This website is developed by volunteers to help newcomers to The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and to our many Apache projects take their first steps towards being a part of our community.
Here we provide signposts to information about both the ASF as an organization, as well as about the over 100 different Apache project communities that provide free software for the public benefit.
We do not focus on any specific projects here, but rather on the common processes and policies found in most of Apache projects. Our goal is to help you understand how the ASF works and give you the confidence to participate more directly in Apache projects that interest you.
If you are new to open source please read our newcomers section for some explanations of basic concepts, first steps to get started, and places to ask for help.
We have a list of speaker resources for both conference organizers and speakers.
For a list of current events, our calendar section contains an aggregation of foundation wide calendars, along with the official conferences calendar, including ApacheCon, BarCamps, and more.
Learn about the mission of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), how projects are governed, etc at the Foundation page.
If you know a little about open source and want to understand how the ASF works our contributors section is for you.
We also have a collection of links to relevant information.
If you are an Apache Committer you should read our committers section and see the Developer Information site.
The Community Development project also manages the ASF's participation in the Google Summer of Code program. Each year, since 2005, we've taken on between 30 and 45 students. Many of these have gone on to be long term committers and even members of the foundation.
Read about a few of our GSoC successes.
Interested in learning how the foundation works, the difference between membership and committership, who decides what, how elections take place, how is our infrastructure setup, what is the board, what is a PMC, what's the philosophy behind the incubator, why is the foundation moving away from project containment. Read the how Apache works works.
All Apache projects use publicly archived mailing lists that anyone may subscribe
to and/or ask questions related to that Apache project. Most projects have at least a
dev@project.apache.org mailing list for technical discussions about the code, and a
user@ or users@ mailing list for questions about the product or features.
The ComDev project has our own mailing list where you can ask general questions
about Apache at dev@community.apache.org.
If you are looking for specific areas to get started contributing to open source, you could look at collection of project ideas created by GSoC mentors.
If you still haven't found what you are looking for, try our FAQ or send us an e-mail at dev AT community DOT org.