Avro board report for Oct 2016

[Ryan Blue <rb...@netflix.com.INVALID>]

Hi everyone,

Here's a draft board report for this quarter. If you have anything you'd
like to add, please reply!

rb

## Description:

 - Avro is a cross-language data serialization system.

## Issues:

 - There are no issues requiring board attention at this time.

## Activity:

 - 1.8.2 release is close to a release candidate.
 - Added a single-message format and API for systems like Kafka.

## Health report:

 - Last report stated, "Avro is healthier than last [quarter]". This is
   because the community was talking about setting up a regular release
   schedule and there was interest in regularly getting contributor work
   into releases. This is an important step becuase contributors won't
   submit patches to a project if they are never available to use.
 - The release planned for August has been delayed by build issues, but
   is nearly through blockers and is expected this quarter.
 - Contributor engagement is still a goal we are working on. Many committers
   do not have time to review patches.

## PMC changes:

 - Currently 16 PMC members.
 - No new PMC members added in the last 3 months
 - Last PMC addition was Sean Busbey on Sun Feb 14 2016

## Committer base changes:

 - Currently 23 committers.
 - No new committers added in the last 3 months
 - Last committer addition was Matthieu Monsch at Mon Jan 18 2016

## Releases:

 - 1.8.1 was released on Fri May 20 2016

## Mailing list activity:

 - dev@avro.apache.org:
    - 279 subscribers (up 8 in the last 3 months):
    - 757 emails sent to list (660 in previous quarter)

 - user@avro.apache.org:
    - 631 subscribers (up 9 in the last 3 months):
    - 45 emails sent to list (39 in previous quarter)

## JIRA activity:

 - 51 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
 - 35 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months


-- 
Ryan Blue
Software Engineer
Netflix