The Apache Beam community in 2019

2019 has already been a busy time for the Apache Beam community. The ASF blog featured our way of community building and we’ve had more Beam meetups around the world. Apache Beam also received the Technology of the Year Award from InfoWorld.

As these events happened, we were building up to the 20th anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation. The contributions of the Beam community were a part of Maximilian Michels blog post on the success of the ASF’s open source development model:

Success at Apache: What You Need to Know by Maximilian Michels https://t.co/XjtVYgPAHX #Apache #Open #Innovation #Community #people #processes #JustWorks @stadtlegende pic.twitter.com/xSibnyWAMe

— Apache - The ASF (@TheASF) 26 maart 2019

In that spirit, let’s have an overview of the things that have happened, what the next few months look like, and how we can foster even more community growth.

Meetups

We’ve had a flurry of activity, with several meetups in the planning process and more popping up globally over time. As diversity of contributors is a core ASF value, this geographic spread is exciting for the community. Here’s a picture from the latest Apache Beam meetup organized at Lyft in San Francisco:

We have more Bay Area meetups coming soon, and the community is looking into kicking off a meetup in Toronto!

London had its first meetup of 2019 at the start of April:

and Stockholm had its second meetup at the start of May:

Big audience for the second @ApacheBeam meetup in Stockholm! Gleb, @kanterov from @SpotifyEng kicking off the first talk with Beam SQL.#ApacheBeamStockholm pic.twitter.com/fDqPPFh2gY

— Matthias Baetens 🌆 (@matthiasbaetens) 6 May 2019

Keep an eye out for a meetup in Paris.

If you are interested in starting your own meetup, feel free to reach out! Good places to start include our Slack channel, the dev and user mailing lists, or the Apache Beam Twitter.

Even if you can’t travel to these meetups, you can stay informed on the happenings of the community. The talks and sessions from previous conferences and meetups are archived on the Apache Beam YouTube channel. If you want your session added to the channel, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Summits

The first summit of the year will be held in Berlin:

You can find more info on the website and read about the inaugural edition of the Beam Summit Europe here. At these summits, you have the opportunity to meet with other Apache Beam creators and users, get expert advice, learn from the speaker sessions, and participate in workshops.

We strongly encourage you to get involved again this year! You can participate in the following ways for the upcoming summit in Europe:

🎫 If you want to secure your ticket to attend the Beam Summit Europe 2019, check our event page.

💸 If you want to make the Summit even more awesome, check out our sponsor booklet!

We also launched the CfP for our Beam Summit in North America, which will be held in collaboration with ApacheCon.

🎤 If you want to give a talk, take a look at our CfP.

Stay tuned for more information on the summit in North America and Asia.

Why community engagement matters

Why we need a strong Apache Beam community:

• We’re receiving lots of code contributions and need committers to review those and help onboard new contributors to the project.
• We want people to feel a sense of ownership to the project. By fostering this level of engagement, the work becomes even more exciting.
• A healthy community has a further reach and leads to more growth. More hours can be contributed to the project as we can spread the work and ownership.

Why are we organizing these summits:

• We’d like to give folks a place to meet, congregate, and share ideas.
• We know that offline interactions often changes the nature of the online ones in a positive manner.
• Building an active and diverse community is part of the Apache Way. These summits provide an opportunity for us to engage people from different locations, companies, and backgrounds.