Hi everyone,
It has been pointed out that the way we run our yearly community survey
happens by inertia, without any formality to it. Now while I’m never one
for too much formality, some here would be helpful.
We discussed it in the Airflow PMC and with the outcome we now raise a
vote on the devlist in public. Proposal is we formally accept the following:
* A yearly Airflow Community survey should be run, and it should run
proximate to the end of the calendar year.
* The intent of this survey is to understand the use of the software
and features used in order to understand where to focus future
development on and which features might be deprecated. But not
limited to. We are also interested in perceived quality and biggest
problems for which we even might need to elaborate a solution space.
* The questions for which are discussed on the dev list. We should
have a final lazy consensus to the dev list (or vote if we don’t see
consensus) on the questions before the survey is published. No
formal vote is required before finalising the questions or starting
the survey. It would be good to keep a majority of questions stable
such that we can see changes year-over-year.
* Questions must not involve collecting PII data. One exception is the
optional collecting of email addresses for delivering sponsor
incentives (i.e. training course, credits. See further on in this
document)
* There is no formal position or person responsible for generating the
questions. As with everything ASF related, all individuals are given
the opportunity to participate, but their influence is based on
publicly earned merit.
* The PMC will promote the survey via airflow.apache.org website -
including the banners on the website, and Apache Airflow Social
Media, Slack and similar channels.
* The survey should be conducted in a way such that not one person or
company gets more information than the others.
* The results should be processed/analysed and a summary published on
the Airflow website (and thus subject to normal PR review process by
committers and the PMC).
* The full, raw results for the survey should be published in full
each year for the entire community to read and benefit from. Publish
must be timely within 1-2 months after closure. The only
scrubbing/redacting allowed is of PII data or obvious fraudulent
answers.
* In case there is no appropriate survey platform run by the ASF
available for under the “apache.org” URL, the entity or people
running the survey will be free to host it elsewhere.
* If any entity wants to support/sponsor the survey and take the cost
connected with running, processing the survey - we will welcome such
sponsorship. This needs to be an explicit request after a call for
sponsors to the PMC and PMC has to approve it. We will also leave
freedom for the entity running the survey in the way to attract wide
audience (for example offering credits or free products as long as
they do not suggest being PMC endorsed; and to refer Apache Airflow
according to the nominative fair use.
* In cases of such sponsorship, the entity will be listed as sponsor
permanently in the published Survey results - this is in accordance
with the targeted-sponsorship policy of the ASF. We will inform
Fundraising of the ASF about this being a formal targeted
sponsorship by the PMC.
This is just writing down what we do already (with the exception of the
last two points which are a new addition and a more formal approach to
the ad-hoc basis right now).
Jens on behalf of the Airflow PMC.
This email is calling a vote for the procedure, which will last for 5
days - which means that it will end on December 8th, 2025 22:00 UTC.
Everyone is encouraged to vote, although only PMC members and
Committer's votes are considered binding. Members of the community are
encouraged to vote with "(non-binding)".
Consider this my +1 (binding) vote.
Please vote accordingly:
[ ] +1 approve
[ ] +0 no opinion
[ ] -1 disapprove with the reason
