[REPORT] Board report for Apache Avro Jan 2020

[Sean Busbey <bu...@apache.org>]

Hi folks!

Here's the report for the quarter I submitted. Let me know if there are any
last minute changes y'all would like to see.

----
## Description:
Apache Avro is a data serialization system with a compact binary format. It
is
used for storing and transporting schema driven serialized data. The unique
features of Avro include automatic schema resolution - when the reader's
expected schema is different from the actual schema with which the data was
serialized the data is automatically adapted to meet reader's requirements.

## Issues:
The project currently has no issues that require board attention.

## Membership Data:
Apache Avro was founded 2010-04-20 (10 years ago)
There are currently 33 committers and 23 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 3:2.

Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was Nándor Kollár on 2019-08-29.
- Michael A. Smith was added as committer on 2019-10-18
- Ryan Skraba was added as committer on 2019-12-12

## Project Activity:
No new releases in the past quarter.

A user found an issue with our project signing for the 1.9.1
release and our KEYS file; the issue was corrected. (RM key was in a staged
KEYS instead of project KEYS)

Work has continued to update both build tools, language versions, and third
party dependencies. The need for both a new minor release and a new major
release has come up in a multiple discussions about getting these changes
into
the hands of downstream users.

There has been no movement on the previously reported need to document and
update how the project versions releases.

## Numbers
For those who prefer metrics:

Mailing Lists:
 - dev@avro.apache.org had 837 emails (11% increase)
 - user@avro.apache.org had 79 emails (22% increase)

JIRA:
 - 81 issues opened (-24% decrease)
 - 71 issues closed (22% increase)

GitHub:
 - 81 PRs open (-2% decrease)
 - 73 PRs closed (1% increase)

Code Repository:
 - 73 commits in the past quarter (-49% decrease)
 - 18 code contributors in the past quarter (flat)

## Community Health:
Community health remains steady. We have a core set of contributors working
to
keep the project going and are getting better at recognizing that work
through
project responsibilities like committership. We still need to work to
establish a release cadence, probably indicating room to improve the work
required to steward release candidates.