Texera Apache Incubation – Monthly Meeting Minutes

Date: July 30, 2025
Chair: Chen Li
Participants: Chen Li, Anzhi Zhang, Seongjin Yoon, Yichen Ren, Ali Risheh, Yicong Huang, Yunyan Ding, Meng Wang, Matthew Ball, Sarah Asad, Xinyuan Lin, Ryan Zhang, Dhriti Soni, Jae Yun Kim

1. Apache Incubation Status Overview

• Incubation Start Date: April 12, 2025
• Mentors Assigned: 4
• PPMC Members: 13
• Committers: 13 (same as PPMC)
• External Contributors: 100+
• System Architecture: Cloud Infrastructure
• Project Logo: New logo based on a peacock motif
• Website: https://texera.io
• Tutorial Videos are being developed to onboard new users.
• Use Cases from the Medical Domain, including NIH and ADA data pipelines, are being documented and integrated.

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2. Recent Accomplishments

Core System Enhancements

• Cloud Deployment: Successfully deployed Texera on AWS EKS, demonstrating scalability for over 20 concurrent students.
• Collaborative Features: Implemented shared write access for computing units among different users.
• Machine Learning Integration: Added new operators for scikit-learn model training.
• User Experience (UI/UX):
  • Enabled dynamic workflow configuration directly from the user interface.
  • Improved UI for displaying operator and port-level metrics.
  • Enhanced performance for retrieving resources from the Texera Hub.
• System Configuration: Introduced a new configuration parameter, max-concurrent-regions, to manage resource allocation.

Community and Outreach

• Data Science for All (DS4ALL): Utilized hub.texera.io to teach data science and AI/ML concepts to 34 students from high schools and community colleges.
• Middle School Program: Taught a data science workshop to 32 middle school students on July 21, 2025.
• Biology Summer Camp: Hosted an online summer camp on data science for biology, targeting undergraduate and graduate students with limited coding backgrounds.
• Academic Deployment: The platform is now officially deployed and in use at the UCI Department of Ophthalmology.

3. Project Roles and Responsibilities

The Texera project follows the standard Apache meritocracy model. The table below outlines the key roles, their permissions, and the process for joining.

Role	Key Permissions	How to Join
Contributor	Submit issues & PRs, join discussions	Start contributing — no formal process required.
Committer	Merge PRs, push code, vote on code changes	Voted in by the PPMC based on quality contributions.
PPMC Member	Governance, vote on releases & new committers/PPMC	Voted in by current PPMC members.
Mentor	Guide the project, oversee releases, ensure Apache policies followed	Appointed by the Incubator PMC; must be an experienced ASF member.

4. Incubation Graduation Action Items

Software Grant Agreement (SGA)

• Status: In Progress
• Details: The copyright release form has been signed by the UCI Licensing Office and Chen Li. We are currently awaiting feedback from the Apache Foundation.

Documentation

• Status: In Progress
• Details: Work is underway to consolidate user guides, developer setup instructions, and governance policies into an Apache-compliant format. We are analyzing the documentation structures of projects like Apache Flink and Spark to ensure an optimal user experience. We are also exploring solutions for community-contributed documentation for public datasets.

Reporting Schedule

• Next Monthly Report Due: August 6, 2025
• First Quarterly Report Due: November 2025