Incubator PMC report for August 2023

The Apache Incubator is the entry path into the ASF for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the Foundation's efforts. There are presently 24 podlings incubating. This month we were missing a report from Liminal, which was also missed the previous month. There were no graduations and no new proposals to the board for graduation, although a couple were discussed. Tuweni voted to retire, as did DataLab, despite discussing it becoming a TLP the month before. ASF Marketing & Publicity have updated the Podling Publicity/Media Guidelines. The Wayang podling mistakenly made a release without involving the IPMC. None of the mentors signed off the Devlake, NLPCraft, OpenDAL or Streampark reports. There was one IP clearance and podlings executed 8 distinct releases. Discussion on the general list has been chiefly about podling releases.

Community

New IPMC members:

• Matthew de Detrich

People who left the IPMC:

• None

New Podlings

• None

Podlings that failed to report, expected next month

• Liminal

Graduations

• None

The board has motions for the following:

• None

Releases

The following releases entered distribution during the month of July:

• Celeborn 0.3.0
• Devlake 0.17.0
• OpenDAL 0.38.0
• OpenDAL 0.38.1
• Pekko 1.0.0
• Pekko 1.0.1
• Uniffle 0.7.1
• Wayang 0.7.0

IP Clearance

• Pekko HTTP CORS code donation

Legal / Trademarks

• N/A

Infrastructure

• N/A

Miscellaneous

• N/A

Table of Contents

Annotator
Celeborn
DevLake
NLPCraft
OpenDAL
Paimon
PonyMail
SDAP
StreamPark
Toree
Training

Annotator

Annotator provides annotation enabling code for browsers, servers, and humans.

Annotator has been incubating since 2016-08-30.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Grow community.
2. Involve mentors.
3. Release a 1.0

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

We need advice from the IPMC (or our mentors) about our future. There is use of our libraries within various production systems, but community activity (let alone contribution) has not materialized.

How has the community developed since the last report?

Not at all.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Also no real progress.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2022-05-05 - v0.3.0-rc.1

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2022-08-17

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Our mentors have been as quiet as the rest of the project. They have provided help in the past--when requested.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

No known issues.

Signed-off-by:

•  (annotator) Nick Kew
  Comments:
•  (annotator) Tommaso Teofili
  Comments:
•  (annotator) Benjamin Young
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Celeborn

Celeborn is an intermediate data service for big data computing engines to boost performance, stability, and flexibility.

Celeborn has been incubating since 2022-10-18.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Grow the community
2. Release more versions

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

None

How has the community developed since the last report?

1. One new PPMC joined the community.
2. One new committer is proposed and under voting.

How has the project developed since the last report?

1. One new release was published.
2. Important features like supporting Flink, graceful upgrade are GA.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2023-07-27, 0.3.0-incubating was released.

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2023-07-01, Jiashu Xiong was elected as our new PPMC member.

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Our mentors have been very helpful and responsive.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

The VP, Brand has approved the project name.

Signed-off-by:

•  (celeborn) Becket Qin
  Comments: I'm glad to see the new version has been released.
•  (celeborn) Lidong Dai
  Comments:
•  (celeborn) Willem Ning Jiang
  Comments:
•  (celeborn) Duo Zhang
  Comments:
•  (celeborn) Yu Li
  Comments: It's great to see the latest 0.3.0 release supports more computing engine (Apache Flink) thus extends its ecology. New contributors joining also indicates a good growth of the community.

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

DevLake

DevLake is a development data platform, providing the data infrastructure for developer teams to analyze and improve their engineering productivity.

DevLake has been incubating since 2022-04-29.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Grow the community, add committers and PPMC members, and mailing list subscribers.
2. Grow the project, support more data sources and use cases, and improve the user experience.
3. Elect another release manager, now we only have two.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

No issues at the moment.

How has the community developed since the last report?

1. 16 new contributors have joined the community (109 contributors in total)
2. 154 new community members in Slack (756 in total)
3. 2 new committers were elected, and 1 PPMC was elected.
4. Hosted a total of 3 community meetups.

How has the project developed since the last report?

1. Made one new major release v0.17 with no compliance issues, and v0.18 is at the beta testing stage.
2. Supported new data sources such as Azure DevOps and PaterDuty, etc.
3. Re-defined deployments in DevLake and update the algorithm for DORA accordingly.
4. Redesigned user experience for transformation rules in Config UI.
5. Supported the data deletion in v0.18.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2023-07-24

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2023-07-25

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

The mentors helped tremendously throughout version releases and community governance.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

There are no known brand and naming issues.

Signed-off-by:

•  (devlake) Felix Cheung
  Comments:
•  (devlake) Liang Zhang
  Comments:
•  (devlake) Lidong Dai
  Comments:
•  (devlake) Sijie Guo
  Comments:
•  (devlake) Jean-Baptiste Onofré
  Comments:
•  (devlake) Willem Ning Jiang
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

NLPCraft

A Scala API for NLU applications

NLPCraft has been incubating since 2020-02-13.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Community growth.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

None.

How has the community developed since the last report?

We have communicated with developers which have interest to contribute to the project, especially python developers and ML engineers.

How has the project developed since the last report?

• Research related to usage in the project last AI technologies.
• Research related to usage python API to be connected with last AI libraries.
• Site updated, dependencies updated etc .

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2023-02-30

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

August of 2021.

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

No issues with mentors to report.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

No issues with mentors to report.

Signed-off-by:

•  (nlpcraft) Roman Shaposhnik
  Comments:
•  (nlpcraft) Furkan Kamaci
  Comments:
•  (nlpcraft) Evans Ye
  Comments:
•  (nlpcraft) Paul King
  Comments:
•  (nlpcraft) Konstantin I Boudnik
  Comments:
•  (nlpcraft) Dave Fisher
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

OpenDAL

Open Data Access Layer: Access data freely, painlessly, and efficiently.

OpenDAL has been incubating since 2023-02-27.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Higher Quality Release Workflow  
2. Grow the community.  
3. Collect more use cases.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

None.

How has the community developed since the last report?

According to incomplete statistics from GitHub, Opendal currently has 114 contributors and is being used by 205 projects.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Added support for storage services such as tikv, persy and dropbox, as well as language bindings for haskell, zig, lua, etc. In addition, we have also implemented the sink API for cloud storage services.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2023-07-21 v0.38.1

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2023-07-21

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Yes.

Signed-off-by:

•  (opendal) tison
  Comments:
•  (opendal) Willem Ning Jiang
  Comments:
•  (opendal) Sheng Wu
  Comments:
•  (opendal) Ted Liu
  Comments:
•  (opendal) Xiaoqiao He
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Paimon

Paimon is a unified lake storage to build dynamic tables for both stream and batch processing with big data compute engines, supporting high-speed data ingestion and real-time data query.

Paimon has been incubating since 2023-03-12.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1.Paimon Website: release note page, power by page. 2.Release 0.5-incubating. 3.More publicity for the English community

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

• N/A

How has the community developed since the last report?

• Paimon Website: add community page, security page.

How has the project developed since the last report?

• Prepare release 0.5-incubating
• Introduce Tag creation on snapshots
• Paimon Metrics integration to Flink
• Spark integration to write to Paimon with schema evolution.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2023-06-07

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2023-08-01 Chong Zhuang was added as a new committer

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

• Our mentors have been very helpful and responsive.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

• The VP, Brand has approved the project name.

Signed-off-by:

•  (paimon) Becket Qin
  Comments:
•  (paimon) Robert Metzger
  Comments:
•  (paimon) Stephan Ewen
  Comments:
•  (paimon) Yu Li
  Comments: The development activities (code contribution, tech discussion, etc.) are frequent, new contributor / committer keeps joining, and people care about document and website building, all indicate a good community development.

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

PonyMail

Pony Mail is a mail-archiving, archive viewing, and interaction service, that can be integrated with many email platforms.

Pony Mail has been incubating since 2016-05-27.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Growing the community
2. Growing the community
3. Growing the community...

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

No issues other than the perennial lack of new contributors.

How has the community developed since the last report?

No development of note here.

How has the project developed since the last report?

No noteworthy development. Couple of bugfixes.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2019-04-20

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Sean Palmer was elected committer on 2021-04-02

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

No answer.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

No answer.

Signed-off-by:

•  (ponymail) John D. Ament
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

SDAP

SDAP is an integrated data analytics center for Big Earth Science problems.

SDAP has been incubating since 2017-10-22.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Make a third release with new release manager
2. Continue dev discussion thread on graduating

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

None

How has the community developed since the last report?

Discussion and development is active.

Started discussion thread on graduating and working towards third release.

How has the project developed since the last report?

1 issue closed, 13 issues new/updated, 8 PRs merged.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2023-05-16 (Version 1.1.0)

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Jason Kang was added as a committer on 2023-05-22

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes. Our mentor, Julian Hyde, continues to provide guidance in SDAP releases and graduation.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

PPMC is not aware of any issues.

Signed-off-by:

•  (sdap) Julian Hyde
  Comments: I think SDAP is ready to graduate. In my opinion, a third release is not necessary for graduation. The low participation in the graduation discussion is a little concerning, but not unexpected, because SDAP has never been very active on dev@.
•  (sdap) Jörn Rottmann
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

StreamPark

StreamPark is a streaming application development platform.

StreamPark has been incubating since 2022-09-01.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Grow the community
2. Release more versions
3. Develop more contributors

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

None

How has the community developed since the last report?

1. Two new PPMC member join the community
2. Two new committer join the community
3. Four new contributors join the community, total contributors 104

How has the project developed since the last report?

1. New version 2.1.1 released
2. Many bug fixed and Many new features in progress like supporting catalog

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2023-06-30, 2.1.1-incubating was released.

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2023-06-26, Zhou li and Yuepeng Pan was elected as our new committer.

2023-06-27, Muchunjin and Sizhu Wang was elected as our new PPMC member.

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Our mentors have been very helpful and responsive

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Yes, The VP, Brand has approved the project name.

Signed-off-by:

•  (streampark) tison
  Comments:
•  (streampark) Willem Ning Jiang
  Comments:
•  (streampark) Stephan Ewen
  Comments:
•  (streampark) Thomas Weise
  Comments:
•  (streampark) Duo Zhang
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Toree

Toree provides applications with a mechanism to interactively and remotely access Apache Spark.

Toree has been incubating since 2015-12-02.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Increase active contributors

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

None

How has the community developed since the last report?

The community is working on wrapping up support for recent versions of Apache Spark that has moved to use Scala 2.13.

We still see much of the users asking questions in the gitter channel rather than using the mailing lists.

There is also a discussion started around retirement process, and discussion is happening on the dev list.

How has the project developed since the last report?

We need to wrap up the new Toree release supporting Spark with Scala 2.13

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2022-04-11

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Kevin Bates was added to the PPMC on 2019-08-14

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

None

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

No Trademark issues

Signed-off-by:

•  (toree) Luciano Resende
  Comments: With my contributor hat, I am planning to try to move Toree trough graduation on the next couple months
•  (toree) Weiwei Yang
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Training

The Training project aims to develop resources which can be used for training purposes in various media formats, languages and for various Apache and non-Apache target projects.

Training has been incubating since 2019-02-21.

In June 2023, we started adjusting the project goals. Besides a pure focus on content creation tools we have identified the need for two additional aspects:

(1) For ASF processes some documentation exists, e.g. https://community.apache.org/contributor-ladder, but the ASF member journey is still a challenge for many new members, especially those with less coding experience. As a solution it has been suggested to provide training material for the following problems:

• You've just graduated to a TLP. What are the challenges you will now face?
• New committer onboarding
• New PMC member onboarding
• New PMC Chair onboarding
• New board member onboarding

(2) Creation of some general recommendations/guidelines for:

• managing/validation of training material contributions of arbitrary ASF projects has been proposed.

We expand our focus now on the following aspects:

We have to work on strategies to increase the participation and the visibility of the project and its goals.

Besides requests for contributions from individual contributors from other Apache projects we want to show what the Apache Training project can offer to those projects.

We should build on the assumption that synergy and network effects can help us to increase the community around training and skill management topics.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Improve the community participation (other Apache projects should actively be linked to this project, since they "have the content")
2. (Re)define the short-, mid-, and long-term goals of the project.
3. Select an approach to handle non coding / non document related tasks (e.g., community related activities on events)
4. Create a strategy how this projects contributes to or is supported by other Apache projects
5. Create a tutorial on how the tools provided by this project can be used to create own content
6. Review current policies around contribution review and releases to find a pragmatic compromise

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?  

The Training Project needs more contribution from other Apache projects, hence a clear communication strategy for interlinking existing projects with the Apache Training project is needed.

We need feedback from other Apache projects on the presentations and trainings developed till now.

In order to improve this collaboration we suggest to investigate the status of other project’s documentation in a systematic approach, especially with an eye on available training related material.

How has the community developed since the last report?

no changes

How has the project developed since the last report?

Initial discussion regarding usage of content created/delivered by LLMs has been started.

In July, a first documentation inspection and fact extraction tool (Python script) has been provided. A pull request is open: https://github.com/apache/incubator-training/pull/87.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

Initial setup oft he project’s structure: Goals and strategy needs refinement.

Working towards first release: What type of artefacts to release is not clear, due to unclear goals and strategy.

Community building: The community exists of a very small number of people but is more or less invisible, as of today (April 2023).

Nearing graduation: Currently, we are far away from graduation.

Date of last release:

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

November 2020

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Mentors have been responsive and helpful when reached out to.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

The name search process has not yet been started, as there is still time to do that if and when graduation draws nearer.

The PPMC is actively monitoring usage of the Podlings current name on other sites.

The Podling is not directly affiliating with any sponsors donating content and presenting an independent image on the webpage.

Signed-off-by:

•  (training) Craig Russell
  Comments: Happy to see new activity here.
•  (training) Christofer Dutz
  Comments: It seems that finally a bit of life has been coming back to the project, I'll continue my best to help with that staying that way.
•  (training) Justin Mclean
  Comments:
•  (training) Lars Francke
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes: