Title: Apache Corporate Organization Chart
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At a high level, organizational governance at the Apache Software Foundation
(ASF) is fairly simple: the Members elect a Board of Directors;
the Board appoints various officers and creates PMCs;
the PMCs report periodically to the board, and most other officers
report through the President, who reports for them to the board.
Click in the image map to learn more about a role.
- Existing Members nominate and elect new members periodically, and
annually nominate and elect nine Directors to the board.
- The board appoints operational officers, and delegates responsibility for
specific policy or operational areas to each officer. For
example, the VP, Legal Affairs Committee is responsible for setting
legal policy for the ASF and all Apache projects, and working with
corporate counsel.
- The board appoints executive officers, including a President,
Secretary, and Treasurer, who are responsible for specific
operations of the ASF.
- Most [officers report directly to the President][1] on a monthly basis, and
the President reports an overall operational status to the board at each meeting.
- The VP, Infra reports to the President, and provides high-level oversight of
the operations of the infrastructure team. Within the team, a paid Infra Admin
helps manage daily operations and prioritize work with the
paid staff who maintain services all Apache projects use.
- The board creates and updates Project Management Committees (PMCs).
In most cases, the board simply ratifies properly constructed
requests from the Incubator (to graduate podlings to TLPs), or from
the PMCs themselves (to add or remove PMC members). In each case,
the relevant PMC has already voted to recommend the change to the
board.
- PMCs report directly to the board quarterly. The board exercises
organizational oversight of PMCs, ensuring that they are
functioning as a healthy and meritocratic community, and that they
are following Apache policies. The board does **not** provide
technical governance; that is handled within the PMC itself.
- The Chair of each PMC is a Vice President of that project, and thus
is an officer of the ASF. The [primary duty of the chair](/dev/pmc.html#chair) is to ensure
that the project's reports are complete and submitted to the board.
- PMCs vote on software product releases. This ensures that all
source code releases are acts of the ASF itself, through its
properly-governed PMC.
- PMCs nominate and elect new committers to their project. PMCs also
nominate and vote on new PMC members, whom the PMC then recommends
to the board for approval.
- The Apache Incubator is a special (I)PMC: it's work is to mentor new podling
communities to help them learn the Apache Way. After each podling votes
on their software releases, the IPMC members provide oversight and vote
on that podling's release process as well, to ensure the podling is progressing
towards becoming a full Apache project.
- By policy, only individuals may serve as Members, committers, PMC
members or ASF officers. This is one way that the ASF and
[Apache projects preserve their independence](http://community.apache.org/projectIndependence).
[Source for org chart graphics](ApacheOrgChart.odg) stored in an Apache OpenOffice file.
[1]: https://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2012/board_minutes_2012_10_17.txt