I want to deeply agree to @J: Well said! @Rich: Thank you for letting me be a part of this community
G. Am 10.03.2026 um 10:51 schrieb Jarek Potiuk <[email protected]>: Just a comment. I hadn't realized (remembered) you've been doing it, but this is fantastic job you've been doing Rich. I think this is really cool that a human is sending these messages and responding to questions, even if it's 50% of acknowledgment and 10% follow-up questions This is exactly how you build communities: not by automating things with mindless bots and automated workflows, but by having actual humans spending time and pay attention to newcomers. This is what makes those - eventually maybe 5% of them - who join actively engaging later on. J. On Tue, Mar 10, 2026 at 1:43 AM Rich Bowen <[email protected]> wrote: Esteemed Board, For close to 2 years, I have emailed each newly-elected PMC member, welcoming them to the larger life of the Foundation, and pointing them to onboarding information for PMC members. This is triggered by the [NOTIFY] emails but each one is individually sent, not automated. Roughly half of the recipients respond with an acknowledgment/thanks for the message. Roughly 10% have some kind of followup question. I’m assuming that the Board wishes that this continue, but it makes sense to me to change hats, and send this as a member of ComDev. If the Board would prefer to designate one of your members to continue this, I’d of course turn it over, but I’ll assume, unless you tell me differently, that I can and should just continue under my own authority as a welcoming member. (Full text of email included below, and would of course be updated to reflect the new sender.) ComDev, (copied) do you wish to have visibility of these messages (ie, Cc’ed to dev@community)? The volume varies of course. There were 17 in February, and 11 in January, for example. This does not include PMC members of newly graduated projects, which the Incubator handles separately. — Rich Bowen [email protected] Template: Dear __NAME__, I see that you have been added to the __PROJECT__ PMC. Congratulations! As a PMC member, you’re entrusted with the direction of the project, as well as its ongoing relationship with the Board and the rest of the Foundation, so we wanted to welcome you to the larger ASF family. And in the same way as you have been added by the existing PMC members, remember that part of your duty is now to be the one who is on the lookout for potential committers and PMC members for your project, and to mentor those people into project leadership, to ensure the sustainability of your project, and of the Foundation. We’ve put together some resources for PMC members at https://community.apache.org/pmc/ That’s still a work in progress and we hope it will improve over time. We’d like to hear your feedback on how this resource could be improved, based on information that you learn and wish someone had told you. If you have any questions about any aspect of the Foundation, or want to chat about how the Foundation can better serve your project, please reach out to myself, or any other Director. Rich, on behalf of the Board of Directors
