Start an ALC Chapter

So there’s no ALC chapter in your town or city yet, and you’d like to start one. Wonderful! Here’s what’s involved.

Before you apply ¶

Check the map first. There is a single ALC chapter per town or city. Look at the list of chapters to make sure one doesn’t already exist in your location.
You don’t have to be a committer. It is not mandatory to be, or to have, Apache committers to form a chapter. If committers are available locally to participate and share their experience, that’s a bonus, but it isn’t a requirement.
This isn’t a committer meetup. The goal is to build a local group of Apache and open source enthusiasts — students, developers, and the local business community — not simply to hold a monthly meeting of existing committers.

Metropolitan areas ¶

For large metropolitan areas (for example the San Francisco Bay Area, or Los Angeles), more than one chapter can make sense. The ComDev PMC reviews these requests and decides on a case-by-case basis.

How to apply ¶

The formal application steps are maintained on the ALC wiki, in the Process to establish an ALC Chapter document, linked from the ALC program page. In outline:

Confirm there is no existing chapter in your town or city.
Email dev@community.apache.org with [ALC] at the start of the subject line, expressing your interest.
Work with the ComDev PMC to confirm the chapter and get it listed.

Once your chapter is approved, add it to this site so it appears on the map.

What’s expected of a chapter ¶

Code of conduct. All ALC members follow the Apache Code of Conduct.
Quarterly reports. Each chapter sends a short status report to ComDev every three months, covering its activities and their impact.
Stay active. A chapter that is inactive for three months may be dissolved, after discussion with its members and a PMC vote, so that the one-chapter-per-city slot can be freed up.
No press releases. Chapters do not issue press releases.

Adding your chapter to this site ¶

Each chapter on the map is a single Markdown file in source/alc/chapters/ in the website repository. To add yours, copy an existing file and edit its front matter:

---
title: ALC CityName
city: CityName
country: Country
lat: 00.0000
lon: 00.0000
status: active        # active | proposed | dissolved
started: 2026
organizers: "Name(s) or team"
links:
  website: https://example.org/
  slack: "#alc-cityname"
  wiki: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/COMDEV/...
---

A short paragraph about the chapter, its focus, and how to get involved.

The map and the chapter list are generated automatically from these files, so a pull request adding one Markdown file is all it takes.