Apache Board of Directors - a retrospective #

Last term I had the honour of serving on the ASF board of directors, better explained in context of the ASF governance structure. As quite a few directors (myself included) declined to run for the board this year again, I thought it would be a good idea to think about the past term, write that down and publish those thoughts. As I wanted to give every board member a chance to respond, I shared some guiding questions but left it to board members to choose the channel they deemed most appropriate to share their responses on.

So far, two decided to make their answers publicly available:

• The board member experience at Apache by Shane Curcuru
• Reflections on the ASF board, and advise to new directors by Rich Bowen

When posting the questions, I intented to share my own answers as well - but refrain from publishing them for as long as possible to not influence others. So here we go:

For a bit of context where I’m coming from: When I was first nominated for board I didn’t see that nomination coming at all. This was back in 2016. I did accept, I was voted in. Back then I was still in a technical role, even though what I had been doing in various teams and open source projects was much more on the leadership and management side oftentimes. As a matter of fact, after that one year it was time to make a shift in roles in my dayjob as well.

I took a one year break in 2017, was elected as board member again in 2018. Seems like twelve months is just about the timeframe that works for me - maybe some of the answers below will explain why that is the case.

Which areas were a lot of fun for you?

Which parts were particularly educational for you?

• The way the Apache board runs board meetings with several dozen agenda points in very well under two hours by moving as many decisions to asynchronous channels as possible. This makes it possible to participate from many more time zones than I have seen at any other organisation. It also means that people don't have to align on when everyone has time to participate in the meeting and can do most of the discussion and decision work whenever they happen to have time for it spread out over many days. On the flip side this means the entire process feels like it's slowed down a lot - except it wouldn't be possible any other way as those know who have tried to get all nine directors in one room at one date at one time during that day.
• I had no idea how budgeting is done at the ASF's scale before being part of that discussion. I was very glad to know that there are other directors who have experience with that topic.
• In every board meeting we go over project board reports: Everytime there are some where I'm like: "You should totally talk about what you're doing there to a wider audience than just your project." - it's great when that advise is actually followed up on - it's even better as so far everytime such learnings were written down behind a stable URL, that URL became very popular as a reference for other going forward.

Are there any parts of being a board member that you could imagine helping with even after stepping down?

Which areas were particularly time costly for you?

We have well over 200 projects. Each is required to submit a board report on a quarterly basis. While most aren’t particularly long, the content does add up. While in theory, checking private lists, following a few discussions and listening to project contributors (be they users, contributors, committers or pmc members) would be needed to spot governance issues early, the current number of projects to check for each shepherd means that issues will be discovered too late for precise, scalpel like patches. Somehow that entire process is something that in my opinion could benefit from a better collective understanding of what constitutes a healthy projects, including an understanding of just how much freedom there is in configuring your project governance best practices.

Maybe the Apache maturity model would be a good starting point for spotting best practices. Maybe it would be helpful to also come up with project anti patterns to watch out for to take the guess-work out of the process of writing a board report.

Which areas were energy costly for you - didn't necessarily take a lot of time but were definitely not fun to deal with?

There’s just one example that’s standing out for this one: Occasions where the board needed to delegate tasks to a new role. The main reason here was that typically the discussions quickly dissolved into mixing role name, role accountabilities, person to fill the role and budget for the role all into one discussion.

While for the final result all four perspectives need to come together, in my experience, it helps to first think about the actual accountabilities that should be delegated. Only after that look for a name that fits, otherwise people will associate accountabilities because of the name, believe that those accountabiities aren’t needed and reject the need for the role entirely.

Only after having exact accountabilities start discussing budget - it’s much easier to talk about money, once it’s clear exactly what the purpose looks like that the money is going to be spent on. Once that is out of the way, start looking for a human to fill the role. Even if there is an obvious choice popping up, make your need for that role to be filled known and go looking for volunteers. You’d be surprised to hear how many new faces we’ve seen speak up and get active - lowering the load on any usual suspects.

"I wish I had known this before joining the board"

In your opinion - what are the strengths of the ASF board?

• They have developed an awesome model of collaboration with an asynchronous decision making process that does scale.
• The people I had the honour to serve with remained human beings, including the humor and including their private family background.
• The ones I have seen serve in their individual capacity leaving corporate interests at the door - or announcing when discussions are started because of what they observed at dayjob.
• They bring a ton of experience from all sorts of backgrounds - both, culturally but also in terms of which companies they've seen from the inside - trying to learn from all of that experience to build a better world that is much more flexible and light weight than your average large scale enterprise.

In your opinion - what are areas for potential improvement for the ASF board?

In your opinion - what changes should be made to the way the ASF board operates, interacts with communities, interacts with the wider ASF ecosystem, interacts with the public?

While at the ASF we are very good at thinking about inward facing communication, I believe we can become much better at communicating to the non-ASF world. As we grow, I believe that perspective becomes ever more important - we cannot rely on people to just “get” how we work from simply following our projects and becoming ever more involved.

Being community over code to me implies counting the user/customer of our projects as part of that community. They are the ones who have the fresh eyes to spot flaws in our argumentation of why we are doing things the way we do - and spot advantages. However they can only do that by understanding what goal and purpose we want to work towards.

Any advice for new board members - where to look first, what legal implications to keep in mind, what PR implications to keep in mind etc.?

What are the tasks and time commitment?

Tell us about a moment from your time on the ASF board that is most precious to you.