Join Us! Growing the Presto Foundation in 2020 and Beyond

    By: 

    Brian Hsieh, The Linux Foundation

    The Presto Foundation (PF) was established in September 2019 as an openly governed and vendor-neutral body dedicated to scaling and diversifying the Presto community. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, PF and its Governing Board are in a unique position to make Presto the fastest and the most reliable SQL engine for massively distributed data processing.

    After many discussions, the Governing Board agreed and ratified the PF’s guiding principles and 2020 strategic goals.

    Presto Foundation Guiding Principles

    Our guiding principles reflect our commitment to open governance, neutrality, and community building, listed below:

    One open, neutral and united Presto community

    One of the main reasons the founding members came together and created the Presto Foundation was to unite the Presto community. The Presto community and its contributors have been working on many great capabilities and connectors, and many of these haven’t made their way back into the repo, and we truly believe that these can benefit many other users. We invite all Presto community members to embrace PrestoDB and contribute back to move the project faster, reduce duplication of efforts and create wider impact for the entire community.

    Open, transparent technical leadership and direction

    At the end of the day, technology and technical direction is what keeps a community interested and the innovation going. We want the project to be inclusive and the technical roadmap to be fairly representative of the community’s view. In fact, the Technical Steering Committee has its own open charter and the meetings are open for everyone to attend. We invite you to join the Technical Steering Committee meetings. We believe under the open and transparent governance of the Technical Steering Committee, the PrestoDB project will continue to grow, gain contributors, and solve some hard technical challenges.

    No one individual or company is greater than the project and its community

    The Linux Foundation is dedicated to building sustainable ecosystems around open source projects to accelerate technology development and commercial adoption. It is the home of Linux creator Linus Torvalds, and most importantly provides a neutral home to Linux and other projects where their development can be protected and accelerated for years to come. This important principle of neutrality has been the core of Linux Foundation as well as Apache Software Foundation so that no one individual or company agenda becomes that of the projects. Neutrality will drive the approach to governance that we have adopted so that no single company or individual can take undue influence.

    2020 Strategic Goals

    With our guiding principles in mind, the PF Governing Board developed six strategic goals to guide our growth in 2020. The goals, listed in no particular order, below, are fluid and meant to evolve over time with input from the community:

    Unify Presto under one neutral and openly governed community

    By establishing a neutral and openly governed body to help incorporate new contributions to Presto, we can facilitate the open sourcing and maintenance of these updates to the software, and in turn, provide great benefit to Presto’s users. Additionally, unifying Presto under one community will enable greater adoption and collaboration with benefits beyond the foundation itself.

    Cultivate adoption of Presto across industries

    With a history of adopting and supporting the growth of ecosystems for such projects as Envoy, Kubernetes, LetsEncrypt, Prometheus, Node.js, we are confident that the Linux Foundation will provide an open, collaborative, and supportive environment for the growth of the PF and the broader Presto community. Through the foundation, we invite all Presto users to embrace PrestoDB and contribute back to the project faster, allowing us to reduce duplication and create true impact.

    Create value for all PF developers and members

    The foundation’s neutral and open governance body is core to the PF’s ability to ensure that all members benefit from the organization, and no single company or individual can wield undue influence. Additionally, the PF’s Technical Steering Committee (TSC) is responsible for ensuring that project development is on track, software contributions are high quality, and all developer opinions and perspectives are welcomed and considered as it relates to the future of the ecosystem. We invite you to join the TSC meetings and we believe under the leadership of our TSC Chairperson Nezih Yigitbasi (PrestoDB Lead at Facebook), the PrestoDB project will continue to grow, gain contributors, and solve hard technical challenges applicable to organizations across the industry.

    Grow PF membership

    The PF’s success is dependent on the growth of our community. In 2020, we intend to increase PF membership through our support from the Linux Foundation, our neutral and open Governing Board, the dedication of our Technical Steering Committee, and various other initiatives that will contribute to a robust and diverse community that represents the scope and scale of Presto usage by organizations worldwide.

    Champion diversity and inclusion in the community

    In addition to growing our membership, the foundation is committed to broadening the diversity of our community, and making sure that all members are supported. To this end, our Governing Board ensures that all members feel welcomed regardless of their background, and our Technical Steering Committee’s open charter is reflective of the diverse perspectives and opinions of our members, with TSC meetings open to everyone in the community.

    Create community events to foster collaboration

    In 2020, we intend to host neutral events that support discussion and open collaboration between all members of our community. Through these initiatives, we can bring about unprecedented growth of the Presto ecosystem that will open up new partnership opportunities for both members and end users alike.

    Moving forward: PrestoCon 2020

    The journey to make PrestoDB into a successful project is just beginning. As Chairperson of the Governing Board, it gives me great pleasure to announce a key milestone in this journey that brings together our core principles and strategic goals: in early 2020, the Presto Foundation will be hosting the first-ever PrestoCon. The details are still in the works and a date will be announced shortly. We look forward to new contributions, new memberships, and new milestones.

    We invite everyone who has built upon Presto to join our community. We truly believe that having all users and contributors working together under one neutral organization will accelerate the growth of the Presto ecosystem.

    Sincerely,

    Brian Hsieh, Uber Head of Open Source Program Office and Presto Foundation Governing Board Chairperson