Proposed November board report

[Karl Wright <da...@gmail.com>]

Please comment on the proposed November board report, to be submitted by
November 6th, below.

Thanks!
Karl

[REPORT] ManifoldCF

Board Report, ManifoldCF PMC

ManifoldCF PMC Chair: Karl Wright (kwright@apache.org)
Date: November 2013

Project description
==============

ManifoldCF is an effort to provide an open source framework for connecting
source content repositories like Microsoft Sharepoint and EMC Documentum,
to target repositories or indexes, such as Apache Solr, OpenSearchServer
or ElasticSearch. ManifoldCF also defines a security model for target
repositories
that permits them to enforce source-repository security policies.

Releases
========

ManifoldCF graduated from the Apache Incubator on May 16, 2012.  Since
then, there
have been five major releases, including a 1.4 release on October 28, 2013.

Committers and PMC membership
=============================

The last committer and PMC member we signed up was Minoru Osuka (minoru),
on January
10, 2013.  We voted in a new committer and PMC member in May, but he
declined to accept

the committership due to his company's policies.  Other contributors have
been

approached, but have also declined to accept consideration for possible
committership.

The most recent of these encounters took place in September.

We are not entirely sure why people who are obviously interested and to
some degree

committed to the project seem unwilling to become full committers.  I
suspect that

corporate restrictions make this a challenge in some cases.  Also, we seem
to be

interacting more with contractors than with employees recently, and it may
well be that

contractors have less interest in a long-standing relationship with our
project.

Mailing list activity
=====================

Mailing list has been active, with a wide range of topics.  Most of our
connectors
now have significant use cases and constituencies.  Dev list comments
centered around

voting, extensions to the SharePoint connector, people looking for
integration advice,
etc.  ManifoldCF also participated in Google Summer of Code, and MCF
committers

mentored one student developer through end of September.

External contributions and even committer contributions have been somewhat
lighter this

cycle than in the last quarter.  Communication with committers indicates
that this is

due in some degree to the maturity of the product, but also to an uptick in
everyone's

work load.

I am unaware of any mailing-list question that has gone unanswered.

Outstanding issues
==================

Both Infra issues that were outstanding at the time of the last report have
been

resolved.

Branding
========

We have reviewed the site branding guidelines and believe we are now
compliant with
these, with the possible exception of (TM) signs in logos from other Apache
products
that don't have any such marks.  Hopefully we will be able to correct this
issue
soon.