Oct NiFi Board report

[Joe Witt <jo...@gmail.com>]

Team,

Here is what I submitted for our Oct board report.  Look forward to NiFi 1.15!

## Description:
The mission of NiFi is the creation and maintenance of software related to
providing an easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and
distribute data.

Apache NiFi MiNiFi is an edge data collection agent built to seamlessly
integrate with and leverage the command and control of NiFi. There are both
Java and C++ implementations.

Apache NiFi Registry is a centralized registry for key configuration items
including flow versions, assets, and extensions for Apache NiFi and Apache
MiNiFi.

Apache NiFi Nar Maven Plugin is a release artifact used for supporting the
NiFi classloader isolation model.

Apache NiFi Flow Design System is a theme-able set of high quality UI
components and utilities for use across the various Apache NiFi web
applications in order to provide a more consistent user experience.

## Issues:
There are no issues requiring board attention at this time.

## Membership Data:
Apache NiFi was founded 2015-07-14 (6 years ago)
There are currently 53 committers and 33 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 7:5.

Community changes, past quarter:
- David Handermann was added to the PMC on 2021-09-15
- Joe Gresock was added as committer on 2021-09-17
- Gábor Gyimesi was added as committer on 2021-07-22

## Project Activity:
The last releases for NiFi were in July and this includes NiFi, the NiFi
Registry, MiNiFi Java, and MiNiFi CPP.  Since then the community is working
aggressively on another significant release in NiFi 1.15 which is nearing
release candidate stage.  It already includes more than 180 issues including
dozens of new features and improvements as well as many bug fixes. The updates
also keep key dependencies updated due to evolving vulnerabilities for popular
capabilities like Jetty and others.

## Community Health:
The community remains strong. Mailing list activity for both the dev and users
lists has increased (54%, 37%) this quarter in terms of total number of emails
written but also interestingly in terms of the number of authors engaged. JIRA
activity this quarter has increased by 17%.  Github activity looks roughly
unchanged and it is still too early to tell if our auto closing of PRs is
having the desired effect though community health certainly remains strong and
contributions continue to roll in.  Our Slack activity levels remains very
high and we have nearly 1900 people in the general channel. There does appear
to be a 20% reduction in the number of unique contributors with commits in the
quarter but that aligns to a roughly 35% drop in total commits.  This is
likely to rapidly turn around as we approach the release candidate for NiFi
1.15.0.


Thanks
Joe