Research Information Portal¶

As one of the largest hosts for open source projects, there is a wide array of academic researchers interested in studying communities at the ASF. To ensure that our communities are respected, and to make it easier for researchers to find the right information, our volunteers maintain this research information portal.

About The ASF And Our Communities¶

The Apache Software Foundation ("ASF") is based in the United States and is recognized as a 501C3 non-profit charity creating software for the public good. We do this by providing services and support for many software project communities who choose to join the ASF. Thus the ASF is a very broad set of loosely-connected communities, each with their own independence, but following core policies required by the ASF board. A key feature of ASF project governance is independence from corporate or outside control.

• See the governance and org chart of the ASF's corporate entity.
• The Apache Way is our set of behaviors for community-led projects.
• We work on many publicly archived mailing lists for the 100's of ASF projects.
• All ASF code is free to use and provided under our Apache-2.0 license, and we have a license FAQ.
• We publish Board of Directors minutes as well as corporate public records.
• The ASF infrastructure team can only answer questions about the ASF's own officially provided services.

Codes Of Conduct And Communication Etiquette¶

Please review the ASF's Code of Conduct before working in any ASF hosted spaces or communities. The ASF's CoC is derived from a number of other popular open source project codes, and works to ensure all participants can contribute freely and comfortably in ASF spaces. Any serious CoC violations should be reported to one of our volunteer contacts.

ASF Conferences have their own extended Anti-Harassment policy, covering in-person or synchronous online events.

Virtually all communication at the ASF is expected to be on our publicly archived mailing lists. We have general email etiquette guidelines and tips on how to use our mailing lists.

Best Practices For Research¶

The ASF expects academic researchers to adhere to their organization's policies for any research. To ensure research efforts don't negatively impact our communities, please also understand our best practices.

• Communicate on mailing lists, not with individuals. While you may rarely need to contact a specific individual, most communications should be sent to our mailing lists. Response times will vary depending on the community; please remember we are all volunteers.
• Technical questions about ASF projects should always be addressed to that project's dev@ mailing list.
• The ASF does not generally partner, co-sign, or otherwise directly associate with other organizations or research efforts.
• Ensure any bots, scraping, or other automated systems respect ASF server capacity, timeouts, and service intervals. Excessive automated hits on ASF infrastructure may result in a ban.
• Research on code, version history, tooling, or any other technical products of the ASF must respect the license of any resources used.
• Research on our publicly archived mailing lists is permitted; the Apache Pony Mail project provides an API; be sure to use smart rate limits.
• The Apache Kibble project provides data and metrics about ASF community engagement. Instead of mining your own, maybe consider reusing this dataset.
• Please check with each individual ASF project community before sending general surveys.
• Do not use aggregated personal or work email addresses from our archived lists for communicating with individuals. Social network analysis may use individual email addresses for analysis, but not for directly emailing individuals.

Contact Us¶

If you are an academic researcher and can't find the right place to ask questions about the ASF, we have two volunteers who can help direct you to the correct place to ask. Please be sure to include your specific question, as well as where else you've looked for answers on ASF websites, so we can improve our documentation for the future. Please be patient; we are all volunteers!

• Shane Curcuru: email curcuru at apache.org
• Justin McLean: email jmclean at apache.org