The call for papers for OS Summit Asia is now open!

Apache and Eclipse are doing something a little different this year. Rather than have independent ApacheCon Asia and EclipseCon Asia conferences, we’re holding a joint conference in Hong Kong—OS Summit Asia. The conference runs November 26th through 30th and will be held at the Cyberport. This is both our first conference in Hong Kong and our first conference together, so it’s bound to be interesting.

The call for papers is now open with a deadline of July 13th, so mark your calendars and submit those talks and tutorials! Hope to see you there!

As it’s late over in this timezone, I’m not going to write up too much at the moment, but I want to at least publish the results of the Apache Software Foundation board of directors election. The new board includes:

• Geir Magnusson, Jr
• Greg Stein
• Henning Schmiedehausen
• Henri Yandell
• J Aaron Farr
• Jim Jagielski
• Justin Erenkrantz
• Sam Ruby
• William Rowe

I’m honored to be included on that list and despite Justin telling me my carefree days are now over, I’m excited to be a part of the board. I also want to offer my own thanks to Cliff, Ken, Dirk and Sander for their efforts. They leave some big shoes to fill.

According to Charles Babcock of Information Week the answer is the Apache webserver. Not a bad choice, in my humble opinion.

As was mentioned at ApacheCon, the Apache Software Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation will be producing a joint open source conference in Hong Kong November 26-30. Yes, this year, this November, in Hong Kong! Further details and a call for papers will be announced soon. In the meantime, you can listen to the latest Apache Feathercast Podcast in which I discuss the new conference with Rich Bowen.

See you in Hong Kong!

Tonight I leave for ApacheCon EU where I’ll be giving my Incubating Open Source Communities Talk next Thursday at 10:30 am. This talk is based on one I gave last year at OSCON and this year at the Taipei OSDC. I’ll be sharing lessons learned in Apache about open source communities as well as reviewing the structure and procedures of the Apache Incubator. I’ve enjoyed preparing this presentation and I’m looking forward to sharing it.

Without much fanfare Apache Excalibur had a release recently. Other than a large backlog of bug fixes, the major change is the move to Maven 2. Check out the release notes for more details. Many thanks to Jorg Heymans for doing all the dirty work!

For those that haven’t heard yet, OFBiz has exited the Apache Incubator and is noxw a full fledged top level project. As one of the mentors, I’m very excited for their success. Though quite honestly the OFBiz team barely needed the mentors. I was regularly impressed with their commitment to the incubation process, and the openness, dedication and thoroughness of their efforts. They became models to me of how Apache’s Incubator can work.

If you aren’t familiar with OFBiz (the Apache Open For Business Project) you should take a look. OFBiz provides a large collection of software for ecommerce, ERP, and other “business automation” systems. It’s developed in Java but is not a typical J2EE app (no EJBs for example). The project makes a great addition to Apache and showcases the work of many other open source projects.

Congrats to the OFBiz team!

I finally got around to signing all the keys from the ApacheCon keysigning event.

I got into Austin for ApacheCon on Sunday. You really don’t want to see my actual to do list. A snippet of the interesting parts looks like this:

• Finish presentation on Java scripting for PittJUG’s code camp Saturday
• Verify builds tagged for the Excalibur release
• Help with Incubator documentation (does anyone still want to do a docathon?)
• Chair some sessions
• Catch up on Incubator email (an impossible task)
• Enjoy time with some of my favorite other hackers