ASF Plus One Newsletter: June 2025

Published on June 26, 2025
By The ASF

Summer may be upon us, but there is no shortage of activity happening across the ASF universe. The schedule for Community Over Code North America has been released including keynote speakers. There are only 2 more days to take advantage of early bird registration rates – save $100 USD until June 28 – so don’t miss out! The ASF’s website working group is hoping to gain more contributors, and the ASF was a participating organization in the UN’s Tech Over Hackathon. Keep reading to learn more.

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Community

Early bird registration for Community Over Code North America ends this week; be sure to register and save $100 USD off your ticket! Reminder that this year’s event takes place September 11-14 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Community Over Code planners are also pleased to announce the schedule for the ASF’s flagship event, which will include 20 session tracks spanning the four-day event. Besides attendee-favorite tracks such as Cassandra, Community, and Data Engineering, the 2025 conference will include new AI Plumbers, OpenLakehouse, and Industrial Internet of Things tracks.

The schedule also includes a diverse set of keynote speakers including:

Michael “Mr. B” Bratsch is a nationally recognized teacher and an award winning educator. Some of his career highlights include being the founder of the nationally recognized academic, Social Emotional Learning (SEL), and leadership program called “The Futureboys and Futuregirls.” These students will also be attending Community Over Code, giving attendees a chance to meet with and guide our technological future.
TV host and historian Roy Underhill. Roy is best known as the host of the PBS series The Woodwright’s Shop and the author of many books that followed. Roy currently runs The Woodwright’s School in North Carolina, dedicated to historically-informed woodworking.

Project Updates

If you’re a writer, designer, or information architect, the ASF needs your help improving the Apache.org website presence. This work includes clarifying and de-duplicating content and improving site visuals and navigation. Learn more about the ComDev Working Group or email dev@community.apache.org to contribute.

Apache jclouds has been retired to the Apache Attic.

Foundation News

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Schedule for Community Over Code North America

Open Source Developers Saving the World with Code, Not Capes

President’s Letter

One of the most important things we can do to support both our mission of providing “software for the public good” as well as the entire open source ecosystem is to ensure that it continues beyond us. Open source software as a movement and the ASF are both approaching thirty years old. Of course, software existed for quite some time before that, but a lot has changed in those thirty years, due in no small part to the work of the ASF’s projects and others like them.

Those of us who have seen much of the history of open source overlap with our careers had mentors who knew software, but we were all writing the open source story as we went. That’s different now. We must be the mentors who ensure the future of open source development, and for me, June has been an inspiring month for it.

As I mentioned in the May issue of Plus One, I helped organize last week’s UN Tech Over Hackathon on behalf of the ASF. With the theme “Ahead of the Storm: Open Geospatial Analytics for Children-Centric Climate Emergency Response,” the three challenges had participants working to accelerate progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through open source innovation. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) offered three problems for teams to tackle, which are detailed in this blog post. Thank you to those who served as mentors and judges, and congratulations to the winning teams: the Bytans, SEESALT, and T4SG!

There were two other events happening simultaneously during the hackathon. Wikipedia hosted an Edit-a-Thon, celebrating the 70th anniversary of Italy and Sri Lanka’s admission to the UN, adding 6 new articles and editing 234 pages. And the Sovereign Tech Agency and Alpha-Omega ran a Maintain-a-Thon with 40 participants focused on the vital work of maintaining open source infrastructure.

The result was a large room in the UN headquarters with an amazing convergence of long-time open source contributors and the next generation to come. In my opening remarks on Tuesday, I invited them all to take advantage of this rare opportunity to connect with one another, find ways to make sure their projects and ideas continue past the [hack-, edit-, maintain-]athon, and build the future of open source together.

Also this month, we finalized the keynote speakers for Community Over Code North America. Finding the right people for those talks is an annual challenge, and I’ve always loved that ASF events reach beyond our own projects and code and invite people doing interesting things in other communities to speak at our flagship event. I thought it would be hard to beat last year’s Iron Man, but this year we have two speakers I’m really looking forward to for different reasons.

One of the best things I’ve done in my career was teach middle schoolers about open source collaboration through a program called Co.Lab. Seven years ago, I had the opportunity to do one of these classes in Minneapolis with an amazing teacher, Michael Bratsch, or “Mr. B.” He has built a program called Futureboys and Futuregirls, where their motto is “we’re taking off like rockets” in a school where 89% of students are economically disadvantaged. I’m excited to see Mr. B again, hear about how that program is doing now that he’s been at it long enough for his students to have reached adulthood, and to introduce another group of Futureboys and Futuregirls to software.

Our second speaker I have never met, but I’m certainly looking forward to doing so. Roy Underhill has hosted The Woodwright’s Shop on PBS since 1979. Some of you may have seen his TEDx talk, “Have Broad Axe, Will Travel,” on ingenuity and living in the present. Paired with the lineup for our new hobby-sharing track, Roy should be a fantastic addition to our long history of stories from interesting communities and the history of technology beyond software.

I hope you’ll also take a moment in the next month to think about how you can support the next generation of contributors, whether that’s by being a mentor, writing documentation and tutorials, looking for ways to improve the new contributor experience, or finding someone to shadow your ASF work. By making ASF projects a place where new contributors are welcome, we ensure the future of all we’ve built so far and everything better that’s yet to come.

Sincerely,
Ruth Suehle