks but they're the exception. No specific action appears needed at this time. ## Membership Data: Apache NiFi was founded 2015-07-14 (5 years ago) There are currently 47 committers and 32 PMC members in this project. The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 3:2. Community changes, past quarter: - Arpad Boda was added to the PMC on 2020-05-24 - Andrew M. Lim was added to the PMC on 2020-05-24 - No new committers. Last addition was Peter Turcsanyi on 2019-10-25. Discussion is underway for voting in a new committer at the time of writing this board report. ## Project Activity: Apache NiFi Registry 0.6.0 we released in April containing security and bug fixes and minor features. Since the release of Apache NiFi 1.11.4 in late March the community has continued aggressively working toward Apache NiFi 1.12.0. There are already 240 fixes, improvements and features in this release and again it is shaping up as another high impact release. There have been considerable improvements to the many Public Cloud provider integrations. There have not been any Apache NiFi MiNiFi Java releases in some time. What is happening now is https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MINIFI-422 which will merge MiNiFi Java back into NiFi as a headless form of NiFi supporting both broad use case patterns well and reduce the release/codebase burden. Apache NiFi MiNiFi CPP 0.8.0 is in progress with over 76 issues resolved. ## Community Health: Mailing list activity overall seems to have leveled off. In the previous reporting period for the mailing lists we saw an increase and in the one prior a decrease. In this period we see a significant decrease in dev threads with a slight increase in users list. However, and as we noted previously the activity and growth seems to have moved heavily to the Apache NiFi slack channels. In the past many quarters we've reported 394, 523, 707, 895, and now 1071 persistent users in our general slack channel. So while the mailing list activity looks leveled or possibly declined we're seeing dramatically higher engagement on slack. The nice thing we're seeing there is more people engaging who do not have committer status that normally might not say much on email but now willing to engage in slack. Just a more comfortable communication mechanism for some it appears. Activity on twitter, stackoverflow, youtube, blogs remains impressive. Community activity level as measured in overall commits has regressed a bit this quarter versus last but that is pretty clearly related to release pushes. We see roughly the same number of unique authors. As we push to NiFi 1.12.0 I'd expect a rise again. Keeping up with the review/merge of pull requests remains a challenge. We're reviewing and merging at an overall impressive rate but it remains difficult to close the gap. We're likely to setup an auto-close based on age mechanism. The fundamental challenge is it is easier for new contributors to put up a PR that fixes some issue they have than it appears to be for those same types of folks to engage in reviewing and testing others PRs. Indeed that part while critical for the community is less exciting/interesting. The delta in opened versus closed this quarter was just 25 commits but add that up quarter over quarter and we end up with quite a backlog. We've done well with both PMC and committer pipeline and as noted above we anticipate a new committer being named very soon.
