Board report draft

[Ryan Blue <bl...@apache.org>]

Hi everyone,

Here's a draft of our report to the ASF board for this quarter. Please let
me know if you'd like to add or change anything.

rb


## Description:

 - Avro is a cross-language data serialization system.

## Issues:

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

## Activity:

 - Released 1.8.1 on 20 May 2016
 - Discussion on the dev list agreed to a goal of a release every quarter,
   and one PMC member has volunteered to be release manager for 1.8.2.
 - JavaScript implementation added RPC support
 - Close to a spec and implementation standardizing a single-message format
   for uses like Apache Kafka payloads.

## Health report:

 - Avro is healthier than last month
 - Contributor engagement is still a goal we need to work toward, with
   only a few committers actively reviewing patches. Regular releases help,
   but we can make it easier for both committers and contributors by adding
   time-saving tools like continuous integration.

## 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:
    - 271 subscribers (down -1 in the last 3 months):
    - 655 emails sent to list (660 in previous quarter)

 - user@avro.apache.org:
    - 621 subscribers (up 16 in the last 3 months):
    - 48 emails sent to list (107 in previous quarter)

## JIRA activity:

 - 53 JIRA tickets created in the last 3 months
 - 29 JIRA tickets closed/resolved in the last 3 months



-- 
Ryan Blue